‘Inside Out 2’ is a triumphant Pixar sequel
Plus, ‘Ultraman Rising’ successfully combines kaiju, fatherhood, and baseball
Recent industry trade reporting has said Pixar Animation Studios is moving away from the original autobiographical tales that have been a big part of its output the last few years in favor of surer things. So get ready for a lot less stuff like Onward, Soul and Turning Red and many more sequels to Pixar hits of the last.
The problem is that Pixar has never been all that great at sequels, at least outside of the Toy Story franchise. Neither the second or third Cars was very good, nor did there need to be a second Incredibles or Monsters, Inc. movie. I barely remember anything about Finding Dory, and don't even get me started on whatever Lightyear was supposed to be.
For most of those, the sequels didn’t work because the idea for it was not good enough to justify one.
But with Inside Out 2, Pixar has made a sequel to one of its best films, and it does just about everything right. It is faithful to the ideas and values of the original while expanding its world naturally.
It doesn’t get as dark as the first film did at times, and there’s nothing quite as heartbreaking as the original movie's Bing Bong moment (you know the one). But it’s a successful update that takes the concept in creative and rewarding directions. Also, its colorful universe looks fantastic, especially in IMAX.
The first Inside Out, released in the summer of 2015, borrowed an idea from the old sitcom Herman’s Head: It was set entirely in the brain of a young girl named Riley, with Riley’s different emotions represented by animated characters like Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. From there, the film built a beautiful, complex world of memories and thoughts.
As hinted by the first movie's ending, things are about to get a lot more complex as Riley enters puberty (while Inside Out was nine years ago, it doesn’t appear more than a year or two has passed in movie time.)
There are new emotions in town, led by the main antagonist: Anxiety (voiced very well by Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser ). Are all well-rendered — Anxiety resembles the old pizza commercial villain The Noid, while Embarrassment reminded me of the old comic strip character Ziggy — although Ennui’s character isn’t much more than French jokes, and Embarrassment is a nearly non-speaking part.
Riley is trying to make the high school hockey team and is torn between cozying up to the older team members and remaining close to her established friends.
And then… Anxiety and the other new characters stage a coup against the Joy/Sadness/Disgust group and try to turn Riley into the version of Michael Jordan we saw in The Last Dance: Someone so driven by competition and pettiness that she’s willing to crush all enemies to succeed at hockey. It could lead to success on the ice, but it’s not true to who Riley has always been.
It’s not much of a surprise where the movie ends up, but it does a great job getting there. And at a running time of just 90 minutes, it doesn’t have an ounce of fat.
There’s some very creative stuff with animation, including a couple of minor characters who look like they were hand-drawn.
Inside Out 2 also captures the perpetual annoyance, very familiar to me personally, of being a native of Minnesota but having people think you’re from Michigan (Pete Docter, director of the first Inside Out and now Pixar’s chief creative officer, hails from Bloomington, Minnesota. The director of the new movie, veteran Pixar hand Kelsey Mann, is also a Minnesotan, although he went to college at… Northern Michigan.)
Because Robot Dreams is technically a 2023 film, Inside Out 2 is the best animated film of 2024 to date and a possible good sign for Pixar’s sequel-heavy future.
Ultraman: Rising
Speaking of animation excellence, there’s another cartoon movie out this week, also from an established franchise. Finding new things to say in an established format is also quite good.
That movie is Ultraman: Rising, which lands on Netflix Friday, the same day Inside Out 2 lands in theaters.
It’s a co-production of Tsuburaya Productions and Netflix Animation, and it will be released in countries in their respective languages. But while it’s set in Japan and uses an established Japanese property, Ultraman: Rising was produced in the U.S. by Netflix.
It’s got a great hook: What if Shohei Ohtani were the alter ego of a superhero that fights giant monsters?
Although that comparison is unfair to Ohtani, Protagonist Ken Sato is presented as a Japanese-born baseball star, returning to Japan after spending most of his career in the U.S., and therefore showing a degree of arrogance and self-centered-ness much more associated with American athletes than with Ohtani, or for that matter, any other famous Japanese ballplayer in memory.
However, his real reason for returning to Tokyo is to take on the role of superhero Ultraman from his father, who has retired from it. The role mostly involves fighting kaiju on the streets of Japan.
Sato, however, is estranged from his father, mostly over his mother's mysterious disappearance. He soon realizes that the kaiju might not be the enemy after all—especially after he unwittingly becomes the guardian of a baby monster. There’s plenty of reconciliation and redemption, which is affecting, even if it’s not entirely surprising.
Directed by Shannon Tindle, a character designer by trade making his directorial debut, Ultraman: Rising combines some truly impressive animation with a compelling story that fuses the Japanese monsters and baseball traditions while providing something of a revisionist take on the Ultraman mythology.
I admit I don’t know the Ultraman series all that well, although I enjoyed the Shin Ultraman film a couple of days ago. This is a successful re-examining of it that I could see catching on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.