The Pitch: Puberty’s a-comin’ — Riley, the now 13-year-old protagonist from Inside Out, has just finished eighth grade and is looking forward to goofing off with her two best friends and hockey teammates Grace and Bree in high school.

Meanwhile, in Riley’s emotional headquarters, the usual gang of Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Liza Lapira), and Fear (Tony Hale) have been prioritizing all of Riley’s good memories, tossing out the bad ones (to the back of the mind), and cherishing one of Riley’s core beliefs: She is a good friend.

But the incoming prospect of a three-day hockey camp with the stars of Riley’s high school team is a lot to handle for HQ, especially after Grace and Bree woefully confess that they’ll be going to a different high school next year. Not to mention the onset of puberty, which transforms Riley’s emotional system overnight — there’s the newly added Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and Anxiety (Maya Hawke), who begins running the show to “protect” Riley and ensure that she’ll have new friends going into her freshman year.

Eventually, with Anxiety in control, Joy and the rest of the gang find themselves ostracized and deemphasized — as Riley begins to change and encounters a significant turning point in her life, the emotions in her brain are left to figure out what they can control, what they can’t, and what it means to live with anxiety.

A Whole New World (Again): Inside Out introduced us to an imaginative world within Riley’s mind, and it’s once again one of the most indelible parts of Inside Out 2. There’s an even greater concentration on color and texture this time around, right down to expressive close-up shots of emotions and the visually dazzling “belief-system strings.” There’s a great journey that Joy and co. embark on throughout (like the first film), and they pair the trek with a sense of quiet vastness that feels totally unique in the Pixar universe.

But the film also uses the world-building as opportunities for some killer jokes. The one that got me chortling in the theater was the “Sar-Chasm,” a massive quarry that opens up when Riley (directed by Ennui) makes a sarcastic comment. There’s also a “Brain Storm,” where ideas in various lightbulbs swirl around in a tornado — not as funny, but still kind of cute.

Inside Out 2 (Pixar)