Falling in love with Anxiety

Image adapted by Riley Wong.

Spoilers for Inside Out 2 ahead!

I’m an anxious person. So watching the portrayal of an anxiety attack in 2024’s highest-grossing movie, Pixar’s Inside Out 2, made rivulets stream from my eyes. Even a year later, I get moved just thinking about the movie, that scene in particular having a chokehold on me.

In the movie’s climax, Anxiety causes a nearly impenetrable whirlwind in our protagonist Riley’s mind.

Animated movies have come a long way: once a genre deemed to cater primarily to children, they have since grown to represent more complex and mature themes. And as we mature, we become more vulnerable, our state of mind included. Another computer-animated film that realistically and squarely depicts a panic/anxiety attack is Dreamwork’s Puss In Boots: A Last Wish (2022), where Puss, engulfed with fear, starts breathing heavily while momentarily immobilised. While A Last Wish represents Puss’s external symptoms and signs, Inside Out 2 focuses on the invisible internal mechanisms, the intricate chain of causes and effects that trigger Riley’s breakdown.

This fantastical, ambitious look into the inner workings of the most complex faculties of humans – our mind and emotions – is what made the first Inside Out, released a decade ago in 2015, so creative and memorable. Here, the mind is imagined as a physical space that emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear) and other brain “workers” inhabit and interact with. In the sequel set two years later, we return to the rich and colourful mental world of Riley, now going through a critical, disruptive, terrifying stage of any adolescent’s life: puberty. The psychic reality of Riley shifts, literally, as shortly into the film, workers start wreaking havoc and tearing down the “headquarters” of Riley’s mind in order to create room for new emotions. We’re then introduced to Envy, Embarrassment, Ennui and most importantly, Anxiety – the film’s antithesis to Joy. While Joy adopts a happy-go-lucky, anything-goes attitude for Riley’s life, Anxiety is a worrywart, insistent on preempting, projecting and planning for all possible outcomes – particularly the negative ones.

Anxiety concocts a brainstorm: a literal storm with ideas as precipitation — one of the clever visual puns in the movie.

The biggest strength of this movie is its perceptiveness, materialising the nebulous, elusive concepts of consciousness and helps us understand, if not at least approach, our feelings, thoughts and perceptions. The plot of this instalment largely follows that of the first: the emotions grapple with drastic changes to Riley’s mental environment, and in the end learn not to resist but to embrace them. Yet, it feels organically expansionary, as we encounter new and intriguing challenges, such as emotions being (literally) bottled up, sar-chasms, brain-storms and the central complication: Anxiety’s relentless grip on the mind.

Accepting Anxiety

Anxiety manifests in Inside Out 2 as a “Disney-fied” caricature that’s too adorable to dislike, even when she exiles the original five emotions and rearranges Riley’s mind. I found her little idiosyncratic antics particularly charming: from chugging five energy drinks at once, to always wrapping her hands around each other in nervous anticipation. Apart from being a cutie patootie, she’s also portrayed as a realistic character with social intelligence and sophistication, helping Riley remember to practice for her hockey game and navigate tricky teenage situations – even if she sometimes misinterprets social cues or reacts disproportionately. She’s ambitious but scrupulous to a fault; self-aware, but insecure; resourceful, but self-destructive. Any perfectionist would instantly relate to her character and decisions. Most importantly, even though Anxiety ends up temporarily weaponising Riley’s imagination and augmenting her moral compass, the movie highlights how Anxiety and Joy are two sides of the same coin: they both want the best for Riley. In other words, Anxiety is represented as an antagonist, but not a villain in this story.

Inside Out 2 complicates the emotions by introducing another separately functioning, but still mutually constitutive dimension, the Sense of Self: Riley’s complex belief system constructed by formative memories, originally cherry-picked by Joy herself. At the start of the movie, we see Joy take an “elevator” down to the depths of Riley’s mind and place a memory orb in a pool; it then morphs into a strand of light that sprouts upwards like the roots of a tree — literally grounding Riley as a person. At first, this sense of self was articulated by a singular, categorically positive statement: “I’m a good person.”

Riley’s Belief System, the roots to her Sense of Self.

However, once Anxiety takes the reins of Riley’s mind, she does the same, selecting anxiety-filled moments to form a new Sense of Self: “I’m not good enough.” Unlike the smooth, blue strands planted by Joy, Anxiety’s are orange and jagged, indicating unstable and harmful beliefs. These beliefs are also largely conditional (“I’d make friends if I become a Fire Hawk”), demonstrating how anxiety can sometimes limit our field of vision and blind us to alternative courses of action. Even though Anxiety’s intention was to push Riley to be a better version of herself, she instead imbued her with overwhelming self-doubt, which culminated in an anxiety attack.

After much struggle, Joy is able to replant the original “I’m a good person” Sense of Self, yet Riley’s panic doesn’t subside. In what I call the ✨Pixar twist ✨ (the protagonist self-reflexively learns from their journey and changes their original goal), Joy has the epiphany that she’s also been limiting who Riley is, and that just like Anxiety, she’s been distorting how Riley views herself and needs to forgo some of her control over Riley. She then allows for a third Sense of Self to organically grow from all of Riley’s memories; this sense of self can no longer be contained within a single statement, but is composed of a nuanced, varying, holistic perspective of herself. Finally, all the emotions are embraced, literally. A trail of yellow dust appears and flows to the mind console, and Sadness exclaims, “Joy, Riley wants you” – a direct reversal of Joy’s remark in the first instalment, “Sadness, Riley needs you.” Here, Riley has matured to know what she’s feeling, and has the skill to better express her emotions.

Riley embraces all her emotions, and the emotions embrace Riley.

In the end, the emotions do not axe the role of Anxiety, but rather, accept her time and place in Riley’s life, as seen when Anxiety informs everyone that she has to study for a Spanish test, while letting her relax in the distance when her task isn’t up. Psychology Today writes that “[t]his is a smart behavioral intervention tool — use the anxiety and don’t pretend it’s not there, but instead give it a task and outlet.” The bigger message here is that all of our emotions exist for a purpose – we need to know how and when they serve us, and not act against us.

Bridging escape and reality

Clearly, the movie confronts several heavy issues, yet juggles them with the levity and humour expected of its genre. To thread between fantasy and reality in any mode of storytelling is a balancing act. Despite the majority of events in Inside Out 2 being situated in an imagined, surreal environment (of our own imagination), the movie could not be more grounded in reality, thanks largely to the assiduous research the filmmakers did in preparation for the story. “Even if kids don’t understand it the first time around, the film’s science is real, complicated, and correct,” Time writes. Not only does grounding the film in real-life neuroscience make its portrayal of emotions more compelling, it’s also the responsible thing to do, as audiences can take home its messages and apply them in their lives. For people dealing with anxiety, this movie can be a starting point for unpacking and healing.

In addition to consulting with professionals, the filmmakers also gained insights from the subjects of the movie themselves – teenagers. Dubbed Riley’s Crew, teenage girls aged 13 to 18 formed a focus group that watched screenings of the movie and provided feedback. Director Kelsey Mann explains, "I am not 13 years old anymore. There's still a 13-year-old in me. I can tap into that, but I can only tap into it so much, especially if you want everyone to relate to this.” Something can be said about the epistemological workings of producing Inside Out 2. The filmmakers are trying to access the subjectivities of a 13-year-old, yet philosophical trains of thought like solipsism posit that we can only truly understand our own minds. In fact, our entire reality exists in our individual minds – much like how Riley’s world is reflected in her complex, changing mental interiors. The importance of Riley’s Crew then becomes evident: no one knows — or can know — a subject’s situated standpoint like the subject themselves.

The result is far-reaching resonance with broad audiences, from teenagers like Riley herself to professional therapists. During the height of cultural interest in the movie, memes, videos and texts were found all over social media adding to a broad Inside Out 2 discourse. For example, the common experiences of Anxiety was articulated in Gen-Z’s usual self-deprecating humour, allowing teenagers to share an otherwise negative emotion in a lighthearted, relatable manner.

"Anxiety is so me."

Similarly, mental health influencers express their approval over how anxiety is depicted.

What the movie has done is thus render the mystified concepts of anxiety more accessible, and open up room for discourse on a topic that might otherwise still be socially stigmatised. And the conversation is ever-unfolding and expanding. Emotions generally grow in number and complexity: we start with personal ones in Inside Out; then more social ones in Inside Out 2 (embarrassment, for example, is an emotion that recognises and maintains group norms). Subsequently, the story could head in the direction of moral emotions, such as shame and compassion. As recent animated movies like The Last Wish and Inside Out 2 draw attention to previously more obfuscated mental health experiences, animation could be headed down a path of greater empathy — movies that understand and inspire understanding.