took us into the Mission Control operations centre within the mind of a kid, and showed us the five emotions amusingly piloting her every decision – Joy, Fear, Rage, Disgust and Sadness – as well as all sorts of dizzyingly intricate detail about memory balls and personality islands. Now the sequel-upgrade brings us up to the teen years with a whole bunch of new emotions.
One of the original film’s smartest implied gags was that the story stopped just before the puberty crisis, represented by an alarm-red panic button on the dashboard, when all the worries and upheavals we’d just been through would be supplanted by an unimaginably painful new array of problems. Well, now that moment has arrived – Riley is now 13 years old . She is due to start high school, and along with her two best friends is heading off to a prestigious ice-hockey camp.
Meanwhile the five emotions in charge, led by the boosterish Joy are alarmed to find the tiniest touch on the controls triggers a disproportionate response in the once level-headed Riley; they get tearful fits and tantrums. To their horror, moreover, a whole new bunch of teen emotions have barged in, including Anxiety and – hilariously – a shruggingly dismissive Ennui .
But you can spend a lot of time waiting for the arrival of the most relevant teen emotion: Love. We find that Riley’s inner imaginative landscape actually features a huge “Mount Crushmore” with four indistinct faces. But that’s as far as this goes. Could it be that the film is squeamish about the reality of teen experience, or didn’t want to get involved in any identity debate? I wonder.