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      ‘Inside Out 2’ Returns Pixar to Box Office Heights

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      The sequel was expected to collect at least $145 million in the United States and Canada over the weekend, about 60 percent more than anticipated.Pixar is finally back in fighting form.The Disney-owned animation studio’s 28th movie, “Inside Out 2,” arrived to roughly $145 million in estimated North American ticket sales from Thursday night to Sunday, ending a cold streak that began in March 2020, when theaters closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.It was the second-biggest opening weekend in Pixar’s 29-year history, trailing only the superhero sequel “Incredibles 2,” which arrived to about $180 million in 2018.“They’re back,” David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers, said of Pixar. “This is a sensational opening.”Based on prerelease surveys that track audience interest, box office analysts had expected “Inside Out 2” to take in about $90 million in the United States and Canada over the weekend. That total would have been strong — on par with opening-weekend ticket sales for the first “Inside Out” in 2015.“Inside Out 2” sold an additional $125 million in partial release overseas, bringing its worldwide opening total to around $270 million, analysts said. The PG-rated movie cost an estimated $200 million to make and at least another $100 million to market.“Inside Out 2,” about a 13-year-old girl and the personified emotions inside her puberty-scrambled mind, received exceptional reviews. Ticket buyers gave the movie an A grade in CinemaScore exit polls, the same score the first film in the franchise received.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What ‘Inside Out 2’ Teaches Us About Anxiety

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      A new emotion has taken over Riley’s teenage mind. And she has lessons for us all.At the end of “Inside Out,” the 2015 Pixar movie about the emotional life of a girl named Riley, a new button appears on the console used to control Riley’s mood. It’s emblazoned with one word: Puberty.Joy, one of the main characters who embodies Riley’s emotions, shrugs it off.“Things couldn’t be better!” Joy says. “After all, Riley’s 12 now. What could happen?”The answer has finally arrived, nearly a decade later, in the sequel “Inside Out 2.” Riley is now a teenager attending a three-day hockey camp as new, more complex feelings take root in her mind.There’s Embarrassment, a lumbering fellow who unsuccessfully attempts to hide in his hoodie; the noodle-like Ennui, who lounges listlessly on a couch; and Envy, with her wide, longing eyes.But it is Anxiety who takes center stage, entering Riley’s mind with literal baggage (no less than six suitcases).“OK, how can I help?” she asks. “I can take notes, get coffee, manage your calendar, walk your dog, carry your things — watch you sleep?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Ultraman: Rising’ Review: Bringing Up Beastie

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      A superhero raises a baby monster in this animated film. But the action is dragged down by talky sequences about parental responsibility.The lead of “Ultraman: Rising” sure looks like Japan’s iconic red and silver superhero, but fans might have to squint. First introduced in a 1966 TV show about an alien who crashed to Earth, Ultraman is the brainchild of Eiji Tsuburaya, the prolific pop culture titan who also had a talon in the creation of Godzilla and Mothra. Working with Netflix to boost the monster fighter’s international profile, the director Shannon Tindle, who wrote the screenplay with Marc Haimes, puts a too-cute twist on the character, transforming the kaiju brawler into a kaiju father when Ultraman is tasked to raise a 20-foot infant. Baby Gigantron is too big for diapers — and the gases she leaks evacuate city blocks.Ultraman has as many identities as he has film and TV spinoffs, approximately 130 and counting. Here, for targeted cross-cultural appeal, he’s a Japanese American baseball player named Ken Sato (voiced by Christopher Sean) who transfers from the Los Angeles Dodgers to Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants as cover for inheriting the Ultraman mantle from his estranged father, Professor Sato (Gedde Watanabe).The liveliest bits involve a Lois Lane-esque sportswriter named Ami (Julia Harriman) who is unimpressed by this swaggering, Yank-inflected jock who calls everyone “bro.” Yet, the energetic, manga-stylized scenes of bat-swinging and fist-flinging are given short shrift in favor of talky, draggy sequences about parental responsibility that cut from one conversation about exhaustion and sacrifice to another. If Ultraman wants to conquer the world, he’ll have to try something livelier than a cartoon that looks like a kids movie but lurches about like a saccharine family drama.Ultraman: RisingRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Inside Out 2’ Review: A Charming Sequel to the 2015 Hit

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      Anxiety meets Joy in Pixar’s eager, predictably charming sequel to its innovative 2015 hit. Sadness is still around, too, as are Fear and Disgust.When a dumpling of an old lady toddles into the animated charmer “Inside Out 2,” she is quickly shooed away by some other characters. Wearing rose-tinted glasses, she has twinkling eyes and a helmet of white hair. Her name is Nostalgia, and those who wave her off — Joy and Sadness included — tell her it’s too soon for her to show up. I guess that they’ve never seen a Pixar movie, much less “Inside Out,” a wistful conceptual dazzler about a girl that is also a testament to one of the pleasures of movies: the engagement of our emotions.If you’ve seen “Inside Out” (2015), your tear ducts will already be primed for the sequel. The original movie centers on the life of Riley, a cute, predictably spunky if otherwise decidedly ordinary 11-year-old. What distinguishes Riley is that her inner workings are represented as an elaborate realm with characters who embody her basic emotions. For much of her life, those emotions have been orchestrated by Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), a barefoot, manic pixie. Once Riley’s parents move the family to a new city, though, Sadness (Phyllis Smith) steps up, and our girl spirals into depression. This being the wonderful world of Pixar, the emotions eventually find a new harmonious balance, and Riley again becomes a happy child.When “Inside Out 2” opens, Joy is still running the show with Sadness, Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira) inside a bright tower called headquarters. It’s here, in the hub of Riley’s mind — an ingeniously detailed, labyrinthine expanse that’s part carnival, part industrial zone — that they monitor her on an enormous oval screen, as if they were parked behind her eyes. They track, manage and sometimes disrupt her thinking and actions, at times by working a control console, which looks like a sound mixing board and grows more complex as she ages. By the time the first movie ends, a mysterious new button labeled “puberty” has materialized on the console; soon after the sequel opens, that button has turned into a shrieking red alarm.Puberty unleashes trouble for Riley (Kensington Tallman) in “Inside Out 2,” some of it very poignant, most of it unsurprising. It’s been almost a decade since the first movie was released, but film time is magical and shortly after the story opens, Riley is blowing out the candles on her 13th birthday cake with metal braces on her teeth and a stubborn pimple on her chin. New emotions soon enter headed by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), a carrot-colored sprite with jumpy eyebrows and excitable hair. Not long afterward, Anxiety takes command both of the console and of Riley, with help from Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and my favorite, the studiously weary, French-accented Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos).Directed by Kelsey Mann, this smooth, streamlined sequel largely focuses on Riley’s nerve-jangling (and strictly PG) interlude at a girls’ hockey camp, an episode that separates her from her parents while bringing her new friends, feelings and choices. (Mann came up with the story with Meg LeFauve, who wrote the screenplay with Dave Holstein.) As in the first movie, the story restlessly shifts between what happens inside Riley’s head and what happens as she navigates the world. Her new emotions find her worrying, grousing, blushing and feigning indifference, and while Joy and the rest of the older emotions are humorously waylaid at times, you can always feel the filmmakers leading Riley toward emotional wellness.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tribeca Festival: ‘Mars’ Provides Refuge for its Writers

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      The comedy group The Whitest Kids U’ Know completed the project dealing with the loss of one of its founding members, Trevor Moore, who died in 2021.The animated film “Mars” — about a ragtag group of civilians visiting the red planet on a trip financed by a billionaire with an asteroid-sized ego — will premiere Thursday at the Tribeca Festival. It will mark the end to a bittersweet journey for the film’s writers that began more than a decade ago.“Mars” was written as a live-action film in 2012 by Trevor Moore, Zach Cregger and Sam Brown, the founders of the comedy group The Whitest Kids U’ Know. They met thanks to living in the same dormitory at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where they performed lots of gigs. From there came tours of the city’s comedy clubs and a television show that ran from 2007 to 2011.During the Covid-19 pandemic, they decided animation was the best way forward for the feature and opted to crowdfund the film. But in August 2021, tragedy struck when Moore died in an accident.“It did seem kind of unfathomable to complete this movie without him,” Cregger said during a recent video interview with Brown and Timmy Williams, who is also in the comedy group. They, Darren Trumeter (the fifth member of the group), and Moore, who completed his recordings before the accident, provide the voices for all the characters in “Mars.”“Trevor’s death changed everything,” Cregger said. Before Moore died, the group was having regular interactions with fans on Twitch and other social media platforms, which helped fuel interest in “Mars.” Continuing that was difficult. “When he died, it kind of became like, this hurts every time,” Cregger said. But they felt a responsibility to their fans, who helped fund the film, to complete the project.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle’ Review: Drama on the Court

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      This film extends the story told in an anime series about high school volleyball teams.For someone unfamiliar with “Haikyu!!,” the anime adaptation of a slice-of-life manga about a high school volleyball team, the premise may seem a bit niche. And yet the series, which continues in the form of the film “Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle,” has always excelled at making its wholesome sports drama accessible to every kind of audience — especially those who may not know anything about volleyball.The series focuses on Shoyo Hinata, a short teenager who dreams of becoming a volleyball champion like his idol, a small-statured ace called the Little Giant. He enrolls at the Little Giant’s former high school, Karasuno, and joins the volleyball team with his middle school nemesis, Tobio Kageyama. The two boys form a superhuman pair that helps revitalize the team and offers Karasuno the opportunity to return to its former glory.Directed by Susumu Mitsunaka, “The Dumpster Battle,” which feels like more of an extended episode than a stand-alone film, picks up during Karasuno’s heated competition at the spring nationals. They are set to go against Nekoma, another team with which they’ve been caught for years in a friendly rivalry. The match takes up the entire movie, with flashbacks and series callbacks fully contextualizing the relationships and stakes at work in the game.As in every match in the series, the Dumpster Battle uses imaginative visual metaphors to depict each team’s offensive and defensive strategies and overall playing philosophies. Karasuno is the crow, with Hinata’s awe-inspiring leaps above the court represented by a crow making an airborne attack. Nekoma is the cat, grounded with solid defense, stalking and manipulating its prey until it can find the right moment to clip the crow’s feathers. And both of these underdog squads want to earn respect and fight their way out of the dumpster.Leading Nekoma is Kenma Kozume, an apathetic teen with no stamina and little athletic prowess who would rather play video games than volleyball. But Kenma, whom Hinata befriended at a training camp earlier in the series, is also Nekoma’s mastermind, meticulously planning their attacks while his teammates make up for the athleticism he lacks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Robot Dreams’ Review: A Friendship That Is Far From Mechanical

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      This animated film from Pablo Berger is a silent wonder that says everything about love.Decades after Philip K. Dick asked if androids dreamed of electric sheep, we have an answer. This android — one of two nameless leads in the Oscar-nominated charmer “Robot Dreams” — envisions a small, lonely dog in his third-floor walk-up, microwaving a depressing dinner for one. Set in 1980s Manhattan, Pablo Berger’s all-ages, wordless wonder of a cartoon kicks into gear when the mutt assembles a self-aware, spaghetti-limbed robot companion ordered from an infomercial. You might be thinking that sentient artificial intelligence didn’t exist 40 years ago, and you’d be right. But dogs don’t rent apartments, either.This fanciful vision of New York is populated by animals: sporty ducks, punk rock monkeys, buffalo mail carriers, penguins shouldering boomboxes, and a disproportionate number of llamas. Mechanical beings are sparse and some creatures consider them lower in status, a brutal development when our robot’s relationship with his dog begins to break down. But Berger isn’t interested in science fiction. He’s made a buddy film that’s as relatable as two friends bonding over slices of pizza (but the robot eats the plate, too).Berger, who also adapted the screenplay, expands Sara Varon’s short graphic novel of the same name into a minor epic. To describe the plot — a dog and a robot are best friends, until they aren’t — the film sounds pitifully small. But the world inside it feels huge, a sprawling landscape of joy and heartbreak and mixed emotions and stinging dead ends.It’s hard to make out the dog and robot’s attachment. Is it platonic? Romantic? Does the dog consider himself the robot’s partner or his owner? The leads remain resolutely mute. In their silence, we fill their relationship with our own memories of loved ones, present and past: partners, best friends, siblings, even long-lost pets. The music steers the mood, a mix of Alfonso de Vilallonga’s jazzy score and a track by Earth, Wind & Fire that’s heard in endless permutations from the full original to a stripped-down, jaunty whistle, like that gag about a butcher who uses everything but the oink.The film is structured as a series of vignettes. Some are designed to break your heart; others exist just because. In a low moment, the robot imagines himself taking the place of the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz,” which he and the dog rented on VHS from Kim’s Video. His dreamscape, however, squeezes the Empire State Building and the twin towers into Emerald City’s skyline, and on his yellow brick stroll there, he’s engulfed by giant, dancing flowers who stomp their stems at him in choreography that’s Busby Berkeley by way of Riverdance.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Richard Sherman, Songwriter of Many Spoonfuls of Sugar, Dies at 95

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      He and his brother, Robert, teamed up to write the songs for “Mary Poppins” and other Disney classics. They also gave the world “It’s a Small World (After All).”Richard M. Sherman, the younger brother in a songwriting team that won two Oscars and two Grammys, brought Disney movies to musical life and gave the world numbers like “A Spoonful of Sugar,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” and the ubiquitous, multiply translated “It’s a Small World (After All),” died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 95.The death, in a hospital, was announced by the Walt Disney Company.The careers of the Shermans — Richard and Robert — were inextricably linked with Walt Disney. Their Academy Awards were for “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” a chimney sweep’s alternately cheerful and plaintive anthem from “Mary Poppins” (1964), and for the film’s score. Their Grammy Awards were for “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too,” shared in 1975 for best recording for children, and the “Mary Poppins” score.“It’s a Small World” was written for the Disney theme-park ride of the same name. The song plays as guests in boats pass among 240 dolls of many nations with identical faces — tiny can-can and folk dancers, mermaids and mariachi bands — plus Big Ben, the Taj Mahal and grinning farm animals.“People want to kiss us or kill us,” Richard Sherman said in a 2011 video interview about the song, which he said was “the biggest hit of the World’s Fair,” where it was introduced in 1964.The Shermans brought a musical-theater sensibility to movie songwriting. The question was never which came first, the music or the words; what came first was the idea.The framework of “Mary Poppins” did not exist until the Shermans got their hands on P.L. Travers’s beloved books about a magical nanny, a series of adventures in 1930s London with no discernible conflict or resolution. In the movie, the problem is the children’s behavior, brought on by a neglectful father. It also seemed like bad taste to employ live-in servants during hard economic times, so they moved the Banks family to the Edwardian era.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More