Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Pixar made an entire movie about feels feeling feels! As someone who responds well to films that probe deeper emotions than “wheeeee”, I named Pete Doctor’s Inside Out my favorite film of 2015 – against the heavyweight competition of Creed, Spotlight, and Fury Road — after its in-depth examination of baseline emotions via cutesy anthropomorphization, as well as its complicated theses about the importance of sadness and the beginning of the end of childhood, wrecked me in the theater twice, back in that bygone era when I’d go see a film in theaters more than once if I thought it was that awesome.

Nine years later, Pixar has the blemished scorecard of any ordinary animation studio. I’ve had such mixed reactions that I only saw one of their last five films in theaters (and regretted giving in to the cash-grab). Nevertheless, I agreeably let them redeem Inside Out‘s stack of goodwill chips and left the house to catch the new Inside Out 2 while my inner voices of Skepticism and Hope squabbled with each other like Siskel and Ebert. Each of them scored points off the other, leaving me wrecked and nitpicky.

Docter handed the reins to Kelsey Mann, a 15-year Pixar veteran who’s worked his way up the company ladder to his feature directorial debut. As with many a good sequel, he managed to retain most of the original cast. Once again we zoom into the life of Riley (now voiced by Nickelodeon survivor Kensington Tallman) and her head-control room that’s still home to Parks and Rec‘s Amy Poehler as Joy, The Office‘s Phyllis Smith as Sadness, and angry comic Lewis Black typecast as Anger. Exit Mindy Kaling and Barry‘s Bill Hader, who each now rule their own creative dominions; enter Arrested Development‘s Tony Hale as Fear and Liza Lapira (Dollhouse, Unbelievable, CBS’ The Equalizer) as Disgust. Neither role is huge enough for us to protest the recasting. Kyle MacLachlan and Diane Lane also return as Riley’s parents, though necessarily more irrelevant than they were last time due to a change in venue. (Again we’re afforded mere jokey glimpses into their heads. Mom’s feels are still caricatures; Dad’s, still stereotypes.)

In the two years that have passed for Riley, our interior quintet’s dynamic has settled into a certain equilibrium at her mental control panel. (Human thought-life in this universe is denied the pleasure of Sherlock mind palaces. We’re all internally deconstructed.) Alas, her exterior life is in a state of flux. She’s just turned 13 and is about to move up to high school, only to discover her two BFFs (Grace Lu from Hulu’s Fright Krewe and newcomer Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green) will be going to a different school next year. Their big upcoming week at all-girls hockey camp might be their one last chance for an extended hangout before, Riley worriedly presumes, they’ll all lose touch forever and never see or speak to each other again and her life will become a bottomless pit of loneliness despite the internet being right there at her fingertips. In that respect, today’s teens have it much easier than we did in our day, when separated friends nearly always became effectively dead to each other. Or maybe that was just me.

Just when she’s resigned herself to one last Three Musketeers hurrah, Riley discovers hockey camp also has…older, cooler girls! Apparently this is her very first year of hockey-camp eligibility. She’s bedazzled by the confident, athletic, stylish upper-grade young ladies who rule at hockey and might or might not foreshadow her own future in the sport and in her social spheres. Contrast them with Riley’s younger, geekier yesteryear pals and…well, anyone who’s ever watched a sitcom with a teen in it knows how that entire conflict will go and how it’ll end. The outside world’s clique struggle is not especially daring. Then again, it’s not as though we as a society have solved that problem and should stop addressing it evermore.

This fraught moment is of course exactly the wrong time for Riley’s body to schedule its very special changes. In the middle of one random night, the “Puberty” dashboard light from the first movie is a throwaway gag no more; it’s blinking and it’s happening and there are klaxons and surprise remodeling. Out with the old dashboard, in with the new, and the Five Feels suddenly have four unwelcome new coworkers who don’t know what they’re doing. Taking charge of the pack is Anxiety (Stranger Things‘ Maya Hawke), a frantic, orange youngster who claims she’s Joy’s biggest fan, thinks she knows what’s best for their host, and thrives on an endless coffee supply cupped and ‘ported in from a Looney Tunes pocket dimension, all the better to keep her wired 24/7. She tries fitting in at first, but within minutes has staged a coup, jettisoned Our Heroes to the farthest recesses, and begun influencing Riley to make all the worst possible choices. Anxiety doesn’t know any better and yet she just totally knows she has to keep doing something and eventually reality will sort itself into the correct timeline where Riley wins at life and has Anxiety to thank.

Before her arrival, we’re also introduced to other, heretofore nonexistent aspects of Riley’s brain, such as the lake full of support cables that represent her Beliefs, and the bonsai sculpture that is her Sense of Self. We saw none of this architecture in Mom’s or Dad’s heads in the first one, let alone in Riley’s, but presto, they’re there now, integral parts of her identity infrastructure and the plot, devised so the two warring factions of feels can have tangible objectives to fight over. Still other new areas in her thought-life terrain are lazily based on easy dad-jokes, a letdown from the first film’s more innovative designs. Coming from three credited screenwriters (Mann, returning co-writer Meg LeFauve, and Weeds staffer Dave Holstein), the larfs are like elbows jabbing your sides as you witness a “brainstorm” in action. Later in the second half, the skirmish among the sensibilities turns into a lengthy journey from the mindscape’s farthest reaches that necessitates some feelings feeling other feels and in some cases doing other feels’ jobs for them.

To their credit, the First Five remain a funny ensemble, building upon the previous film’s concluding camaraderie and seamlessly integrating the newcomers into their Round Table. Their interplay goes a long way toward enlivening Riley’s Afterschool Special motions, even if they don’t exactly come together as a superheroic team of equals. At one point Sadness is weirdly thrust into doing espionage behind the usurpers’ backs, which seems a really unlikely role for her, though she’s such a fun character that it’s hard to fuss about it with a furrowed brow. Her scenes earned the loudest children’s laughter in our showing, and I mused to myself how, contrary to Claudius in Hamlet, for once we’re treated to the sight of one sorrow come a single spy.

On the other end of the dramatic spectrum, Poehler taps into a more serious flipside to her Leslie Knope sunniness with critical moments of soul-searching, including a heartbreaking soliloquy upon realizing, for some kids of a certain age and/or temperament, joy stops being their default mode or even their dominant attitude. Her most meaningful moment is one she comes to share with Anxiety, in which she stops talking and introduces a new concept to Riley’s headspace: empathy.

But the runaway MVP here is Hawke’s Anxiety, the well-meaning antagonist who doesn’t realize how badly she’s screwing up. Her line delivery is pitched and edited at Robin Williams genie-speed, her shortsighted assurance is a change of pace from the previous film’s psychological obstacles, and, quite frankly, her portrayal of how certain forms of anxiety work are unquestionably all too real. Her master plan involves conscripting Riley’s imagination (a vast studio of artists toiling ceaselessly at drawing boards, not unlike certain animation companies) to game out every possible outcome of every possible decision of Riley’s entire life — with, of course, an unhealthy emphasis on worst-case scenarios — in a quixotic attempt to choose the one correct path among the near-infinite possibilities. Anxiety correctly learns this level of personal timeline control is impossible and impractical, yet tries it anyway because it’s the only way she knows.

This is exactly my brain inside, and has been since, oh, eighth grade or so. I could feel earthquake tremors in my own head space as her futile logical lapses and radical gear-shifting lead Riley into one disastrous confrontation after another and culminate in abject paralysis. Again: too real. That hit harder than anything I’ve witnessed so far from this year’s thin theatrical crop.

It goes without saying the animators again knock themselves out in visualizing unseeable concepts, but it’s become all too easy for me take animation quality for granted. Individually delineated hairs and glowing sci-fi panoramas are pretty much baseline nowadays. It’s almost more charming when cartoonists go intentionally lo-fi rather than spend $200 million to keep topping each other in ways we laypeople can scarcely perceive, even on larger screens away from home. The important thing is, at least for part of the runtime, Inside Out 2 finds a way through the messy complexities of the human brain that leads Pixar back to that too-oft-missed human heart.

On the downside, the sequel’s roaring success and its ongoing box-office reign as The Savior of Cinema guarantees an Inside Out 3 with ever-increased chances of damaging Riley’s story even more. Where would they go from here? Introduce incarnations of every emotion in the dictionary until their membership is more unwieldy than the Legion of Super-Heroes? (If we must, I need Rachel Dratch as Rejection, Tina Fey as Irony, Aubrey Plaza as Pessimism, and, utterly without explanation, Creed Bratton as Creed.) Or dare they tiptoe into the forbidden realm of Riley’s sexual side? Or maybe do an Inception and descend another level till we’re inside Joy’s “head”? Or maybe they’ll just rehash this film’s plot all over again, this time with Anxiety growing into a 50-foot Muppet and requiring Riley to get prescribed antidepressants! Or get hooked on the street drugs! Riley’s future is wide open, even if the viable sequel possibilities aren’t.

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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Meet the new feels! Paul Walter Hauser (Black Bird, Richard Jewell) is the awkwardly oversized Embarrassment, hiding inside a comfort hoodie with instant-retreat drawstring and mostly responding in wordless whines until backed into a corner. (10/10, no notes.) Ayo Edibiri from The Bear (my favorite current show, and yeah, I am fiending for the new season) is Envy, who seems like she ought to be a bigger player in Riley’s social dilemma but oddly isn’t. French actress Adèle Exarchopoulos (Blue is the Warmest Color) plays Ennui as a shiftless beatnik glued to her tiny phone, which begs the question of exactly what imaginary apps she’s doomscrolling through. Academy Award Nominee June Squibb (Nebraska) has two cute scenes as Nostalgia arriving unfashionably early.

Elsewhere within Riley’s memories, comedian Ron Funches (DC’s Powerless, Harley Quinn) and SNL‘s James Austin Johnson have the absolutely best scenes as preschool cartoon stars who aren’t as educational as they used to be. Steve Purcell, creator of the great Sam & Max, Freelance Police (and a top collaborator on Brave), is a Deep, Dark Secret. Other voices in her head include Pixar’s returning good-luck charm John Ratzenberger (absent from four of their last five films), Pete Docter himself, ex-SNLer Bobby Moynihan, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, old-school standup Paula Poundstone, and hall-of-fame Muppeteers Frank Oz and Dave Goelz.

Meanwhile in the real world, Community‘s Yvette Nicole Brown is the hockey camp coach who turns from encouraging recruiter to taskmaster on a dime.

How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there is indeed a scene after the Inside Out 2 end credits. For those who tuned out prematurely and really want to know, and didn’t already click elsewhere…

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[…insert space for courtesy spoiler alert in case anyone needs to abandon ship…]

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…sometime later, Joy makes the long journey back to the Memory Vault and yells inside to the Deep, Dark Secret that it’s time to emerge at last. Naturally Joy is curious and asks what the secret is.

Timid at first, the Secret eventually relents: “I BURN HOLE IN RUG!” He doesn’t seem smart enough to lie, but that’s what he claims.

Joy is relieved because she thought it was the time Riley peed in the pool. Apparently now recalling that secret, the Secret recoils and retreats into the Vault’s shadows once more and refuses to reemerge.

Will we ever learn why the Deep, Dark Secret was summoned? Was the rug just a cover story (no pun intended) for an even darker secret? Find out nine years from now in Inside Out 3 when some future Pixar regime decides it’s time to watch Riley have a high school meltdown and/or her first date!