Inside Out 2 — Easter Eggs & Hidden Details

Carved above the entrance to the Vault, where Riley's secrets are held, is ACXIII. Read the numerals and it resolves to A113, Pixar's CalArts classroom signature. Every other film in the catalogue hides the number by making it small or peripheral; this is the first time the studio has hidden it by encoding it, so that finding it and decoding it are two separate steps. Placing it over the door of the room that holds secrets is not subtle, but it is very funny.

During the sequence where Anxiety runs through every song Riley knows in order to look cool in front of Val — the scene that cracks open the Sar-Chasm — a memory orb bounces close to camera on the right of frame, and the memory inside it is Elio, the title character of Pixar's next feature. It is the studio's oldest trick performed at its highest difficulty: the orb is in motion, in the background, for a fraction of a second.

Lance Slashblade, the polygonal swordsman from a Final Fantasy-styled game Riley used to play, is rendered deliberately in the blocky idiom of an early-2000s console title. The detail worth pausing on is his weapon: the bright edges read as a blade, but the darker section of the sword is shaped as a hockey stick. Riley's imagination cannot build a fantasy hero without smuggling her actual life into him.

Pixar's recurring vehicle gets a placement that respects the film's own rules. Because nothing in Riley's mind exists unless Riley put it there, the truck cannot simply drive past — so it appears as a paper model sitting on a table to the left of Joy's bed area in the emotions' quarters. A thing Riley would have folded, in the room belonging to the parts of her that remember folding it.

During the parade of possible futures, the Luxo ball — the yellow ball with the blue stripe and red star from Luxo Jr. (1986) — passes on the right-hand side, and near it is a nod to Figment, the purple dragon mascot of Epcot's Journey Into Imagination. The first film hid Figment in a portrait in Imagination Land; the sequel brings him back, which turns a one-off cameo into a small running tradition of its own.

Pinned up in Riley's bedroom is a poster for *4\Town*, the boy band Mei and her friends build their entire lives around in Turning Red. It is the most naturally-placed cross-reference in the film: both stories are set among Bay Area teenagers in overlapping eras, so a Turning Red* band being a real band in Riley's world costs the film nothing at all.

In one of the film's quieter cameos, the pair of binoculars Joy passes to Sadness are Lenny, the wind-up binocular toy from Andy's room in Toy Story. Lenny is the toy who spends the original film doing exactly this job — being the one everybody looks through — so casting him as a prop rather than a character is a joke about a supporting role that has followed him for thirty years.

The sequel does a large amount of storytelling through set dressing that nobody points at. Family Island has visibly shrunk since the first film; Goofball Island looks unchanged; and Riley's old rainbow T-shirt, a fixture of the original, no longer fits her after a growth spurt. None of these are mentioned in dialogue. They are the film stating its thesis — that a thirteen-year-old is being structurally rebuilt — in the geography and the wardrobe before Anxiety ever arrives.