The success of the first Inside Out movie in 2015 was so great that it must have taken innumerable acts of will and good faith to stop the powers that be immediately churning out another and another and squeezing the franchise dry as fast as possible. Instead, a sequel to the coming-of-age story of 11-year-old Riley and her increasingly complicated inner life (Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness, voiced by the actors Amy Poehler, Lewis Black, Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling and Phyllis Smith respectively) wasn’t produced until this year. Inside Out 2 introduced an adolescent Riley struggling with the advent of Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and a small but scene-stealing dose of Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos). It was just as charming, inventive, funny and loving as the first and outdid it at the box office.
All of which means you can approach the four-part spin-off Dream Productions, set between the two films and based in the studio that puts together Riley’s dreams, in one of two ways: with Poehleresque joy (more of the good stuff so quickly! Yay!) or Hawkeish anxiety (oh no! Has the dam burst? Has the lure of the dollar become too much and we are about to be flooded with all the crap they were dying to cash in with in the decade between movies?).
Well, let joy be unconfined! ’Tis a Christmas miracle, but the quartet of tight 22-minute (except for the finale, which comes in at 27) episodes are an unfailing delight. Packed as full of wit, wisdom and jokes for all the family as the originals, they follow the dream-director Paula Persimmon (Paula Pell), who attempts to keep her work relevant as Riley (Kensington Tallman), now 12, grows out of the cupcake/unicorns/glitter confections that Paula has specialised in until now. Her greatest hit was the dream that convinced young Riley to give up her dummy in real life. But that is now (literally – dreams, like emotions in the films, take the form of glowing coloured spheres in Paula’s world) beginning to fade. On the warpath is Maya Rudolph as the studio head Jean Dewberry (and with this and Paula Persimmon I finally realise what the franchise reminds me of: Jayne Fisher’s The Garden Gang series of Ladybird books. To anyone else who has been scratching a similar, if niche, itch – consider this my Christmas gift to you).
Jean promotes Paula’s assistant director Janelle and pairs Paula instead with Xeni (Richard Ayoade, having almost as much fun with the part as the writers are having with him), a daydream director (“Scripts are the instruments of cowards! … There’s no camera any more! Only vision”) and, if you are old enough to appreciate it, a pitch-perfect satire on a certain kind of indie presence in the industry. He wants to make their first dream together one in which Riley plays go fish with Death (“The symbolism will be very rich”). To get him out of her hair while she puts together Riley’s first boyfriend dream, Paula makes him a second unit director (“Tear down the set! We only need black frames and two fishbowls”) but suffice to say, they must eventually learn to work together for the good of Riley and to avert disaster at the hands of those who know her less well.
Dream Productions is full of the kind of details that made the original material such a success. There is Paula’s pet, Melatonin (stroke him enough and you will fall asleep). There is the hierarchy at work: dreams, daydreams, then threatened demotion to “brainfarts”; the aspirational drawing Riley does of her teenage self in class, who transmogrifies into a proper character in her dreams; and the well-crafted relationship between the dream world, the real world and Riley’s waking inner world (the personified emotions from the first film all make an appearance here, some voiced by the actors that played them in the second).
Above all, it is a generous, exuberant thing that feels born of a desire to give us all a treat – a gift rather than a franchise being milked dry. It feels like someone wanted to make us happy rather than treat us as cash cows, and that the idea of giving viewers a couple of hours of escapism and a happy ending was reason enough to get the old gang and some equally great new members together to do it. Like I say – a Christmas miracle.
• Dream Productions is on Disney+ now
