Best of 2024, #4: Inside Out 2

We saw this movie when my daughter was away at sleepaway camp, which was silly, because my daughter had just turned 13 a week before, as the heroine does in the movie. As soon as she was back from camp, my wife took her out to see it as a mother-daughter thing. I can only hope it helped my daughter deal with her own turbulent transitions, because that’s not the kind of thing I could talk to her about.  I’m not in her head and can’t fully understand what she’s going through, but this movie seemed uncanny in its understanding of teen girls and its ability to craft an entertaining story out of it.

(And of course, as with last year’s list, I think this movie proved that Maya Hawke, who plays Anxiety here, is an undervalued treasure.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t Overextend Your Metaphor

Here, too, I thought the first Inside Out was overpraised and the sequel was underpraised. The first one was very well made, but I kept thinking “This metaphor is overextended and somewhat incoherent.” The metaphor is even more complicated here, as five new teenage emotions are introduced, but I thought this one tracked a lot better than the first. Whereas the first felt strained, this one felt effortlessly clever.

I also just found the previous movie’s “tweens need to accept their own sadness” moral to be way too much of a bummer. This movie, about learning to overcome anxiety, felt more uplifting. I understand what the first one was saying, and I guess it was worth saying, but I never enjoyed watching it in the many times I watched it. I look forward to rewatching this one more.

Another thing I didn’t like about the first movie was the glimpses of the father’s manly emotions and the mother’s feminine emotions, as if our fathers and mothers wouldn’t have gender-mixed emotions just like we do. There was less of that here.