“Inside Out 2”: Once More, with Feelings

The best-loved Pixar movies are often spoken of in terms of their tried-and-true emotional impact, how reliably they reduce us to quivering lips and choked-back sobs, year after year, rewatch after rewatch. Sometimes a single inspired sequence can do the trick: I’m no great admirer of “Up” (2009), but its famous opening montage of married life, which distills a couple’s decades-long romance into a few piercing minutes, touches chords of genuine sublimity. The estimable “Toy Story 3” (2010) offers two tear-sodden climaxes, the more audacious of which finds Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and their plasticine pals facing death by garbage incinerator. There are Pixar skeptics, of course, who wouldn’t mind tossing the studio’s entire collection onto the trash heap, dubious as they are of the company and its near-Pavlovian command of an audience’s tear ducts—perhaps more a feat of engineering than of art.