Releasing in summer of 2024, Disney/Pixar's "Inside Out 2" was another massive success for the studio. Though releasing almost a decade after the original, the story takes place two years later, with a thirteen-year-old Riley about to enter high school, and with the onset of puberty come a host of new emotions, including Anxiety, Ennui, Envy and Embarrassment, which sets her previously Joy-led equilibrium on its head. Directed by Kelsey Mann, the film matures the characters and psychological depth of the story, cleverly introducing the new elements at work within Riley's brain. The film received positive critical reviews, and became the biggest grossing film of its year, and one of the most successful animated films of all time, and received a host of awards nominations.
Taking over the reigns from Michael Giacchino is composer Andrea Datzman, a longtime collaborator of Giacchino's, having previously been a featured vocalist, orchestrator, additional music writer and score supervisor, as well as some solo writing for television. This score was her big break, and Datzman rises to the occasion admirably. The score references the themes and tone of the original score, but also pushes into new territory. To reflect Riley's entry to her teenage years, Datzman brings a grungier, more punk-rock aesthetic, especially for the scenes dealing with Riley's hockey team. In addition a few new themes are introduced, including a jittery string theme for Anxiety, and a malleable and heartfelt theme for Riley's friendships and developing sense of self. Overall a successful sequel score that continues the established sound, but isn't afraid to push it in new directions, while still maintaining plenty of zany color, energy and heart that the story requires.
Walt Disney Records released the score digitally, and a later vinyl was released by Made by Mutant. I tend to work on more darker, dramatic fare as my go-to, so it's fun to get to play with lighter material for a change and to complete matching covers to go along with the first score. The new film's marketing used a new font that suits the design well, but here I opted to keep the supporting fonts that I'd established for the film score. I present a total of fourteen new covers.
Covers 1-11 all use officially-sourced studio posters and artwork, while the final three covers feature commissioned custom artwork. Working with a diagonal title logo again created a headache in many instances. Many of these required the usual enhancement, paint-outs and some patching and shifting of minor components.
Cover 1 is my remake of the official album cover. That piece is extremely cramped, clearly by design, but uncomfortably so for me. My challenge here was to give it a bit more breathing room. The only issue was that there were two or three small variations on the image, with the characters with slightly different positions and spacing, but none where the characters were clean and complete. This meant that to expand the sides, I'd often have to overlap 1 or two additional pieces for each character (sometimes from alt version of this poster/wallpaper, and sometimes pulling from similar solo character posters) and then try to blend it all as smoothly as possible. I think it generally works ok, the only issue I have is that slight gap in the top middle. I wish I had all the characters completely isolated, in which case I could have spaced things out perfectly, but as it was, I had to struggle quite a bit to get things even to this point.
Covers 12 and 13 include artwork commissioned by the Poster Posse collective, illustrated by Christian Hova and Cryssy Cheung. I liked Cryssy's piece, as it's one of the few that features Riley in a major way. This one took a bit of work, as I painted out the title above Riley's head, then tried to re-space things for the format, including moving the side characters out a bit (and cloning out the margins a bit past that), shifting the bottom two characters (which required re-doing Riley's ice-skate on the right of the image), and then painting and blending everything back together.
Finally, Cover 14 features an original illustration by Nicole Gustafsson, used as the textless inside sleeve for the Made by Mutant vinyl edition, to which I merely added the title and credits to match the rest of the series.
Hope you enjoy!
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