Newsletter Entry #2 - The Lede

Growing is something that everyone must face and doing so can be quite difficult. However, adolescence is typically the period where we begin to feel overwhelming emotions and find difficulties in managing and understanding them. For adults, it can be difficult to find someone or something that relates to their mental health struggles. While understanding that people experience many emotions, Pixar released Inside Out in 2015 which captured the attention of viewers across all ages through its deep discussion on emotions then, released Inside Out 2 which dove deeper by exploring mental health through the new character, Anxiety. However, what makes Inside Out 2 so significant is not only its way of showing commonly felt emotions but how its visual storytelling, narrative structure and audience engagement creates a larger discussion about mental health in the film industry.

The first installment of Inside Out caught the attention of millions of viewers across various age groups by personifying human emotions through Riley allowing viewers to embrace the feelings we experience. Inside Out 2 builds upon this as Riley is now a teenager and battles the challenges of adolescence. In the film, we are introduced to three more personified emotions, anxiety, envy, and embarrassment with anxiety being the one of the main parts of the film. Through many moments in the movie, we are shown how overwhelming moments affect us mentally which has allowed us to feel empathy and understand Riley based on the things we have experienced.

But Inside Out 2 sparks a larger cultural conversation about our mental health. In today's world, discussion about our mental health has become more important than ever and Inside Out 2 serves as a timely example of making our emotional battles, especially through tough times, normalized. In one scene of the film, anxiety takes over the dashboard in Riley's mind. It caused her to experience an anxiety attack during her hockey tryouts as she felt the pressure of wanting to perform at a high level. While as teens or even adults, we may not have felt pressure like her during a hockey tryout this makes me reflect on a time when I felt anxiety because of the pressure of wanting to perform well on a job interview.

Inside Out 2 also bridges the gap between the generation of today's children and adults. For children, this movie is an entertaining way for them to understand the feelings they experience. For adults, this movie not only serves as nostalgia from the first film that may have been released when they were younger but also as a perspective on parenting, the growth of themselves and their children, and even their emotional resilience. For example, I was 15 years old when the first Inside Out was released and was 20 when the second one came out. Throughout the movie I found myself comparing my own past experiences to the things Riley encountered such as her trying to fit in with a certain group of people.

Ultimately the exploration of Riley's emotions in Inside Out 2 not only serves its purpose of entertaining an audience but creates a larger topic of mental health struggles across all ages through its new character anxiety. But how exactly does Inside Out 2 compact this larger discussion into a 96 minute film? Primarily through the stylistic and narrative use followed by the audience engagement after the film's release. Through an analysis of these three aspects, we will explore how Inside Out 2 effectively uses particular styles in its animation, narrative to redefine conflict resolution and finally how the audience's reaction to these reflects its larger conversation of mental health across all ages.