Nine years ago, Pixar took us inside the mind of young Riley to meet the emotions that guide her: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. At the end of the film — spoiler! — after Joy has learned she can’t just repress Sadness and take the helm at all times, she dismisses the expanded Riley Mind Console’s puberty alert, saying “It’s probably not important.” Ha ha, and oh yes, sequel incoming. Three big changes brought on by the necessity to go bigger. 1: Instead of helping Riley grow up and accept change, the big challenge now is creating her core identity, via the experiences that form beliefs. 2. Friendship island now looms much, much larger than family island in the conscious landscape. 3: The puberty alarm finally sounds, and heralds the arrival of a new team: Anxiety, Embarrassment, Envy, and Ennui — oh, and Nostalgia. (This is Pixar, after all, and making parents remember what it was like to be a kid is key to the brand.) Anxiety, wondrously voiced with just the right level of twitchy intensity by Maya Hawke, is the troublemaker here: Riley is off to hockey camp, and needs to think about forging a future. Once again, Joy finds herself struggling to remain at the forefront — a struggle so fraught that at one point, Joy cries. Should that be possible? Doesn’t that make Joy Sadness? No matter: the original team isn’t the point here — we get precious little anger from Anger, fear from Fear, etc. And even amongst the newcomers, there’s a paucity of identity-based drama: Envy doesn’t do the damage she should, and Embarrassment is weirdly brave when it counts. It’s all about Anxiety, with an appropriately brief cameo from Ennui. There’s plenty of invention at the granular level: the battle within the Projection Room is smart, the sar-chasm is funny, the stream of consciousness is cute. But the story is very much the same, starting with Joy’s doomed decision to dump bad experiences in the back of the mind. And if the emotions here are more complicated, then the resolution is more convoluted, save for the blunt declaration of Joy’s fate. It’s funny and sweet, but that’s all. (2024) — Matthew Lickona