Hacker Cinema
Inside Out 2
2024 · Film · 97 min
Part of Inside Out Collection
Directed by Kelsey Mann
AnimationAdventureComedyFamily
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.
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15 comments on Hacker News
IMO the article is being a little unfair to being highly misleading by only talking about box-office numbers, they're a much more complicated discussion than the article treats them (especially so since it includes a number of pandemic years). Additionally it's ignoring the reason _why_ CG is so popular and there's so many flops - you can make then a lot quicker than hand-drawn animation.
Tons of hugely successful CG movies came out in the past few years that are not mentioned in the article (Inside Out 2, Frozen 2, Mario movie, Moana 2, Spider-man, etc.) - all of those movies had a higher box-office gross than every hand-drawn animated movie ever except for the Lion King in '94. I'm not saying they're _better_, but rather that box office numbers aren't a great reason to argue for hand-drawn animation, I don't think Disney and other companies are very concerned about the flops when the successes rake in so much money.
Exactly. Pixar is somewhat a victim of its own success, but in this case Inside Out 2 is just Inside Out again - none of the additions or developments are really surprising.
And that's not bad! Sometimes you really do just want more of the same - after all, many wildly successful TV shows are just the same story, told differently each episode.
Flow wildly beat expectations which already gives it a leg up, but it was "new and weird" enough that I bet more of the reviewers actually watched it vs Inside Out 2 or other big-name movies.
Even the tagline of "feature length movie with no dialogue that's actually good" is enough to get people interested.
I kind of hope they don't. I like the humble, democratic, FOSS spirit - it's like Dogme 95 / "Vows of Chastity".
"rules to create films based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, while excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology. It was supposedly created as an attempt to "take back power for the directors as artists" as opposed to the movie studio."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95
I had a negative initial reaction to the animation style but it hooked me in and blew me away. It had virtues far more vital than render quality. In contrast, I bailed on "Inside Out 2" and have no interest retrying. I hope more people are encouraged to create lofi meaningful movies instead of thinking it's the preserve of billion dollar studios and sweat-shop animation factories.
I was also disappointed by inside out 2. I thought it followed the story beats of the first one a bit too closely. Flow was the better film.
A couple things:
1. The academy has had a significant increase of young voters in the past 10 years or so. Generally speaking, young voters are more likely to take animation as a "serious" medium.
2. These interviews were always somewhat overstated. Of course some voters have stupid rationales, but I don't think this dominates the academy.
3. Disney's Inside Out 2 was nowhere close to winning the award this year - Flow's biggest competition was The Wild Robot, which did gross far more than Inside Out 2, but far below Inside Out 2.
If you look at the past couple years, The Boy and the Heron (Studio Ghibli) won over Across the Spider-Verse (with Pixar's movie Elemental nowhere close) in 2023, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio won over Across the Spider-Verse (with Pixar's movie Turning Red nowhere close) in 2022, etc.
I'm curious what year you're thinking about above. Perhaps Toy Story 4 over Klaus in 2019?
I didn't think inside out 2 was a very good movie.
It had good ideas but didn't do very well with them (contrary to the first movie, which was great). I'm not surprised a movie which wasn't "just a sequel" managed to beat Moana and IO2.
That's kind of surprising. Academy members are not required to watch all the nominees for Best Animated Feature before voting. In fact they are not require to watch any of them.
Several years ago I remember that after a year where the movie that won best animated was not the one that those in the animation industry overwhelming thought was sure to win some animation industry magazine survived Academy members asking which movie they voted for and why.
What they found was that a large number of the voters thought of animated movies as just for little kids and hadn't actually watched any of the nominees. They picked their vote by whatever they remembered children in their lives watching.
E.g., if they were parents of young children, they'd vote for whatever movie that their kids kept watching over and over. If they no longer had children at home they would ask grandkids or nieces or nephews "what cartoon did you like last year?" and vote for that.
Another factor was that a lot of these people would vote for the one they had heard the most about.
That gives Disney a big advantage. How the heck did Flow overcome that?
Inside Out 2 had a much wider theatrical release in the US, was widely advertised, made $650 million domestic, is the second highest grossing animated movie of all time so far worldwide, and streams on Disney+.
All that should contribute to making it likely that those large numbers of "vote even though they don't watch animated movies" Academy members would have heard of it.
Flow had a small US theatrical release at the end of the year. I didn't see any advertising for it. I'd expect a lot of Academy members hadn't heard of it.
As a guess, maybe Moana 2 is the movie that the kids are repeat streaming. That was not a nominee so maybe those "vote for what my kid watched" voters didn't vote this year and so we actually got a year where quality non-Disney movies had a chance?
This seems an insufficient analysis. The meaning expressed by contemporary music, film media, or streaming television isn't very profound, but they at least still make a passing effort to "signify" something. The highest grossing movie of 2024 - Inside Out 2 - is not a deep text, but it does have a thesis.
The "Pixar apparatus" is definitely increasingly consumed by audience demand, but they're at a minimum in a transitional phase: something like Seeing Red would never get workshopped out of committees.
Youtube and other social media (emphasis on media) is ground zero for the decay of meaning into intensity; the ultimate incestuous product of auto-simulacra.
Both films are quite good. They are deep, meaningful explorations of the themes presented in their respective films.
Is your issue that they reuse existing characters and locations to do so? How would using new characters and locations improve things? Inside Out 2 builds upon themes from the first film and couldn't be made without the first.
Yes, Disney dominates animation. They've done so longer than anyone on HN has been alive, because most of their animated films are extremely good.
In every post about LLMs there is someone to blindly say something like this.
When in reality if you ask ChatGPT for 10 good movies from this year you will get this.
Anora - Directed by Sean Baker, a compelling drama about the life of a sex worker in Coney Island.
Challengers - A provocative tennis drama directed by Luca Guadagnino, starring Zendaya.
Dune: Part Two - Denis Villeneuve's continuation of the epic science fiction saga.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga - An action-packed prequel exploring the origins of Furiosa, directed by George Miller.
Inside Out 2 - Pixar's sequel that dives deeper into the complexities of human emotions.
Wicked - A musical fantasy adaptation directed by Jon M. Chu . The Zone of Interest - A thought-provoking film about Auschwitz, directed by Jonathan Glazer.
The Idea of You - A steamy romance starring Anne Hathaway.
Hit Man - A comedy thriller starring Glen Powell.
The Outrun - A powerful drama about a recovering alcoholic, starring Saoirse Ronan.
Let me know if you'd like more details about any of these!
Which is a great list.
An example of a hit movie or song that was created by committee?
Inside Out 2 had the largest box office of any movie in 2024. Checkout the "research and writing" section in its wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Out_2#Research_and_writing ... psychological consultants, a feedback loop with a group of teenagers, test screenings.
Or how about "Die with a smile" - currently number 1 in the global top 50 on Spotify. 5 songwriters
Or "APT." - currently number 2 in the global top 50 on Spotify. 11 songwriters
You don't have to look very hard
I do, but only for very specific movies. And _only_ if I can get the perfect spot in the theatre, I'm not paying 25€ for a ticket and sit in a sub-optimal spot just to fight the FOMO of not seeing something on opening week.
I also mostly go alone.
Family movies in the movies are dead though, they all come out on streaming so fast that there's no point in dropping 100€ for the whole family to go see Inside Out 2, we can just wait for a few months and either buy it in 4k from Apple for under 20€ or stream it for "free" from Disney+.
Either way we can pause it as we like, have any snacks or food we like and other people's kids aren't running around and making a racket.
As memorably dramatized in the Inside Out movies, each of us is a sort of committee, and Nate’s portrayal of different people’s attitudes toward risk can perhaps give us a better understanding of our own incoherent selves and how this incoherence can be a strength.
Linking his own professional practice to psychotherapy…
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/movies/inside-out-2-therapy-schools.html
> it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details.
> Do you think that's accurate?
I don't think someone with aphantasia (of which I am one!) is really capable of assessing this - which details our memories have routinely omitted is an unknown unknown until we're explicitly made conscious of the gap.
With regard to your example of a movie, I think you may be overweighting the importance of visualization in recalling narratives (and details within them). Fiction books (for adults, anyways) generally lack visuals, yet readers across the entire visualization spectrum[0] can engage with them and recall/discuss scenes, plot points, etc. Absorbing the narrative of a movie isn't so far off from that. I just took my kid to see Inside Out 2 earlier this week, and have a pretty clear recollection (sans whatever gaps I'm incapable of being aware of) of all of it.
[0] I think, but am not sure, that it strengthens my point here to note that people who visualize the story as they read it are nearly certainly visualizing it _differently_, but that almost never poses a problem for engaging with others about it.
I'm sure Disney was disappointed in Lightyear's performance given its marketing push and brand appeal, but I don't think you're listing the movies that are central to Disney's strategy anymore. Ever since COVID, Disney has pretty much banished Pixar to Disney+, not as "premium" releases that cost extra, but just included day one on the service. If they had theater runs, they were limited or international-only. That includes such films as Soul, Luca and Turning Red, whereas Encanto from their other animation company (Walt Disney Animation Studios) got a wide and successful theatrical run. Turning Red's box office returns are irrelevant because of this. However, due in part to people going back to theaters and (largely) to the film's brand recognition, Lightyear became the first Pixar film since 2019 to be given a real theatrical release. And the main reason it bombed was, I believe, because everyone and most importantly families had gotten used to being able to watch those movies on Disney+ for a lot cheaper. Even if that one waited two months to come to the service.
As for Strange World, it was widely observed that Disney didn't give it any marketing push and a majority of people weren't even aware of its existence. To me, the main reason is that Disney doesn't bother to hype up movies that they don't really believe in. Strange World was one such film, a WDAS movie that isn't a fairytale or a musical (and isn't safe from the kind of conservative hate campaigns that Disney tends to avoid). Disney has a long history of letting their studios make films outside of the cookie cutter but release them with little fanfare. They can now easily be written off as Disney+ fodder.
Disney absolutely still relies on their animation studios for blockbusters, but they've noticed which formula works best for each. Pixar is never as successful as when it does sequels. WDAS routinely hits the 1 billion mark when it makes new additions to their fairytale canon, or bombastic musicals (see Encanto's massive success). It's no surprise then that they're now pushing WDAS, a notoriously sequel-adverse studio, into making a third Frozen and a second Zootopia, and that a _fifth_ Toy Story is suddenly in the works at Pixar alongside... Inside Out 2. Any other project is bound to get buried in the release schedule or dumped on Disney+.
So what kind of movies are core to Disney's strategy? Star Wars is on a kind of hiatus and lives on Disney+. We have Marvel of course, which isn't in the healthiest state but still produces frequent hits. Avatar is now a big one. Any animated movie that fits their preferred formula. And of course, the depressing string of live-action remakes which, if they're all quickly forgotten, often hit the 1 billion mark, and I've no doubt that their lifeless Little Mermaid clone will do the same. I think Disney is now suffering from the same "we grew too big, too quick" realization as every other tech and entertainment giant, and they're definitely reeling from a few recent failures, but I wouldn't use Strange World or Turning Red as the poster children of their troubles; they never bet much on those anyway.
Unfortunately, when Disney makes the most bland and forgettable nostalgia bait, they still make the "movies people want to see".