In Disney-Pixar’s latest sequel, viewers trip through the wires of a pubescent protagonist as metaphorical mental health minions in her brain try to highlight all the feels. Kelsey Mann’s CGI animated adventure Inside Out 2 (B-) is breakneck and brisk and should entertain the kids but isn’t particularly distinguished in terms of plot, characterization or animation. The plot is Upper Case Obvious: a banished Joy (wasted voice of Amy Poehler) works to overcome Anxiety (undistinguished voice work by Maya Hawke) in an effort to keep teenager Riley (ho-hum voice of Kensington Tallman) centered in her self-worth. It’s not entirely clear if our heroine is actually Riley, trying to fit in with new hockey girl friends, or the Joy inside her head; both characters have fairly predictable journeys and don’t get much fun to do on screen. The newly personified Anxiety doesn’t especially work as a piece of animation (love child of Muppet Pepe the King Prawn and Morty’s grandpa Rick) nor as a clever antagonist, but fortunately there are other amusing newbies including Ennui, an eye-rolling French woman portrayed by Adèle Exarchopoulos, and Nostalgia, a recurring octogenarian voiced by June Squibb who has emerged on the scene prematurely. When the film succeeds, it’s in the margins, with funny flourishes and asides and gimmicks such as a valiant pixelated video game character who temporarily enters the fray. Another technique breaking the CGI doldrums is a traditional 2D hand-drawn animated fanny pack character named Pouchy who proves the film’s most surprising comic accessory. There are too many balls in the air cluttering the frame, literally hundreds of memory-filled spheres rolling about like refugees from last year’s Wish, filling what is largely an overstuffed aesthetic. On this trauma trek, we yearn for more of the fiery Anger and less of the winsome Sadness and certainly crave more and better jokes with more engaging wisps of sentiment. There’s enough reason to plumb the pop psychology some more in this sequel, but it’s got its ups and downs.

Ironically, Peter Sohn’s Elemental (C-), in which the animated characters are allegorical and anthropomorphic elements of nature, is virtually chemistry-free. The story follows fiery, hot-tempered Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) and go-with-the-flow liquid character Wade (Mamoudou Athie), who fall in love while helping avert a crisis in their murky metropolis. The two central characters in this misguided romcom are generally inert from their meet-not-so-cute opening moments until the point when their story is finally and mercifully extinguished. For a film as high-concept as this, the story, dialogue and voice acting are all quite basic; and attempted parallels to real-life don’t really land. Unlike WALL-E or Zootopia, for instance, there’s little discernible sense of time, place or genre. Frequent flashbacks simply prolong a tale that’s already treading water, and supporting characters lumber along rather aimlessly against hastily conceived backdrops lacking zest. Admirably, it’s one of the few Disney-Pixar movies which doesn’t rely on a pedigreed voice cast (save for a ho-hum Catherine O’Hara) for an immediate connection, but nobody in the ensemble adds any vocal vibrancy to this periodic tableau of mediocrity. After a largely charmless series of uninspiring episodes, there are a few mild sparks in the final act but not enough to give this not-so-golden-age entry any atomic weight.