Pixar’s “Inside Out” was an Oscar-winning “return to form” for the pioneering CGI animation house back in 2015, a film that found heart in attempting to visualize the emotions that guide us through childhood and make us the adults we become.

And while there are changes in the cast and changes in directors for the sequel, “Inside Out 2,” there’s no change in direction of emphasis.

It’s even more about sentiment and emotions, finding, embracing and exposing our shared humanity as we experience “Joy,” “Sadness,” Anger” and now “Anxiety,” “Envy” and oh “Ennui.” And it’s about finding ways to send those emotions up that will resonate with most any adult watching it, and perhaps amuse and inform kids young enough to let their classmates know they’re still into “cartoons.”

Laughs are few and far between here, but a movie about the emotional RED ALERT that heralds puberty is bound to produce a few.

And a film about the age when your core values start to solidify who you are, the tests that come when friendships are pulled-apart and the emotional roller-coaster that could be in animated form ensure it’ll produce a tear or two. Or three.

Our little gal Riley, expressively-animated in all the shades of teen angst, with Kensington Tallman’s perfectly pitched to that, has just turned 13. The “simple” emotions — Sadness (Phyllis Smith of “The Office”), Fear (Tony Hale of “Veep”), Anger (stand-up comic Lewis Black), and lead-“childhood” emotion Joy (Amy Poehler) might not be enough to get her through high school.

They don’t figure this out until running up against what Riley feels as she’s peaking as a tween hockey player, thrilled and confident winning The Big Game with her Middle School besties, but suddenly getting the attention of older teens she’d love to impress on the high school squad, and their coach (Yvette Nicole Brown).

Mom (Diane Lane) and Dad (Kyle MacLachlan) might be proud. But Riley’s mood changes, crying jags, sarcastic eye rolls and snappishness tell those “old” emotions that there are new players in town.

Enter Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Embarassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and too-cool-for-all-this Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos). With high school star Valentina (Lilimar) and Riley’s possible high school Firehawks teammates to hang with at summer hockey camp, Anxiety figures she has the answers.

Out with the old friends, middle school ways, tastes and tried and true emotions. Before the ebbulient, impuslive Joy can blurt “Jiminy mother-loving toaster strudel!” Anxiety has taken control, exiled Joy and her team and put Riley on a path that might alter which memories she leans on that make up her core beliefs, changing who she is and how she thinks of herself.

Joy & Co. figure this coup cannot stand.

The visual genius of “Inside Out” and the similar “Soul” was in the animated ways the screenwriters and the animators visualize memories as tiny orbs, either kept where they can form a musical string that makes up Riley’s character, or pushed to “the back of the mind,” with the least helpful memories buried and best forgetten.

The old emotions must travel the Stream of Conciousness, cross the Sar-Chasm, transit Imagination Land, dodge The Rumor Mill, take part in the Parade of Future Careers and the like on their quest.

As suspense builds, with Riley facing tests of character with competing emotions pulling her in fraught “entire future depends on it” directions, we see the “Inside” struggle in her head and heart, and the ways Riley, “Out” there, acts on this psychic tug-of-war.

The best gags here might be a send-up of Riley’s former favorite singing educational kiddie TV character (goofily voiced by Ron Funches), a riff on “Blue’s Clues” and “Dora the Explorer,” and the flawed and embarassed about it but still haplessly “selfless” video game character (Young Yea) Riley used to crush on.

The lack of humor is felt.

I felt a bit let down by the indistinct voice-casting. Losing Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling takes a bit of edge off the soundtrack, and Hawke, given the plum part of Anxiety, is competent but colorless voicing the role. Ayo Edebiri doesn’t give us enough “Envy” to stand out, nor does Exarchopoulos take Ennui over the top, where she’d register as funny.

That’s the one give-away that writer turned diretor Kelsey Mann is making her feature debut. The voice performances don’t pop. Even Poehler seems a tad winded playing Miss Upbeat All the Time, Joy. That’s the director’s job, to get line-readings that sing.

Some of that can be traced to a script which treats the hunt for sentiment and emotional resonance on an equal level with cute ways of visualizing mental processes, and forgets the laughs.

But most of these “entertainment value” quibbles can be attributed to the original film that spawned it. That means a perfectly fine film suffers just enough when set side-by-side with the modern classic “Inside Out” to be worth mentioning.

Coming in second to one of Pixar’s very best is nothing to, you know, get all emotional about.

Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Amy Poehler, Lewis Black, Maya Hawke, Liza Lapira, Kensington Tallman, Tony Hale, Ayo Edebiri, Lilimar, Phyllis Smith, Yvette Nicole Brown, Kyle MacLachlan and Diane Lane.

Credits: Directed by Kelsey Mann, scripted by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein. A Disney/Pixar release.

Running time: 1:36