Inside Out Changed the Way I Looked at Sadness. The Sequel Could Do the Same for Another Emotion. (2024)

This article contains spoilers for Inside Out 2.

Every parent in America knows that the teenagers are not OK. The teen mental health crisis is overwhelming schools and frightening families. It’s “the defining public health crisis of our time,” says the U.S. surgeon general.

Into this environment sails Inside Out 2. The sequel follows the original movie’s Riley into teenagerhood, and introduces a new emotion to battle Joy for supremacy in the emotional “headquarters” of her brain: Anxiety. As a parent whose own teen has struggled with anxiety, I was curious (well, anxious) to see how Pixar would handle a plot point that touches my family’s life directly—and one that, over the course of the movie’s yearslong development, has turned into something of a hot-button issue nationwide. The first Inside Out’s eye-opening depiction of the importance of sadness to children (and parents) truly changed the way I related to my kids back in 2015. But did I, and other parents of children with anxiety, really want to see this disorder given the full Disney treatment—and portrayed as a goofy orange creature with a huge, Muppety mouth?

Anxiety, voiced by Maya Hawke, may be the movie’s antagonist, but she’s presented, at first, as a solution to Riley’s teenage woes. She plans for the future, she says. She differentiates herself from Fear by noting, “He keeps Riley safe from things she can see. My job is to keep her safe from things she can’t see.” As Riley navigates the charged environment of a competitive sports camp, trying to impress the coach and older players while dealing with the news that her best friends will be going to a different high school in the fall, Anxiety takes over the central console of Riley’s brain with a plan designed to make her succeed.

The new movie further complicates the lore of headquarters, even beyond the new emotions that join Anxiety with the onset of puberty: Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui. Certain memories are now transported deep into the subconscious, where they sprout beliefs—long threads representing credos like “I’m a good friend” or “I am a hard worker” that weave together into Riley’s “sense of self,” a glowing, growing tangle that Joy tends lovingly.
“I’m a good person,” it says—until Anxiety breaks it and sends it far into the back of the mind. Riley needs to become an entirely different person, Anxiety claims, to get through the challenge of hockey camp. When Joy (Amy Poehler) and the other original emotions protest, she banishes them as well. “OK, Riley,” Anxiety says, in a moment that will elicit bitter laughter from many parents of teens: “Let’s change everything about you.”

While for Joy and those familiar emotions, the plot of the movie is their quest to return to headquarters with Riley’s abandoned sense of self, for Riley, the plot of the movie is anxiety’s steady takeover of her life. At first, it manifests in some positive ways: She gets up at the crack of dawn to practice solo on the ice. But then, when she worries that her best friends’ move to another school will leave her alone, she abandons those best friends to ingratiate herself with the older players. She finds herself doing things she once would never have thought of, including breaking into the coach’s office.

Late the night before a big scrimmage, Anxiety orders the staff that make up Riley’s imagination to draw up terrible possible scenarios for the next day. She thinks she’s helping Riley avoid future discomfort, but really she’s just keeping her awake all night, catastrophizing wildly. What if she trips and falls? What if her old friends play better than her? What if she does something uncool? I recognized a kid spinning out, unable to calm herself down because her imagination is literally working overtime.

New beliefs sprout from Riley’s subconscious, all anxiety-driven: “If I’m good at hockey, I’ll have friends.” “If I make the high school team, I won’t be lonely.” Anxiety thinks these new beliefs will braid together to form a new, better sense of self for Riley, but is crestfallen when, instead, they yield only a brutal self-critique that will sound upsettingly familiar to some parents: “I’m not good enough.” Stranded in the hinterlands of Riley’s mind, Joy bemoans her inability to control Riley’s anxiety. “Maybe I can’t,” she says despondently. “Maybe when you grow up you feel less joy.”

As with the first movie, Pixar consulted with a children’s mental health professional, in this case psychologist Lisa Damour, the author of Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls. “There’s healthy and also unhealthy anxiety,” Damour told me. “Anxiety is a natural and unavoidable aspect of life. It’s there to alert us to potential threats, and to help us protect ourselves. In this way it serves as a valuable—in fact, indispensable—emotion.” She has called Inside Out 2 a “gift” to parents of teens. I know she’s on Pixar’s payroll, but I’m inclined to agree, in large part because of the way Inside Out 2 resolves Anxiety’s takeover of Riley’s brain.

From the beginning, Anxiety’s been a little twitchy—she talks fast, moves fast, and acts fast—but the pressure of the scrimmage (which Anxiety believes will determine not only whether Riley makes the team, but, in turn, Riley’s entire future) sends both of them over the edge. The panic attack Riley suffers at the film’s climax is harrowing to watch, especially for anyone who’s ever experienced one of their own—or seen their child deal with a severe emotional spiral. Inside Riley’s head, Anxiety spins around the console so fast she creates a whirlwind, pushing buttons so fast she’s a blur. “That maps so cleanly onto what people describe when they have panic attacks,” Damour said. “That they feel cut off from themselves, not real, not in touch with the world around them anymore.” When Joy finally pries the new emotion’s hands from the controls, Anxiety is bereft: “I was just trying to protect her!”

Neither Riley’s new sense of self (“I’m not good enough”) nor Riley’s old one (“I’m a good person”) can protect her from what she’s feeling. Her panic attack only resolves when Joy and Anxiety let a new sense of self grow, one that encompasses both Riley’s positive self-beliefs and her negative ones. Riley is a good friend, and sometimes she’s cruel. Riley is honest, and sometimes she does the wrong thing. To move toward a healthy adulthood, Inside Out 2 argues, is to acknowledge a complex multiplicity of self-perceptions that might contradict one another. What matters is not that you tell yourself a simple story about who you are, suppressing all evidence to the contrary, but that you see yourself clearly, flaws and all. “That’s what we try to achieve in clinical settings,” said Damour: “to help people acknowledge their shortcomings while still feeling that they’re perfectly worthy and valuable human beings.” Given a moment of calm, Riley chooses joy—chooses Joy, of all the emotions in headquarters—and skates back out onto the ice.

In the aftermath, we see Riley’s emotions all working together cooperatively. Joy runs the show, but Anxiety’s there, too—she just has a special chair to sit in to help her calm down. What I loved most about Inside Out 2, a movie that’s warmhearted and entertaining if not quite up to the revelatory standards of its predecessor, is its portrayal of Anxiety as not a villain but a character who believes herself to be a protector. Anxiety is useful to Riley in small doses—when she reminds everyone that Riley needs to study for a test, for example—just as all the new “negative” emotions can be useful at times. (Even Ennui helps her exhibit the requisite chill in front of the star older player she idolizes.) But they must live in balance.

That’s a great lesson for kids (and parents) to learn, if they can untangle the movie’s complex cosmology. Not every negative emotion represents a pathology, something requiring treatment. “Psychologists only consider anxiety to be pathological if it’s way out of proportion to any actual threat,” Damour told me. (I tried to imagine a version of Inside Out that put Riley on an SSRI—Anxiety tucked under a weighted blanket?) Yes, anxiety is frightening, and when it gets out of control, damaging. But Damour hopes the movie will help parents understand the role that even uncomfortable emotions play in healthy development. “An unintended consequence of recognizing the teen mental health crisis is that it has left teens and their parents more uneasy than they need to be about the ups and downs that come with being a teenager,” she said. Anxiety might not be pleasant, but as Inside Out 2 will remind both teenagers and their parents, that doesn’t make it any less essential a part of growing up.