The puberty alarm goes off and suddenly Riley’s mind is a construction zone with new emotions in Inside Out 2, a less jolly, more complex sequel to the 2015 Pixar movie.

Riley (voice of Kensington Tallman) is 13 and on the cusp of high school. Inside her mind, Joy (voice of Amy Poehler) has learned to let Riley’s emotional experiences have balance — Anger (voice of Lewis Black), Fear (voice of Tony Hale), Disgust (voice of Liza Lapira) and of course Sadness (voice of Phyllis Smith) all have a place in Riley’s life. Joy does tidy things up at the end of the day, sending the less than ideal memories to the back of Riley’s mind, letting Riley’s sense of self (as physically represented by a sort of crystalized snowflake sculpture thing that grows from the roots of the memories kept down below) develop from only positive memories.

Then the puberty alarm goes off and suddenly a wrecking ball crashes through headquarters and the emotional control panel has new colors. A frazzle-headed orange creature pops up and introduces herself as Anxiety (voice of Maya Hawke). Along with her come a small turquoise-colored Envy (voice of Ayo Edebiri), a large shy pink Embarrassment (voice of Paul Walter Hauser) and floppy French Ennui (voice of Adele Exarchopoulos). Anxiety, however, has plans and quickly takes over.

Her plans involve helping Riley to make and solidify friendships with the high school hockey team players, especially team captain Valentina (voice of Lilimar).

While on the way to a three-day hockey camp with her middle school friends, Riley learns that her besties will be going to a different high school. Though a “sadness is a part of life” Joy looks at the camp as a way for Riley to spend as much time with her buddies as possible, Anxiety quickly convinces the gang that Riley needs to use it to make friends with Valentina and secure her place on her high school hockey team so she won’t be friendless and alone next year. Anxiety’s special skill is painting vivid pictures of the things that can go wrong for Riley, so emotions old and new agree to follow Anxiety’s lead, until the original emotions start to argue Anxiety’s actions don’t reflect Riley’s true self. Then Anxiety vacuum tubes them out to “The Vault” to be locked up — “suppressed emotions,” one of them cries.

But of course you can’t keep a plucky Joy down. She rallies the original emotions to find the sense of self that Anxiety jettisoned when it got in the way of her Valentina plan and take it back to headquarters to save Riley.

Ultimately, what they’re saving Riley from is Anxiety’s increasingly aggressive ideas of the things that could go wrong and the resulting beliefs they create in Riley that she’s not good enough. In the movie’s climax, Anxiety creates something of a storm of this blend of real and imagined horrors — which we see as an emotion tornado where Anxiety is both moving so fast she kind of loses her physicality but is also frozen in place. That’s a pretty good visual representation of being in the grip of panic or anxiety — a combination of an increasingly intense feedback loop and of being stuck. The movie also shows Riley — with the help of external friends and internal emotions — working her way out of this feeling. I don’t know that it means anything to younger kids in the audience — the younger members of the crowd in the theater I saw this movie at were antsy by this point — but I do feel like it’s a good teachable moment for teens and tweens. This moment — and a good bit of the movie — does feel more successful as “art saying something about life” than as “entertaining for the littles.”

When I say this movie is less jolly and more complex, I think that’s what I mean. In the first movie, older but still kid Riley was dealing with the sadness of moving away from her friends. This is a life difficulty that I think is easily graspable to a kid, even a younger one. There is something more nuanced about Riley’s fears and hopes and struggles here — she isn’t really losing her friends, she can still see them, but she won’t be with them every day and will be without the social protection a group of buddies brings and so needs to replace that with older kids she must work to impress (versus the buddies who more naturally share her interests). I think the movie does a good job of examining how this feels and how — without veering into Afterschool Special Peer-Pressure territory — your ambitions for certain friends or social acceptance can cause you to act in ways that are against your core beliefs, your sense of self.

In addition to tackling a muddier problem, Inside Out 2 feels less sharp in general probably in part because we’ve seen all this before. The movie’s funniest new addition is probably Bloofy (voice of Ron Funches), a old-school hand-drawn-looking animated dog-thing that is a character from a preschool show that Riley secretly still loves. Bloofy asks questions of a nonexistent audience and has a helpful fanny-pack friend named Pouchy (voice of James Austin Johnson) — all very Dora the Explorer and my kids laughed at both the visual and character absurdities of Bloofy and Pouchy, who always seems to have very Acme-looking dynamite at his disposal.

I asked my daughter, who is not so far from Riley’s age, what she thought of the movie and her response was that the movie itself is decent but that she hated how Anxiety was trying to ruin Riley’s life. Yeah, tell me about it, I thought. It did help to underline to me, though, that while all the Bloofy wackiness and the punny “brain storms” (idea light bulbs hailing from the sky) and the occasional raft ride on a giant broccoli were entertaining enough for the kids, the ideas in this second outing were probably more interesting and thought-provoking for their grownups. B+

Rated PG for some thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Kelsey Mann with a screenplay by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein, Inside Out 2 is an hour and 36 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios.

Featured photo: Inside Out 2.