Inside Out 2 (PG)
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Caution: spoilers.

This is the sequel to Inside Out. At the time of its release, it became the highest grossing animated film ever. Joy, Sadness, and Anger have the same voice actors as the first movie, but Disgust is now voiced by Liza Lapira and Fear by Tony Hale. I think I might have heard speculation well before the movie came out that Riley might turn out to be gay, but I don't remember for sure. However, what I can say is that after the movie came out, I read that Disney had pressured Pixar to make her seem "less gay". Which bugs me, but having seen the film now, I'm not sure that the character's sexuality would have added significantly to the story. She does idolize an older girl named Val, but that's adequately explained by Riley looking up to her as a hockey player and being anxious to make new friends. (I don't know that there was ever any intention to make Riley gay, but I can't help wondering if Disney execs were just jumping at shadows, anyway.) There's also a deep, dark secret that Riley has, and I kind of wondered if that could be about her sexuality, but I doubted it. And indeed, it turned out to be something else in a post-credits scene.

Anyway, Riley is now 13 years old, and a pretty good hockey player. She has a couple of friends named Grace and Bree, who are also on her junior high hockey team. The three of them get invited to spend a few days at a hockey camp, run by Coach Roberts (Yvette Nicole Brown), who coaches a high school team called the Firehawks. Riley hopes to join the team when she begins high school in the coming fall, but she's distraught when she learns Grace and Bree will be going to a different high school. Also, she enters puberty, but this ain't Turning Red, so the movie doesn't deal with any physical aspects of that, just emotional ones. So, Riley gets a few new emotions: Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy, Ennui, and Embarrassment. (I couldn't help but think she would have had such emotions before puberty, but whatever. I also feel like "ennui" wasn't the best description of the emotions that character represents, but he's still a good character.) Anxiety ends up doing most of the controlling of Riley's actions, and she sends the original group of emotions away, to be sealed in a vault in Riley's mind. Anxiety also sets about building a new "sense of self" for Riley, discarding the one the original emotions had spent 13 years building up. Of course, the emotions escape, with a little help from a few of Riley's secrets that were also locked in the vault. Then they head for the back of the mind, to retrieve Riley's sense of self and restore it. Meanwhile, Sadness goes back to Headquarters so she'll be able to activate a tube to bring the other emotions back once they've gotten the sense of self. She is secretly befriended by Embarrassment.

I think it makes sense that Anxiety was able to take over in Riley's current situation, and it makes sense that she thought Riley needed to change in order to ensure she'd have friends at her new school, without her old friends, as well as being desperate to become a Firehawk. And it was interesting, if somewhat cringe-inducing, to see how that made Riley behave. I don't want to go into specifics, but she basically ignores her old friends and denies aspects of her true self to fit in with Val and the other Firehawks. And eventually, she has a panic attack, which I really worried would affect her physically in a really bad way. That's basically the climax of the film, with Joy and the others finally making their way back to Headquarters with Riley's original sense of self. But what I really love about the film is that Joy realizes it had been a mistake on her part to banish Riley's negative memories to the back of her mind, and that rather than simply re-installing the old sense of self, it was better to create a new one that was a mix of all the good and bad parts of Riley's life. (The banishing of bad memories was something that had concerned me much earlier in the film, so I was glad to see that addressed in the end.) So, ultimately, Riley calms down from her panic attack, and reconciles with Bree and Grace.

Beyond that, I don't really want to say anything. Except that there's a neat bonus scene early in the closing credits, as well as the post-credits scene that I mentioned before. I will say that it took me quite awhile to really get into the movie. Not that I didn't enjoy it from the start, I just didn't love it until much closer to the end. I still don't think it's quite as good as the first movie, but I was really happy with how everything turned out.