All the feels

It's added Ennui, Anxiety and Embarrassment to its emotional core, but does 'Inside Out 2' measure up to the brilliant original?

- ADAM NAYMAN

Inside Out 2

✩✩✩ (out of 4)

Starring Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Kensington Tallman and Tony Hale. Directed by Kelsey Mann. 96 minutes. PG

The creative team at Pixar is peerless at pushing its multi-generational audience’s various buttons — a carefully calibrated skill set that renders the “Inside Out” series and its themes of emotional manipulation as something like an ongoing and semi-ironic act of self-portraiture.

Pete Docter’s 2015 original was an ingenious — and at times, excitingly and daringly abstract — meditation on the joys and perils of psychological development, unfolding almost entirely within the head of a girl whose emotions were sweetly anthropomorphized as fractious coworkers trying to safely navigate their host through a series of preteen crises.

The various contraptions by which these vividly colour-coded characters — led by Amy Poehler’s indefatigable, bright-yellow Joy — modulated 12-year-old Riley’s various feelings and split the difference between goofy slapstick and Freudian sophistication.