Teenager Riley's mind headquarters is undergoing a sudden demolition to make room for something entirely unexpected: new Emotions! Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, who’ve long been running a successful operation by all accounts, aren’t sure how to feel when Anxiety shows up. And it looks like she’s not alone.
23 Jun Inside Out 2 (2024)
Lassiter Layers
Decades ago, I had the charter to ‘study Hollywood’, ostensibly as a model for virtual enterprises, but that extended into my now serious study of folding in film narrative.
One expression of folding is the play within the play, where you have narratives and narrative dynamics in two layers, with one at least partly ‘writing’ the other. There are hundreds of films with this made explicit. Lassiter was newly with Jobs then, and was strongly influenced by the concept. I found many such on the filmmaker side in my visits, but I have had the good luck of seeing Lassiter’s views play out in projects.
We had ‘Toy Story’ where the world of the toys have purpose in enriching the life of their humans. ‘Ratatouille’ where the control agent was a rat, or more precisely the notion that an animal world existed that could ‘write’ on the human world.
‘Monsters Inc.’ was even more plain in its folding, with a world of Miyazaki-like agents who affect our lives behind the scenes.
(‘Lightyear’ was experimental, but makes sense in this context. I can just imagine someone looking at the layer bubbles on the wall and suggesting a new one.)
All of these have the same form as the ‘Inside Out’ films. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they hit the marks of excellence in other dimensions — though all of them do. But I think it helps, because we love these introspective constructions, and more so when a fabulated world is attached.
All of these are this two-world form where one world affects the other, an explicit noir construction. I would have liked it on that account alone, but I saw it with an audience that had kids just this age, and parents of course.
Lassiter is long gone, and Brad Bird is the guy in charge. There’s no way for me to know if this is held over from his influence. We’ll see. Pixar is a lot like Apple in the 80s, where it pitched to content creators as a system of tools to do creative work, but those products were themselves visibly a product of creative design. It may be that the soul of the company can be preserved in this tradition.
One very fine touch: the world of the girl had one set of animation styles, while the world of the emotions had another, quite different. When the emotions encountered other ‘memory artefacts’ Pixar fearlessly allowed them to have their own animation styles: pouchy and the game warrior were quite a radical statement world-wise.
Posted in 2024
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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