Inside Out 2, the sequel to Pixar’s incredibly clever spin on the voices inside our head, is heading to theaters on June 14. If you’re unfamiliar, the first film personified the emotions of a teenage girl named Riley as five colourful people in her noggin. The whole thing was built on taking concepts related to the mind, such as the “train of thought,” and interpreting them literally, but with great comedic flair and invention. The sequel expands upon this idea with new emotions and situations for Riley to deal with, and one new character sounds like a shoo-in for Kingdom Hearts IV.
Total Film (via GamesRadar) recently visited Pixar to see the first 30 minutes of the upcoming sequel and learn about some new characters and concepts it will introduce. For instance, there’s a vault in Riley’s inner world where she hides her deepest darkest secrets, and inside, among other things, is a video game character named Lance Slashblade who Riley had a crush on at a young age. And Riley, I’ll tell you now: that stuff might feel cringe to you as a teenager, but when you reach your 20s and 30s and become dangerously online, you will flaunt your thirst for fictional characters like the rest of us. Embrace it early.
Lance is described as a Final Fantasy-style swordsman who is prone to glitching, and was compared to Keanu Reeves’ Duke Caboom from Toy Story 4 as offering a similar brand of comic relief.
“When you’re a teenager, when you’re not dating, you start to develop crushes. And sometimes they’re not just on people; they’re on cartoon characters,” director Kelsey Mann told Total Film. “That’s speaking from experience! Or videogame characters. We thought, ‘Oh, that would be so great. Riley could have a crush on a video game character. We could animate that character like he’s from a videogame, and have that kind of look – that kind of pixelated look.’ We were like, ‘That could be really fun to do, and hopefully something that’s really relatable to a lot of people.’”
The Final Fantasy comparison is enough to get my mind racing over how this character could appear in Kingdom Hearts IV. The Pixar levels were some of the best parts of Kingdom Hearts III, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Sora might visit an Inside Out world in his next adventure. Lance would make a pretty sensible party member if Heartless started showing up in Riley’s mind. You can imagine scenes in which they start affecting Riley’s emotions and actions in the real world, and it’s up to Sora, Donald, Goofy, and Lance to help balance things out. It writes itself, y’all. Even if Sora doesn’t go to an Inside Out world, Lance could easily be a summon that helps our hero in battle.
At this point, it’s still unclear when Kingdom Hearts IV is coming out. Where will it rank compared to other games in the franchise? That remains to be seen, but more people will be playing the whole series soon, as almost all of its games are coming to Steam on June 13.
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