It’s all in the mind. It’s all in our minds, crowded like a condominium meeting. It is in our mind that emotions meet and collide. Joy, Sadness, Anger, yes. But also, this time, more subtle and ambiguous emotions.
Every time I see a Pixar film, and especially Inside Out and now, Inside Out 2, I have the feeling that they, the alchemists of Pixar screenplays, are the only ones capable of bringing to the cinema everything that twentieth-century literature, from Proust to Borges, and science, from Bergson to Freud to Oliver Sacks. Everything that our conscience has developed seems like it could end up in a Pixar film.
It’s as if they were inside the future, while many good animation authors are stuck in Aesop, or Andersen, Collodi or the Brothers Grimm. Pixar films seem to have come from a team of poets and Nobel Prize winners for psychology.
The idea of Inside Out it was simple and brilliant. The intuition that we are all created, shaped, dominated by our emotions. In 2015, in Inside Out by Pete Docter, eleven-year-old Riley lived according to the instructions of a kind of control tower inside her mind. In which her emotions coexisted – and discussed, and argued.
Now, in this sequel directed nine years later by Kelsey Mann, from a script by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein, the matter becomes more complicated, the little girl grows up. New, more subtle, more adult emotions appear. But the game, the spectator can say, is always the same. How can it fascinate us again?
Well, I’m not a thirteen year old girl, I’m not from Minnesota, I never dreamed of playing hockey like Riley. Yet I know that film is also about me. I know what that huge red button that suddenly appears means, with ‘puberty’ written on it, an atomic alarm that I have experienced first-hand, as I believe do all the inhabitants of this planet. And I too felt a nervous, tremulous and insecure little creature emerge inside me who tries to plan everything: Anxiety. Just as at thirteen I met Embarrassment. And I felt like this, a shapeless, clumsy thing, poorly dressed in a suit, an ugly figure hiding from the gaze of others.
It is not surprising to read about how the film team consulted various thirteen-year-old girls, to understand them, to understand their feelings, their fears, their double and triple truths. And here we burst into the film Anxiety, perhaps the most striking invention of the film. A wrecking ball that breaks the walls of Riley’s security that have become fragile.
And while the story oscillates between the two levels, that of the “real” world and what happens inside Riley’s head, we ride a roller coaster along all its complexities. And we discover, once again, that we are made of memory drops and streams of consciousness, that everyone’s sense of Self is a fragile, icy tree, ready to be swallowed up. I’m not quite sure that Inside Out 2 It’s a film for children, but I’m very sure that it’s a film for all those who have touched, grazed, known adolescence and been overwhelmed by it.
