It’s fine. It’s Pixar. You can’t deny the craftmanship. It’s pretty, there’s some fun animation gags. I couldn’t help but think about the recent comments from Pixar about ‘less specificity more universality’ and Turning Red while watching this. Turning Red you could feel the director’s experiences in. This was such a distance from Riley, a resistance to anything that could define her as more than a white blonde typical American girl. She’s really smart AND creative? But she gets too passionate sometimes and has anxiety and makes mistakes and is hard on herself? Wow! A bunch of positive flaws that mean nothing but kids and adults alike to go ‘that is or was me but in a good way’. And that’s fine! If it helps a kid it’s fine. But you can feel the anxiety, the crowd pleasing, in how much initial play Riley’s admiration and fixation on her fellow hockey player gets and then Mount Crushmore is all guys, including her video game crush. Can’t risk alienating or upsetting a certain crowd, or even just anyone relating to the wide brush that is Riley.

And the emotions are not nearly as fresh a concept this time. In this one they split up Sadness from the group and Joy spends most of the journey with Anger, Disgust, and Fear. A natural instinct: you don’t want to repeat the first movie. But it reveals the efficacy of the first in that they clearly planned three dynamics: the whole group, Joy and Sadness, and Disgust, Joy and Anger. The last three are mostly comic relief while the first two get the emotions and depth, and for a one and done movie that’s fine. But then for this they try to introduce dimensionality to what was meant to be caricatures and it strains the metaphor for what they are in a ‘that doesn’t feel like the feeling of anger’ way. Because it’s easy to go ‘what are positive ways to feel sadness, and the benefits of sadness’. To go into ‘what are positive ways or reasons to feel anger, disgust, or fear,’ well, that could be upsetting, or worse, subjective. So their collective arc is just ‘stop complaining and support Joy more’.

It’s not helped by Disgust and Fear just being impressions. Tony Hale’s Fear lacks Hader’s inhabitance of the character, the extra mile he went to elevate the material. Hale is less a being and more one note. Even in how hollow the about face of support Anger and Disgut go through- not Black’s fault who is clearly trying to make the emotional moments but just can’t get the script to congeal- Hale’s Fear doesn’t even really get a moment. Phoeler and Smith play the hits well enough, and Hawke does a pretty job of playing a desperate, sympathetic antagonist. Unsurprisingly Edebiri is the standout, elevating what she’s given to make even so so bits of comedy charming and laugh worthy through her delivery alone.

It all just hits the same message- ‘all emotions have their place in moderation, any can be bad in excess’ as the first in a way that feels more parent’s well intentioned lecture and less like Turning Red’s ‘god I’ve been there.’ Even the attempt to replicate Puss in Boot’s ‘realistic depiction of a panic attack’ felt less earned and lived in, and almost cloying. A lot of the word play- much as I love a good pun- started to get there too, sounding like the tired creak of a car spinning its wheels. I was gonna give this three stars because animation wise Pixar knows how to make a pretty movie, but is that the standard? Is that it? It can be more- even in modern Pixar we have Turning Red. But with the reception and money this has made, it seems like this will be what we’ll get more of. As is it’s a fine movie to take my mom out to.