Charles Langston:'Puberty is messy': Amy Poehler introduces extended sneak peek at Pixar's 'Inside Out 2'

2025-04-29 17:56:20source:Christopher Caldwellcategory:reviews

LAS VEGAS – Has your anxiety ever totally overtaken your joy?Charles Langston Pixar has now made that into a movie.

The animated comedy "Inside Out" broke out in a big way with a relatable narrative in 2015, and its sequel promises to do the same with new emotions and clever writing. The biggest fan of both movies, however, might be franchise star Amy Poehler, who again voices Joy in "Inside Out 2" (in theaters June 14).

"I've played a lot of joyful characters over the years, but none of them mean as much to me as Joy," Amy Poehler told the crowd at CinemaCon on Thursday. She introduced the film's first 35 minutes to theater owners who were ready to laugh with a teen girl and the many emotions running through her head.

The sequel catches up with the now-teenage Riley, who's making best friends at school and becoming a force at the hockey rink. That means new core memories being overseen by Joy, Anger (Lewis Black), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Liza Lapira) and Fear (Tony Hale) in Riley's mind headquarters.

All is well until one night when puberty hits – it's literally a blinking red light on their emotion console – and a demolition crew shows up for an extreme makeover, even putting up a construction warning sign many parents know all too well: "Puberty is messy."

The emotions are thrown in disarray just as Riley is picked for a hockey camp, where she has to weigh her friendships with impressing the local high school coach, and that's when a new crew shows up: the energetic Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos).

Joy messes up and Anxiety fixes the situation, which leads to Anxiety pulling a coup and making Joy and her friends "repressed" emotions – in other words, sending them to Riley's vault of secrets where a video-game crush and her favorite preschool show character are kept.

The sneak peek gave a sense that "Inside Out 2" is bigger and might be even better than the first, with a hint of Nostalgia as well.

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