What Inside Out 2 Gets Right About Anxiety

A masterclass in a misunderstood emotion.

I saw Inside Out 2 with my family for Father’s Day. We all loved the first movie but were a bit skeptical about a sequel. Disney’s animation shop Pixar hasn’t exactly been firing bullseyes lately—Lightyear was far from buzz-worthy, and Turning Red almost landed them in the red—so this could either be a desperate attempt to recycle tired IP or a continuation of the original magic.

I am happy to announce that the movie far exceeded my expectations. Although it’s marketed as a kids’ movie, like other classic Pixar predecessors—Wall-E, Up, Finding Nemo—it operates on multiple levels, with colorful characters and silly jokes for the kids, and profound insights and clever humor for the grownups.

I laughed and cried numerous times—damn you, Pixar.

Anxiety steals the show

Without spoiling anything, let me quickly bring you up to speed: The 2015 Inside Out introduced us to Riley, an 11-year-old girl navigating the challenges of moving from Minnesota to San Francisco. Her actions are guided by five personified feelings: Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness.

In the sequel, Riley is now a pimply, moody 13-year-old going through puberty and experiencing a whole new slew of emotions, including Envy, Embarrassment, Sarcasm, and Ennui.

But it’s Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke) that’s the breakout star.

Readers of Small Talk will know that I’ve written thousands of words on this insidious topic and have battled Generalized Anxiety Disorder my whole life. I even tried to sell a book about my attempt to conquer anxiety. The book had a lot of interest but no offers, sending me into a spiral of more anxiety.

While I’ve thought way too much about anxiety, I never considered how it might look personified—or, in the case of Inside Out 2, animorphised.

Inside Out 2’s Anxiety is orange with a huge mouth, crooked teeth, and crazy hair that springs from the top of her skull like a geyser. She’s sweet and means well but also a bit unhinged. The kind of girl you invite to a party to liven things up but you wouldn’t want to share a car with for a long road trip.

Anxiety, according to the animators at Pixar, looks a lot like Animal from The Muppet Show— a fascinating choice since I used to own an Animal hand puppet with moveable eyebrows that I would bring to elementary school.

Who knew I was carrying my emotional baggage around with me on my wrist?

Unlike Animal, Anxiety is not supposed to be cool or sympathetic—she is the film’s antagonist. But she’s not a monster, either. She is supposed to be relatable and even a bit endearing.

Director Kelsey Mann told The New York Times that in early drafts of the script, she was too much of a villain.

“She wasn’t very likable. And I didn’t understand why she was doing what she was doing,” he said.

So they did more research, talked to some shrinks, and toned her down to be sweet and sincere. They also made her less cartoonish and more realistic.

The result is a nuanced character that mirrors real-life anxiety’s appeal and flaws. If Anxiety is really so repulsive, then why do so many people buy into what she’s selling? It’s exactly because Anxiety cares so much about Riley’s well-being that she has sway over her actions.

But Anxiety is also a control freak. She hates uncertainty, so she does everything possible to prevent worst-case scenarios from happening. Again, this is where Inside Out 2 totally nails it.

Warning: This is the part of the story where I share some spoilers from Inside Out 2, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, you might want to stop here.

Anxiety is a master planner

The elevator pitch for Inside Out 2 is that Riley attends a summer hockey camp, where she wants to impress the coach and older players while also navigating the news that her best friends will be going to a different high school in the fall.

Anxiety takes over the control of Riley’s frontal cortex to come up with a plan, banishing the old feelings to the back of the brain and replacing them with new feelings like Embarrassment, Envy, and Ennui.

The movie then launches into a hero’s journey: Will Riley’s old sense of self be replaced by a new set of beliefs that make her anxious and unhappy?

Early on, Anxiety explains that she’s different from Fear, saying, “He keeps Riley safe from things she can see. My job is to keep her safe from things she can’t see.”

This is a pitch-perfect encapsulation of anxiety. Anxious people live in the future. We are always planning ahead to mitigate against disaster.

This has its benefits. Since the caveman's days, anxiety has helped humans survive by alerting them to potential threats or terrible outcomes, like bears lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce.

Homo sapiens survived in part because we had strategies to avoid bloody outcomes. Other less-evolved creatures, now extinct most likely, just wandered out in the middle of a pasture without a care in the world, only to be ravaged again and again.

But anxious people also suffer from massive over-planning. We have active and vivid imaginations, which explains why so many creatives suffer from crippling anxiety. We can dream up elaborate scenarios so intricate and detailed that we can’t believe they’re not real.

In fact, sometimes the anxious person’s projected future is so believable that it leads us to behave in ways that inadvertently cause the event we most feared to happen—the classic self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes about anxiety:

I’m not anxious. I’m just right about everything that could go wrong

Anxiety attacks

In Inside Out 2, Anxiety commands a team of internal illustrators to fill Riley’s mind with a series of “projections” or imagined scenarios that influence her behavior. Riley starts to do things she once would never have done, like break into her coach’s office and abandon her friends.

Anxiety thinks she’s helping Riley avoid uncomfortable situations, and in some instances, she’s correct—but ultimately, she’s doing more harm than good. Riley begins to doubt herself, even hate herself. She doesn't know what’s wrong and what’s right. She is racked with feelings of envy, embarrassment, and confusion, with no inner compass to navigate her emotions.

Sounds a lot like being a 13-year-old—or me, on some really wonderful days.

The anxious projections come fast and furious, with Anxiety trying desperately to take control only to find herself lost in a whirlwind of chaos. Poor Riley soon finds herself in the midst of a full-fledged panic attack.

Mercifully, I’ve never had one of these myself, but I’ve read about them. And the filmmakers did a masterful job of capturing the breathless, near-out-of-body experience of being caught in the clutches of unchecked anxiety.

It’s not pretty, and I found myself doing some deep breathing exercises to calm my own nerves during this scene.

I won’t give away the entire movie, but let’s be honest, this is a Disney film. Riley isn’t going to have a complete mental breakdown and murder her parents. There’s a happy resolution, but again, to the filmmaker’s credit, it’s not black and white.

The banished feelings don’t return to the control room and kick out the new guys. They learn to work together collaboratively. Anxiety is given a comfortable chair to relax and sip a warm cup of Anxi-Tea.

The message is Anxiety will always be there in the background, protecting you from bears.

She just won’t play the main role.