“It’s very hard to be in something that is really good, that means something and says something and that a lot of people see,” Poehler said at the sequel’s premiere, a decade after the first film.
Nine years after exploring the emotions of 11-year-old Riley, Inside Out 2 made its debut in Los Angeles, with a whole new range of feelings as Riley becomes a teenager.
Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust from the original film are still in the mix, but now are joined by Anxiety, Envy, Ennui and Embarrassment.
While some changes have been made to the voice cast–Liza Lapira replaces Mindy Kaling as Disgust and Tony Hale replaces Bill Hader as Fear–Amy Poehler returns as Joy, still the star emotion for Riley.
Phyllis Smith also returns as Sadness and Lewis Black as Anger.
Maya Hawke joining as dominant new emotion Anxiety. The actress revealed that she wept in her audition and when she saw the mockup drawing of what her character would look like, “I was like, ‘Oh my god, that’s me, I have to play this part.’”
Avo Edeiri is also among the newcomers, voicing Envy but noting that a root emotion of that feeling is “actually like adoration. So trying to come from that place of positivity a little bit to spin the idea of the character on its head is kind of where I started.”
Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter, who directed the first film and is an exec-producer on the second, said the idea of a sequel only came around a couple of years after the original’s release, when “people kept talking about it, kept referencing it as some film that changed they way they thought about themselves, dealing with their kids.”
In 2020, Docter and Pixar president Jim Morris talked to director Kelsey Mann about digging into the world for possible stories, “and he came back with this idea that features anxiety and I think everybody was like, yes,” Docter recalled.
