Inside Out 2 (2024)
A sequel to Inside Out.
Two years after her move to San Francisco, a 13 year old Riley Andersen is entering high school. Her personified emotions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger—now oversee a newly formed element of Riley's mind called her Sense of Self, which houses memories and feelings that shape Riley's beliefs via the Belief System. Joy, aiming to fill the Sense of Self with only positive memories, has created a mechanism that launches negative memories to the back of Riley's mind.
Riley and her best friends, Bree and Grace, all play on the hockey team, the Foghorns. After winning the championship game, they are all invited to a weekend ice hockey camp, where Riley hopes to qualify for her school's team, the Firehawks. However, a "Puberty Alarm" goes off the night before camp, and a group of mind workers clumsily upgrade the emotion console, leaving Headquarters in disarray. The emotions find that Riley now overreacts to any inputs they make to the console. 4 new emotions—Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui (i.e. the Boredom)—arrive and clash with the original emotions over their approaches. In particular, Joy wants Riley to have fun at camp, while Anxiety focuses on winning a spot on the team and making new friends, especially after Riley learns that Bree and Grace will be attending a different high school.
While Joy is in control, Riley inadvertently gets the campers punished by the strict camp director, Coach Roberts. Anxiety, deciding that Riley needs to change to fit in with the older players, launches the Sense of Self to the back of Riley's mind and has Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust captured, bottled up, and thrown into a memory vault. Anxiety, Envy, Ennui, and Embarrassment then create a new anxiety-dominated Sense of Self and encourage Riley to befriend popular hockey player and new captain of the Firehawks Valentina Ortiz, straining her friendship with Bree and Grace. Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust escape the vault with the help of Riley’s secrets like a TV show character Bloofy and Pouchy, video game character Lance Slashblade, and Dark Secret. Sadness returns to HQ since someone will need to recall the others back to HQ while the others take the Stream of Consciousness to retrieve Riley's old Sense of Self. While on the Stream of Consciousness, Ennui causes a Sar-Chasm (i.e. sarcasm), so the emotions must use an alternative route through Imagination Land where they discover that Anxiety is using Riley’s imagination to come up with all possible negative projections. Joy and the group successfully shut down the negative projections but not before Anxiety calls the mind police on them. They escape through the Parade of Future Careers on a large parade balloon.
Under Anxiety's control, Riley sneaks into Coach Roberts' office and learns from her notebook that Riley is not considered ready to become a Firehawk. Anxiety summons a “brainstorm” to come up with ideas that will change Coach Roberts’ mind which leads to Riley dying a strand of her hair red (to mimic the current Fire Hawk team players). The old emotions find the old Sense of Self on a mountain of negative memories deposited by Joy's mechanism. They cause an avalanche to return them to Headquarters, but this causes the negative memories to spill into Riley's current Sense of Self. Anxiety realizes that the Sense of Self she has created for Riley is one of self-doubt, which causes Riley to perform poorly during her final tryout match, accidentally hurt Grace, and get sent to the penalty box. Horrified, Anxiety frantically swarms the console in a blinding whirlwind, causing Riley to have a panic attack.
With the help of Sadness and a reformed Embarrassment, the other original emotions return to Headquarters. Joy finds Anxiety still in control but in paralysis; Joy convinces her that Riley does not need to change to have a better future. Anxiety relents and Joy reinstates Riley's original Sense of Self, but the panic attack persists. After the repentant Anxiety admits that she cannot determine who Riley is, Joy realizes that the same applies to her i.e. her launching the negative memories to the back of Riley’s mind. With this realization, Joy removes the first Sense of Self and allows a new one to form from Riley's positive and negative memories. The emotions embrace this third Sense of Self, calming Riley and helping her reconcile with Bree and Grace. The console (i.e. Riley) calls for Joy, who takes command and helps Riley happily finish the hockey tryouts.
Riley befriends Val and the other Firehawks at high school, while staying true to herself and maintaining her friendship with Bree and Grace. Nostalgia makes a brief appearance but is sent away. Living in peace, the original and new emotions work together to protect Riley, who checks her phone for the Firehawks' recruitment results and looks at herself in the mirror with a proud smile.
Dark Secret reveals himself as the time Riley burned a hole in the rug.