At the cinema, as we know, involving our most basic emotions as spectators is the ultimate weapon of the world. There’s no escape. And ad Inside Out in 2019, in fact, no one had escaped. Small, (large?), Pixar masterpiece, sector Pete Docter. Let’s say it right away: in Inside Out 2, again Docter&co., released in Italian cinemas from 19 June, there is no escape anyway. If the sequel form is never cinematically indispensable, the desire for a serial, faced with the progressive and updated idea of the emotions that regulate the mood and behavior of a little girl who grows up over the years, is inevitable.
It must be written without the fingers trembling on the keyboard: the success of Inside Out 2 it’s all in the flowing and playful simplicity with which the Pixar writing and animation team invents, organizes, colors the personal and psychological passage experienced by each of us within the tunnel of adolescence. A little thing that we then carry with us for the rest of our lives. A perfect, effective low blow, so universal that it goes beyond the ears of Dumbo and the big eyes of Bambieven in the face of a graphic creation that is not exactly epochal (the glowing and rubbery space of emotions beats the big heads of Riley and friends 10 to 0).
Riley Andersen is all grown up and 13 years old. In the console, right in front of the colored buttons of the headquarters of Inside Out, an unexpected update flashes: the “puberty” alarm. The little girl begins the journey towards maturity and they are no longer enough Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger And Disgust to respond to the external inputs of life. It’s time for “more complex emotions”. Especially if it means betraying your best friends and following the hottest hockey player like a dog, so Valentina Ortizto the summer camp where the official school team will be selected.
Here they burst in front of the keys that regulate Riley’s moods and behaviors Boredom, Embarrassment, Envy and Anxiety. The latter, ca va sans dire, is a true cyclone of initiative and protagonism. So much so as to undermine dear old Gioia who had surpassed her colleagues in the first chapter of the saga and guided Riley’s behavior. The material distancing sees the five primary emotions locked in a small container by the four secondary ones and sent to the Vault of secrets (“we are repressed emotions”). The five colored sweetbreads they will daringly manage to escape, return to headquarters to curb Ansia’s excessive power and make Riley finally a balanced girl. Focused as in the first film on the double, parallel narrative plane of Riley’s real events and the emotions that juggle levers and buttons in the famous headquarters, Inside Out 2 it becomes even better than its predecessor precisely because the complexity of the emotions represented requires a lightness, an irony, a balanced dosage in the fabric of the plot that is quite different and sophisticated compared to the original matrix.
Propped by hilarious comic counterpointsti (the appearances of the old lady Nostalgia who is invited to leave the scene – “it’s too early to enter the scene” – or that of the heroes of the cartoons and video games loved by the protagonist and also locked up in the vault of secrets) Inside Out 2 is a perfect example of how Pixar with this franchise managed to transform human ideas and feelings into animated images. Look when Ansia (in Italian dubbed with playful and exasperating punctuality by Pilar Fogliati) loses control of himself in front of the console and creates a vortex of intertwined and tangled orange threads, in constant movement, impossible to cut and dampen. Something uncontrollable and negative compared to the classic vision of goodness in the home Disney. Now it’s up to the room’s response. In the United States it is flying. In Italy it could revive a rather disastrous box office situation.
