Newsletter Entry #3 - Stylistic Analysis

To start, Inside Out 2 helps us visualize one of the biggest challenges of mental health, anxiety throughout the film. Inside Out 2 helps people visualize an anxiety attack through its animation, editing and sound design. Through the film's stylistic approach, Pixar ensures that viewers who have never experienced an anxiety attack can feel empathy for Riley while those that can relate see their experience reflected in the movie.

This is particularly seen through the anxiety attack scene near the conclusion of the film. This scene shows Riley during her hockey tryout experiencing an anxiety attack after getting put on the bench and feeling the pressure of not playing well enough build up. While not everyone may have experienced an anxiety attack in their life, Inside Out 2 ensures that through the editing, animation, and sound design of this scene, those who can relate feel for Riley, and those who can not, feel the intensity of someone experiencing an anxiety attack.

Through the editing of the scene, we get a deep sense of the panic Riley is feeling. Throughout the scene, we see jump cuts transitioning back and forth between inside Riley’s mind and the anxiety attack that is building up inside her mind. The scene begins with Anxiety frantically pressing buttons on the dashboard as the camera cuts to a close-up shot of Riley’s sweaty face squinting then panning down to her foot quickly tapping as she’s beginning to feel the effects of anxiety (0:01). The camera then cuts to her chest where we get a close up shot of Riley tightly clenching her jersey (0:05). The back and forth between Riley and her mind along with the tight shots helps us get a sense of actions that occur as anxiety builds up inside us. As I find the foot tapping when anxious to be quite relatable, Pixar wants to use these close-up shots to help us grasp the feeling of anxiousness.

Inside the mind of Riley, the animations Pixar uses continue to help us understand the mental health struggle portrayed in this scene. Here, Pixar shows Anxiety trying to control the dashboard quickly. They animate Anxiety to move around at quick speeds as a representation of thoughts spiraling. (0:14). The fantasized animation continues by showing Anxiety running around so fast that it creates a tornado surrounding the dashboard that makes a huge windstorm inside Riley’s mind (0:37). In addition the light in this scene showing inside Riley's mind being dim and far less colorful than the rest of the movie adds to Pixar’s attempt to set the tone of an anxiety attack. Pixar is aware that someone can't experience an actual tornado in their mind, however, the idea of a tornado helps us viewers to visualize how our minds are when anxiety takes control.

The sound design in this scene adds to the tension of not only the feeling of anxiety. During the scenes that show Riley having an anxiety attack, her actions are accompanied by a loud heartbeat and heavy breathing along with intense music playing in the background (0:23). However when it transitions to inside Riley's mind we get loud intense music with the sound of heavy wind blowing (0:40). These sounds help draw viewers into the mind of someone experiencing this and allows us to audibly feel the tension that comes with anxiety attacks. Furthermore, the voice of anxiety glitching along with the sound of her frantically tapping the dashboard, further shows the intensity of feeling anxiety (0:05).

This scene in Inside Out 2 allows viewers to visually and audibly visualize and relate to an anxiety attack, a moment when we are mentally weak. As mentioned previously, we don’t have a literal storm occurring in our mind but Inside Out 2 uses these elements to help us relate and visualize a real challenge faced during mental health battles. While for younger audiences this scene helps express the challenges of mental health when growing up while for adults, it encourages them to not only relate to the scene but also feel empathy for those that experienced these mental health challenges.