Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman is two thumbs up…way up!…on Pixar’s Inside Out 2 (Disney, 6.14). That means it’s almost certainly worth catching, but is it okay if I sidestep it anyway? I’d watch if Sutton was into it, but she’s too probably too young for mind-personality games. No offense but no thanks.
Gleiberman: “Inside Out, I would argue, was the last great Pixar movie. It had the audacity to build an entire world inside the mind of [a young girl named] Riley, and to turn that world — the warring emotions, the good and bad memories stored in collectible marbles — into a kind of enchanted philosophical amusement park.
“It [also] told a tale that was moving and profound…about what happens to all of us as we leave childhood behind — the way the illusions and innocence, the beautiful garden of who we were, must fall away.
“Inside Out 2 can’t shock us with its out-of-the-box imaginative daring the way Inside Out did. But the film’s director, Pixar animation veteran Kelsey Mann and screenwriters Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein” — named after the cows? — “build on the earlier film’s playful brilliance and come about as close as we could have hoped for to matching it.”