I used to go to movies by myself all the time, although not often in my 40s, and generally not to Pixar films, lest I wind up on some list. So while it was unusual for a solitary, middle-aged, jumbo-popcorn-wielding guy to plop down next to us at “Inside Out 2,” it would not occur to me to throw shade in his direction.
The rest of the audience consisted of a handful of couples, some scattered groups of teenagers and a lot of families. Pixar, after all, makes movies for everyone, and the sequel to its 2015 animated hit, about the interior life of a preteen girl named Riley, has been a heartening box-office success in an otherwise slow summer.
Riley’s brain is managed by a core group of anthropomorphic emotions that include Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear and Disgust. A clanging puberty alarm signals the arrival of new Feelings: Embarrassment, Envy, Ennui and Anxiety.
The story involves a struggle for control, both literal and figurative, in Riley’s mind between Joy and Anxiety, who is a marvel of characterization and design. Voiced by Maya Hawke, Anxiety is animated with a deranged perma-grin, pathologically alert and armed with predictive analyses about how every action or interaction might backfire and ruin Riley’s social life.
“Inside Out 2” achieves the trademark Pixar feat of blending thematic sophistication (for parents!), visual whimsy and slapstick action (for kids!) and detached self-awareness and tongue-in-cheek cultural references (for older teens and young adults!).
But something about the studio’s formula seemed miscalibrated this time. About halfway through, I started actively listening to how the audience was responding. Our solitary neighbor seemed to be having the time of his life. The children in the room? Pretty quiet.
By then, Riley’s emotions were trying to rescue her “sense of self” after Anxiety hijacked her brain. They journeyed through the shifting landscape of the girl’s mind to retrieve her core memories and reassemble the girl they recognize while leaving room for the new complexities of her changing human experience.
Lots going on! There is a utilitarian appeal to both “Inside Out” movies, in that assigning names and faces to emotions probably makes it easier for kids and parents to discuss difficult subjects, but otherwise it is unclear how much of the story is supposed to be legible to children.
This has often been the case in recent years. At some point, Pixar offerings switched from “kids movies with winking jokes for parents” to “melancholia for aging elder millennials” so gradually it is impossible to identify a transition point.
One is tempted to cite “Up,” which appeared in 2009 toward the end of Pixar’s classic period. It was a straightforward action-adventure comedy that happened to open with a heart-shredding montage — depicting the lifelong journey of a couple from childhood through “till death do us part” — that people still discuss as if it was a personal trauma.
But this shift was happening as far back as 1999’s “Toy Story 2,” ostensibly a screwball romp about childhood toys that come to life when we leave the room, but also a heavy treatise on time and impermanence.
Later-era Pixar has veered decisively into the thicket of high-concept existentialism. “Soul” (2020), for instance, is about a musician whose sudden death sends him to a trippy, purgatorial realm where spirits collect personality traits and either return to Earth or take a conveyor belt ride into a blinding light called the Great Beyond.
The Happy Meal toys didn’t really catch on.
So “Inside Out 2” confirms what has become obvious, which is that the real target audience for Pixar movies isn’t children at all. It’s sad adults who saw “Toy Story 2” right as they were beginning to understand their own mortality, people whose first steps into adulthood happened while “Up” suggested all of it might add up to little more than a flickering montage.
And now, Pixar films are for former “gifted and talented” kids who recognize in Riley a youngster whose Anxiety stands a real chance of thwarting her adolescent potential. We’re also eager for the next sequel, “Inside Out 3: The Wellbutrin Years.”