Devs: "Inside Out 2"

2015's Inside Out felt like a late Pixar flourish: amid a decade of sequels and spinoffs that saw the company's creatives coasting on past glories, here was a terrific, original-ish concept (using digimation to set out the inner workings of a child's mind), worked through with intelligence, confidence and wit. That film was smart, funny, visually inventive and quietly profound about the ways in which we learn how to function, as if it had been adapted from a behavioural development textbook rather than one of the usual Hollywood sources; yet its real genius lay in Pixar's capacity to make complex thought look supremely easy. (As with the studio's hall-of-fame product, it seemed almost too sophisticated to be left to kids.) One might, then, approach this tardy sequel with an emotion that begs characterisation within the universe of Inside Out itself: trepidation. But rest easy: Inside Out 2 is, from the off, entertainment every bit as assured as its predecessor. Development is its business, after all.

The three-person story team - original scribe Meg LeFauve, new director Kelsey Mann, and Dave Holstein, creator of the sociological HBO comedy Kidding - have used heroine Riley's passage into adolescence to work up new gags and ideas, while taking us all back to a moment where human beings are prone to developing bad habits that can persist into adulthood. The fantasy of how our minds and bodies should run is here set against the chaotic reality of how they actually do run: Riley has the builders in her inner world this time around, expanding her physical capabilities (a passing construction-site warning: "PUBERTY IS MESSY"), and new emotions on her roster (including Anxiety, Embarrassment and Ennui) set on staging a hostile takeover of her operating system. Only Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler) stands in the way of these dark clouds and red cheeks, tossing Riley's bad memories onto some ever-swelling mental scrapheap, and at one point egging a cranial cavity's worth of agitated overthinkers into embarking upon a softening pillow fight. Once again, it's the body as a workspace, subject to different styles of management; it's not coincidental that several of the key voice artists held prominent positions on Parks and Recreation and The Office.

The other organising idea here, however, is Riley's beloved ice hockey, a passion that parallels the way Mann and team treat the big ideas they pluck from the air as the basis for sport. That sense of play - child's play, even - remains foundational to a franchise that depicts memory as visually analogous to the marble systems of our youth. Of the many levels Inside Out 2 operates on - coming-of-age drama at Riley's summer camp, power struggle inside our girl's head - arguably the most intriguing is how these events mirror Pixar's own haphazard transitions: as in the studio's breakthrough works, the toybox has been seized upon as a means of corporate self-expression. As we rejoin her, Riley is a dorky but sweet girl with loving parents who've ensured she doesn't have notably worse memories than waving back at someone who wasn't waving at her. (One possible criticism of these movies: they've clearly been fashioned by folks with Joy, rather than Despair, ascending.) Yet the narrative thrust is that Riley becomes more ruthless, discarding her equally sweet yet dorky childhood galpals in order to gain a new friend group, a stronger sense of self, and the prospect of success on the ever-competitive rink. Pixar, too, have become more businesslike over time, remonetising their bigger hits and thereby converting once-artisanal activity into ultra-modern IP, anything to keep up with the jocks who now run Tinseltown. (If we get Inside Out 3, I expect to see appearances from Avarice and Greed.) 

Yet this company's saving grace has been its ability to rediscover its own sense of play - the innocent, childlike pleasures that helped make it such an appealing stock option - and Inside Out 2 is Pixar's most playful film in years: in places, we're almost watching a writers' room gleefully tossing fun ideas into a colourful hat. A yawning crevice referred to as the Sar-Chasm; a brainstorm rendered as lightbulbs coming down like hail; a riffy mix of 3D and 2D animation, just because we can, and the contrast is interesting, and it gets a laugh. All this entails some degree of sequel bloat, granted. Where the first movie had only to consider the brainspace and Riley's real life, the second spans real life, the brainspace with new personnel installed, and the old personnel (Joy, Anger, Sadness et al.) in exile, digging around at the back of Riley's brain. (One obvious point of comparison: those later seasons of The Office where it wasn't clear whether Steve Carell would be staying on, and the cited replacements were circling.) The simpler pleasures and tight narrative focus have dissipated, replaced by a more manic, busier form, less inclined to let its best ideas (and the audience) breathe; here and there, the storytelling feels subject to those processor chips that have sped up over the thirty-odd years of Pixar's existence. There are a lot more buttons on the consoles nowadays, and half the trick is knowing which ones to press and when. If Riley's development is enmeshed with Pixar's genesis, both are tied up with the rapid technological advances of the early 21st century, how we use computers to tell stories and generate art: nothing is as simple as it once was. If you sense nostalgia creeping in, well, she's in the movie, too - rendered as a cuddly greyhair with a twinset and pearls and the voice of June Squibb. You know Pixar are back on something like form when they toss in a gag that pre-empts their own critics.

Inside Out 2 opens in cinemas nationwide today.