It’s tough to make a sequel to a film as singular as Inside Out. Perhaps that’s why it has taken Pixar nine years to do it. The original movie’s director, Pete Docter, is now head of just about everything at Pixar, so long-time storyboard artist Kelsey Mann has stepped up to make his directorial debut with Inside Out 2. Against all odds, the result is a worthy follow-up to its mighty predecessor — which I think is Pixar’s best ever movie — and an intricate, sophisticated animated adventure. We probably shouldn’t doubt this studio by now.
We catch up with Joy (Amy Poehler) and the rest of the emotions now that Riley (Kensington Tallman) is 13 years old and about to head to high school. Along with her two best mates, she has been invited by the high school hockey coach to a special summer camp. This coincides with the arrival of several new emotions led by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), who shake up the established order of things in headquarters.
Any fears that the addition of these new characters would upset the elegant simplicity of the first movie are allayed by the smart introduction of the newbies. Anxiety describes her job as “to protect Riley from the scary stuff she can’t see” and it’s predominantly her who takes centre stage. Some of the other new characters — Ennui, Envy, and Embarrassment — occasionally feel a little sidelined, but Anxiety’s presence is something of a master-stroke.
The screenwriters Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein — Mann gets a story credit — have evidently put in the work when it comes to the role Anxiety plays in the minds of teenage girls. Anxiety blunders in under the pretence of helping and effectively wipes clean the role of every other emotion, taking the wheel and dominating a personality that had previously been driven by Joy.
It’s an ingenious storytelling idea that allows Anxiety to fill the role of “villain” without ever having to be outwardly malevolent. She genuinely believes her doom-mongering and second-guessing is what Riley needs in order to tackle the more complex world of adolescence. This conflicts with Joy’s belief that simple pleasure and sunshine is the key to everything. Anyone who has experienced anxiety in their lives will recognise the jittery intensity of Hawke’s performance and the way its benign interference can quickly become debilitating.
But away from that broad narrative, the joy of Inside Out 2 is in its liberal sprinkling of fresh ideas. Pixar excels at world-building and the internal landscape of a teenage brain provides plenty of opportunities to flesh out the concept. The new addition here is the “Belief System” — a structure similar to the Na’vi Tree of Souls, representing the way Riley’s core memories shape her ideas and sense of self. There’s no rehashing of ideas from the first film, with puberty — visualised, of course, as a blaring siren — completely restructuring the way Riley operates behind the scenes.
It’s an admirable risk for Inside Out 2 to focus so squarely on the teenage experience, shifting away from the younger core audience of its output. But the story is exquisitely relatable and perfectly observed, charting the nuances of making new friends and managing the separation from old ones. It’s a time in which the aforementioned sense of self is malleable and capable of completely changing, which causes internal chaos.
All of this allows Pixar’s animation team to flex their muscles in terms of visual style, with the last decade allowing for even greater invention than we saw first time around. There’s even more freedom now, not least in the notion of a “brain storm” and the emotionally vicious final set piece, which pushes the visual boundaries as much as the thematic ones.
The straightforward beauty and eloquence of the first film isn’t present in Inside Out 2, but that doesn’t mean it’s anything other than brilliant. Once again, it uses fantastical concepts and visual invention as a prism through which to illuminate the most universal of human experiences. It’s as funny and fresh as it is an homage to what came before and it shows that we all write off Pixar at our peril.
Lightyear be damned; the best studio in the animation industry is back with a vengeance. They’ve always been able to leave us crying into our popcorn and, this time, they’ve weaponised our own anxiety to do it. Those evil geniuses.
Inside Out 2 is in UK cinemas now.
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Paddington 3 is bigger, but will it be better?
Paddington 2 is the greatest sequel ever made. It’s also a hugely important movie to me personally — so much so that, when Sight & Sound asked me to contribute a top 10 for its greatest films poll in 2022, the marmalade-loving bear made the cut. In football terms, he was one of the first names on the team sheet. So it’s fair to say I have a lot of emotional investment in the quality of this year’s Paddington in Peru.
This week, we got our first look at the movie, which takes Paddington and the Brown family back to the bear’s native Peru for a visit to Aunt Lucy. But when the Browns reach the Home for Retired Bears, there’s no sign of her. Cue a journey into the Amazon rainforest, with Antonio Banderas as an almost-certainly-evil riverboat captain and Olivia Colman as a singing nun. Quite possibly a secret villain too.
The best bit of the trailer, though, has nothing to do with any of that. The clip begins with a minute or so of exquisite slapstick involving Paddington and one of those infuriating passport photo booths. It’s the sort of well-executed route one charm that has served the franchise well thus far. The Paddington movies are at their best when they’re glorified sketch comedy shows joined together by over-arching villain plots.
In these sequences, incoming director Dougal Wilson — best known for making several famous John Lewis ads — shows that he’s a student of the Paul King game and it makes me a lot more comfortable that he understands exactly what makes these films tick. They’re British, they’re low-key, and they foreground heart and joy above all other things.
I do have some concerns, though, and those concerns date back to when the central conceit for this film was first announced. There’s a sad tradition of British movie series and TV adaptations sending the cast on holiday as a plot, and it very often falls flat. In this case, it feels like we’re seeing a very deliberate and conscious desire to increase the scale and the stakes — to me, something that’s at odds with everything that makes these movies great.
My worry is that the franchise, particularly in the absence of Paul King and Simon Farnaby, might not be able to withstand the shift from cosy British comedy to globe-trotting adventure. And given how much affection I have for these movies, the stakes for me are already too high.
But this incarnation of Paddington hasn’t put a foot wrong yet and the presence of Jon Foster and James Lamont — responsible for the joyous animated series The Adventures of Paddington — as writers gives me hope that there’s enough connective tissue to maintain the consistent genius of the King era. Trust in the bear, or find yourself on the end of a hard stare.
Paddington in Peru is in UK cinemas from 8th November.
We’re a long way from the city of Casablanca’s most famous movie here. In the gritty, ragged thriller Hounds, Moroccan filmmaker Kamal Lazraq tells a story entirely within the crepuscular shadows of a single night in the city. Hassan (Abdellatif Masstouri) and his son Issam (Ayoub Elaïd) have a corpse in the boot after a kidnapping gone wrong and they desperately need to get rid of it before morning breaks.
The idea of a one-night caper is a simple one that has powered great cinema for decades, with the Safdies’ Good Time one of the best recent examples. Hounds can’t match that movie for anarchy, but the tone here is slower and more thoughtful. This is about the mundanity of the crime and the impending sense of doom it creates than it is about characters desperately flailing — though there is plenty of that too.
Lazraq, intriguingly, utilises a mostly non-professional cast and a lot of improvised dialogue to give the film a naturalistic feel. Masstouri, in particular, is terrific as a man worn down by the impact of poverty and the inevitability that, eventually, his small-time criminality will catch up with him. “It’s money or blood,” he’s told ominously during one early transaction.
The dynamic between Hassan and Issam is nicely drawn, built on antagonism and ideas of masculinity. Neither man really seems to know the human being behind the family role and, at times, this keeps both the characters at arm’s length from the audience. They’re more like archetypes than rounded people, which lessens the impact of the drama.
The same sense of slowly spiralling doom that makes Hounds work well is also a bit of an Achilles heel. Lazraq’s movie is immersive, but unfolds more like a shaggy-dog story than a focused thriller, losing some of its impact in the process. There’s also a bit of tonal blandness at play in a setup that screams dark comedy potential. Brief flashes of spirituality break up the bleak miasma a little, but there’s not enough of that theme for it to really work.
Despite all of that, though, Hounds crafts an impressive atmosphere and plunges its audience squarely into a grotesque world in which death and violence is a mundane occurrence. It doesn’t always work, but there’s enough dirt under its fingernails to make it a fascinating watch.
Hounds is in UK cinemas now. Find a screening here.
British horror left me wanting much Moor
I feel like I write more or less every week at the moment about the resurgence of folk horror. Well, this week we’re back in the windswept British countryside for Chris Cronin’s directorial debut The Moor. On paper, it’s a fascinating hybrid of folk horror and mystery thriller — the opening credits nod explicitly to true crime iconography — but the result is sadly a little limp, despite an inflated running time of nearly two hours.
Claire (Sophia La Porta) feels a great deal of guilt for her role in the disappearance of a young boy 25 years ago at the hands of a serial child kidnapper and killer. Now an adult, Claire teams up with the boy’s dad Bill (David Edward-Robertson) to find crucial evidence that could ensure the perpetrator is never released.
This means they have to spend many hours out on the Yorkshire moors, later with the help of a father and daughter who claim the ability of dowsing — a phenomenon also seen recently in La Chimera. As impressive as the locations are, drowned in mist and fog like the stage at a heavy metal concert, there’s a distinct lack of atmosphere and intensity. For the most part, we’re just watching people blunder around in the dark.
There are creepy images scattered throughout the movie — a herd of eyeless goats, a single children’s shoe — but these are few and far between amid the endless scenes of ambling. It’s true that folk horror is often more about mood than plot, but The Moor provides little more than hazy weather and even murkier storytelling. It’s impossible to find any substance through the fog.
The Moor is in UK cinemas now and on digital from 1st July. Find a screening here.
Stop-motion animation is in the midst of something of a resurgence, but Aussie filmmaker Adam Elliot has never lost the faith. His latest claymation work premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival this week and those of us who weren’t there got a glimpse into the dark, complex world of Memoir of a Snail with a new trailer. It’s got ugly-beautiful visuals, a terrific Aussie cast, and a bracing emotional reality. What more could you want?
Memoir of a Snail does not yet have a UK release date.
Next week: Russell Crowe is in yet another exorcism movie, while Tom Hardy does yet another funny voice in The Bikeriders.
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