Inside Out 2 (2024)

Let me be honest with you straight away: I went into Inside Out 2 hoping to be floored, and I came out feeling... pretty good, actually. Not floored. Pretty good. And given how high the bar was set by its predecessor, that's both a fair result and a slightly deflating one.

Because the original Inside Out is, as far as I'm concerned, one of Pixar's genuine high-water marks. I said as much in my review of Inside Out, and I stand by it completely. It pulled off something rare: a film that works as a children's adventure and as a quietly devastating piece of writing about how the mind processes grief, memory and loss. It earned every tear it wrung out of you. So when a sequel arrives, the question isn't really "is it good?" It's "does it have any right to exist alongside the first one?"

The honest answer is: mostly, yes. But only mostly.

What the sequel gets right is its subject matter. Where the first film explored early childhood emotion, this one plants its flag in the chaos of adolescence, and there's a lot of rich territory there. The new emotions introduced to Riley's crowded headspace are well-conceived and genuinely fun to spend time with. Anxiety, in particular, is immediately recognisable. Anyone who's ever lain awake catastrophising about something that probably won't happen will clock that character within about thirty seconds of meeting her. The film is clearly interested in the messier, more contradictory emotional landscape of being a teenager: the identity questions, the social pressures, the desperate need to fit in while also figuring out who you actually are. That's good, meaningful stuff.

And it looks absolutely gorgeous. There's no argument to be had on that front. The animation is rich and inventive, and the internal world Pixar has built continues to be one of the most imaginative visual spaces in modern animation.

But here's where I have to be straight with you: something has been diluted. The jokes land a touch more mechanically this time. The tone reaches a little broader, a little louder, in ways that occasionally feel like the film is working harder than it should have to. The emotional beats are still effective, don't get me wrong, but they don't hit quite as clean as they did in the first film. There's a difference between a punchline that arrives naturally and one that you can see being set up from several minutes away, and Inside Out 2 crosses that line more than once.

The first film had a kind of purity to it. A confidence that it didn't need to oversell anything, that it could trust you to feel what it was trying to make you feel. This sequel is slightly less trusting of its audience in that way, and it shows.

None of that makes it a bad film. It's a strong Pixar effort by any reasonable measure, and in a landscape where animated sequels often amount to little more than brand maintenance, this one is at least genuinely trying to say something. The themes about identity and the way our sense of self shifts and complicates as we grow up are handled with real care in the film's better moments.

Three and a half stars.

If you loved the original, this is worth your time. It's a worthy follow-up and it'll make you feel things. Just don't go in expecting lightning to strike twice, because it doesn't quite manage that. What it manages instead is something solid, frequently smart, occasionally moving, and beautifully put together. Which, in fairness, is still more than most films manage. I just happen to know this particular team can do even better.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 2024  | Watched: 2025-07-16

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus · fuboTV
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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