Is Disney’s ‘Inside Out 2’ right when it comes to emotions?

The human mind is like a telescope: perfect for observing everything but itself. Quantum physics is grade school homework compared to deciphering the difficulty of asking out a girl who is interested in you — scientists would pool their Nobel Prize money for a way to crack that particular nut.

To put it another way, every generation has its own metaphor to explain why, despite all our intelligence, we remain such hot messes. Humors, icebergs, Greek kings, even a ridiculous thing called “neurons.” Today’s AI experts insist that the brain is a computer, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the brain is still much better at recognizing stop signs in a photo.

Pixar’s latest creation, “Inside Out 2,” has found its own symbol of psyche relevant to our times: the working committee.

Like the 2015 original, “Inside Out 2” (in theaters June 14) portrays each person as controlled by five personified emotions—joy, sadness, anger, disgust and fear—that operate from a command center in the brain. Looking through your eyes, they determine the appropriate emotional response and catalog memories of those experiences. Those memories form a tree like the sense of Self, the manifestation of a person’s belief system.

This brain belongs to Riley, a 13-year-old girl who recently moved to San Francisco from Minnesota. Like most of our friends from the land of Ten Thousand Lakes, Riley loves hockey and is off to training camp. Riley is also just entering puberty, translated here as a siren blaring and contractors swarming in and making a mess during construction. (A quick side note to thank the Pixar team for their foresight in making Riley a girl. An exploration of male puberty would be a short film, and a horror movie at that.)

This is already a delicate and smelly time, but to make matters worse, Riley discovers that her new friends won’t be going to high school with her next year. What started as a mere hockey camp is now an audition for new friends and a new identity. Through these cracks, muscles form a new team of emotions: envy, shame, boredom, all along the lines of fear.

Anxiety, while understandably caffeinated, seems to get better results than Joy, giving her the courage to throw the original emotions and Riley’s sense of self-worth out the window. Those emotions attempt to return to HQ and restore the original Riley, before Anxiety builds a whole new one based on despair and self-loathing.

It’s all well orchestrated. After all, the Pixar machine is too well-oiled by now to turn out a bad product. The cacophony of snorting I heard in the theater suggests that if you called your parents in the car driving home after the last movie, you’ll call them again. But as Joy herself says in the film, the older you get, the less you need her.

I have to confess that I’ve always had a problem with the central premise of “Inside Out,” which suggests that we’re merely puppets of our own emotions, the governing force rather than a taste. When the Self spins so wildly based on how you’re feeling at the moment, there’s not much to go on. We’ve all encountered people who are ruled entirely by their emotions — usually in sandboxes or in line for Pixar movies. Riley is young, but she’s no toddler, and while we can’t choose how we feel, the lesson should be how to control those emotions, not just ride the wave. (Such suppression might give me an aneurysm at 35, but my emotions will go down with my ship, knowing that I was the captain.)

Besides, none of us feel one distilled emotion at a time. How often do we feel ashamed of our jealousy, or disgusted by our anger, or maybe just sad about everything. Too often, emotions are a toxic tag team instead of a single grudge match.

As Steve Larkin of the Washington Review of Books noted in his review of “Inside Out 2,” the new emotions that come with adolescence aren’t new at all, and they don’t signal heightened maturity. St. Augustine proved that, too his stolen pears: children are complicated in their simplicity. Hormones don’t introduce children to the concept of envy, the snake got there first.

But the fatal flaw of “Inside Out 2” is how it tries to rehash the structure that worked so well in the first film without understanding why that was so. (I don’t care about spoilers, take it from Anger.) The first “Inside Out” was about reconciling joy and sadness, with the former teaching us that a healthy person needs the latter to cope with life. Happiness is nothing without sadness, and pretending sadness doesn’t exist is the quickest way to create a wreck.

“Inside Out 2” tries to replicate that journey with Anxiety, despite nearly sending Riley off the deep end again. Fear is forgiven and given a place in the council of emotions, even her own special armchair when she gets too frantic. But fear is not a core emotion. It is a disease, a disordered response to our helplessness. Fear is not a moral failing, and that thinking is something else permutation from his grasp. Yet it remains an inadequate response to the problem at hand, one that deserves more of a trap door than a seat at the table.

Fear lies to us, not by saying there aren’t any problems, but by suggesting it can keep them under control. The worse you feel, the more you cling to the illusion—like a sick cycle of job security. In an increasingly uncertain world, true serenity comes not from hiding or cooperating with those fears, but from accepting that it’s not just you. To think otherwise is vanity, a character I’m sure will appear in “Inside Out 3.”