Life is about to become pure chaos thanks to every teen’s dreaded emotion: anxiety. (It’s pretty bad for grownups too.)
Maya Hawke joins Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” as Anxiety, the new voice inside tween Riley’s (Kensington Tallman) head. Join the club. Just as Riley is set to start high school, feelings of Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) join in. Actors Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Tony Hale, and Liza Lapira play Riley’s preexisting feelings of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. It’s getting crowded in there….
Lilimar, Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green, and Grace Lu voice Riley’s friends, while Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan return as her parents. Yvette Nicole Brown voices Coach Roberts, who heads up a summer hockey camp. Additional voice actors include Paula Pell, Sarayu Blue, Flea, Ron Funches, Dave Goelz, James Austin Johnson, Bobby Moynihan, Frank Oz, Paula Poundstone, John Ratzenberger, Kendall Coyne Schofield, June Squibb, Kirk Thatcher, and Yong Yea.
“Inside Out 2” is directed by Kelsey Mann, with Mark Nielsen producing. Academy-Award winner Pete Docter did not return to write or direct the sequel.
The original 2015 Disney movie won the Best Animated Feature Oscar and was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay, one of only four Pixar films to be nominated in that category. (“Ratatouille,” “WALL-E,” and “Up” are the other three.)
The Academy recently announced a realignment to split the the Short Films and Feature Animation branch into separate Animation and Short Films branches. The Animation branch’s 700 Academy members will oversee both features and shorts, with new governors in charge of each category.
The “Inside Out 2” cast marks Walter Hauser’s second animated feature this year following Charlie Kaufman’s “Orion and the Dark.” The actor voiced the titular “The Dark” for the Netflix movie; that one also dealt with tween anxiety.
“Inside Out 2” is Pixar’s first sequel in five years since “Toy Story 4” in 2019. The film hopes to return Pixar to box office prominence after a rough patch in which a string of Pixar movies, all original features, were released directly to Disney+. Those three movies, “Soul,” “Luca,” and “Turning Red,” all got their day in theaters when Disney re-released them early this year.
“Inside Out 2” premieres June 14 in theaters. Check out the trailer below.
