Inside Out 2: The Ups and Downs of Somewhere New -

If you’ve moved homes as a child, you’ll know it’s an adventure like no other. While the kids you’ve known since nursery misspell your name in your goodbye card, and your posters reveal tiny Blu Tack stains across your walls, your parents will whisper promises of a bigger room and new friends, desperately circumventing the fact that the only world you’ve ever known is about to turn, well… inside out. The release of Inside Out in 2015 came shortly after my family’s first move abroad. With its beaming colours and effortlessly moving score, children everywhere raced home that summer to imagine their own core memory islands. With the exception of broccoli on pizza, Inside Out distinctly mirrored the frightening highs and lows my sister and I had experienced in the last year. This gave me hope that ultimately, like Riley Anderson (Kaitlyn Dias), we too would build a new home just as wonderful as the first. 

Nine years later, the release of Inside Out 2, directed by Kelsey Mann, has arguably brought a balance of heartfelt humour and psychological depth just as well as its predecessor. The sequel follows Riley beginning puberty with her new emotion Anxiety (Maya Hawke) who believes a weekend at an ice hockey camp will determine Riley’s entire high school future. While technically “smaller” than her move across state borders, the transition to high school’s regimes whilst managing mood swings is a lifestyle change that most will agree is equally as distressing for Riley, as the original film’s move. Yes, we may be well past puberty now, but departing your treasured family home to live with strangers at university is by no means less bewildering to ‘Freshers’ than any Inside Out scenario. And so, despite now finding ourselves in the “security” of adulthood, the principal teachings of Pixar’s Inside Out 2 are far from beneath us.

Warning! (Spoilers from here.) When mistakenly nicknamed Michigan instead of Minnesota by ice hockey captain Valentina Ortiz (Lilimar Hernandez), Anxiety sways Riley to laugh it off in acceptance. Foreshadowing the loss of identity to come, Anxiety’s choice to “rename” Riley sparks a snowballing fake persona built on a foundation to impress others. Whether you’re hearing freakish new vocabulary at your first lecture, or watching that one flatmate cook flawlessly with a wok every night (when you’ve eaten pesto pasta four days in a row), the possibilities to feel out of place at university are relentless. You too, like Riley, may feel a build-up of anxiety beginning to question your self-worth.

To join the high school hockey team and avoid a future “where only the teachers know her name”, Riley lets Anxiety bottle up her other emotions in a jam jar and demolishes her ‘Sense of Self’ (an object representative of Riley’s core moral belief that she’s “a good person”). Having overtaken her mind, Anxiety pushes Riley to sarcastically estrange her favourite boy band, dye her hair to match the hockey clique, and break into the coach’s office to read a notebook on her chances of making the team, each due to the anxiety that she’s “not good enough”. While breaking and entering is a little melodramatic, any student will agree the fear of social and academic failure, and the subsequent pressure to make things “work” in your first term as a ‘Fresher’, can seem critical in determining the success of your young adult life. But, as our endearing protagonist demonstrates, reinventing your true ‘self’ based purely on what you think will impress others, or what you think you need to achieve specific goals, will only lead to a self-worthless whirlwind of frozen despair. 

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Riley’s anxiety attack – where do I even begin? If you’ve never faced an anxiety attack, this scene does a pretty damn good job of simulating one for you. From the vortex of tumbling orange, to the stark silence of paralysed thought, the scene drags you through the sensory overload of Riley’s mind. You, frozen with her, are forced into an experience just as petrifying as the one unfolding on screen. And while anxiety differs for everyone, the representation and validation of an often misunderstood and private experience (in a mainstream family film I might add) provides crucial insight for a wider understanding of mental health problems, particularly for the film’s younger audience.

Now despite the remarkable themes and imaginative wonderland the Inside Out franchise brings to the table, we must distinguish its universe of personified emotional and mental processes as a work of fiction. As much as we’d love a tiny Ayo Edebiri inside our heads, it’s perhaps more important that the millions of children who went to the cinema this summer understand we are the only ones responsible for our actions. Still, Inside Out 2 is a conceptual masterpiece; demonstrating that when we allow our Anxiety to take control, she will not only suppress other emotions but also deem them incapable of determining who we are. And so, as the franchise proves again, any lifestyle change is a rollercoaster of emotional ups and downs. Listening to our emotions as they come forward is essential to maintain our own ‘Sense of Self’. And finally, we must remember that like Sadness or Anxiety, there are no antagonistic emotions, they merely exist to help us through the leaps and bounds of ever-changing life.