Amy Poehler is back as the voice of Joy, with a new whirl of emotions represented by Maya Hawke, Ayo Edebiri, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Paul Walter Hauser.

Pixar’s 2015 instant classic, Inside Out, was the best possible psychological starter kit for curious kids. The movie was groundbreaking in its inventive way of showing children the complex workings of their minds, framed as a hair-raising adventure, while also making the tour into the subconscious both hilarious and deeply affecting for adults. What are the odds that a sequel almost a decade later and by a mostly new creative team could recapture its canonical predecessor’s magic and humanity? But graduating from childhood into the emotional minefield of early adolescence might even have improved upon it. 

Whereas many sequels bulk up on principal characters simply because the laws of the follow-up demand it, the script here follows the sound logic that the relatively simple core emotions of childhood would suddenly be jostling for space with a whole new set of volatile feelings and confused impulses when adolescence hits. It’s the balance of basic psychology with abstract concepts and inspired observational comedy that makes this a uniquely captivating coming-of-age tale.

Inside “Head”-quarters, Joy (Amy Poehler) mans the emotion console with unflagging enthusiasm and occasional input from her cohorts Fear (Tony Hale), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Liza Lapira) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith), whose essential co-existence with happiness was the moving takeaway of the first film. This is a team that knows its job, retiring to bed each night with the satisfaction of having nurtured Riley’s healthy Sense of Self and shaped her Belief System.

But their peaceful slumber is broken by the piercing sound of the console’s “Puberty Alarm” going off in the middle of the night. Suddenly, a maintenance crew descends for demolition day, gutting HQ and upgrading the console for a more sophisticated model, built to manage the hormonal rollercoaster of adolescence. At the same time, Riley wakes up with a zit and a temper, while Joy & Co. find that even the gentlest touch of a button on the new console yields a wild overreaction.

As Riley sets off for an all-important hockey camp that will determine whether she makes the hotshot high school team, the Fire Hawks, a newly evolved emotion takes control. And what more fitting emotion for a young teenager in 2024 than Anxiety, a jittery figure that looks like a Looney Tunes character put through a laundry wringer, all teeth and bug eyes, crowned by a tuft of messy orange plumage and voiced by Maya Hawke with nervous energy to burn.

Once Anxiety has put herself in charge, Riley starts sacrificing intrinsic values like loyalty to make way for competitiveness, turning her back on Grace and Bree in a determined bid to get in with the cool clique of Fire Hawks players, led by rink star Valentina (Lilimar). In a refreshing departure from the usual teen-movie mean-girl depiction, these young women are a welcoming multi-cultural crew that actively encourage Riley, even if Anxiety ensures that she’s ruled by her worst instincts.

The real conflict emerges when Anxiety exiles Joy and her childhood cohorts to The Vault, a subterranean storage unit for suppressed emotions where they make amusing new allies. It falls to Sadness, a perpetual Debbie Downer burdened by gloom and insecurity, to make it back to HQ and stop Anxiety before Riley’s Sense of Self is destroyed.

Just as the first film was peppered with funny set-pieces visualizing complex thought processes in hairy situations, Inside Out 2 mines humor and suspense from such elements as the stream of consciousness; a brainstorm; sarcasm (literally a “sar-chasm” that threatens to swallow Joy and friends); Imaginationland office staffers busily ordering up Anxiety’s worst-case scenarios; and the Parade of Future Careers, which allows the outcasts to hitch a ride on a Supreme Court Justice float.