What Inside Out 2 has to teach us about life

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I love Pixar & Disney. Really, P&D is the real OTP. Some of my favorite movies in the world are Coco, Soul, Inside Out (one day I might just need to do a piece on those movies). Anyways, when they said Inside Out 2 was coming out, introducing emotions like anxiety, you best be knowing I was doing cartwheels like Joy.

I went to watch it with my parents over this holiday weekend, and I freaking loved it.

I’ve always had a lot of love for P&D movies because they have this ability to visualize grave topics like anxiety and death with such humor, love, and levity. Like how Soul depicts “lost souls.” But there was one thing that I especially loved about Inside Out 2. And that was their depiction of suppressing emotions & bad memories. Spoiler alerts ahead…

At the beginning of the movie, we start off with Riley turning 13!!! She’s reached that ripe age when a young adult develops their first strong sense of self. Joy being joy, she creates a finicky mechanism to throw away all of Riley’s bad memories to the back of her mind, so she doesn’t have to remember all of her humiliating memories. TL;DR this ensures Riley believes she’s a good person with good values. But then enter puberty, introducing emotions like anxiety, embarrassment, ennui (boredom, TIL), and envy. Given that Riley is entering high school, this convinces anxiety to take over headquarter operations and change Riley’s entire sense of self just to be socially accepted. Anxiety quite literally tears Riley’s old self apart and throws it away using Joy’s mechanism like all the other bad memories.

The whole premise of the movie is around our core emotions (joy, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness) getting back to headquarters to ensure Riley regains her original sense of self. Joy especially doesn’t want Riley to lose herself to anxiety. But the ending is so beautiful because even though the core emotions are able to retrieve Riley’s OG sense of self, they realize that the old sense of self actually no longer serves Riley. She’s growing up, and these emotions of anxiety, embarrassment, envy, ennui? They’re here to stay. This is a bittersweet acceptance that comes as we grow up. Similar to how joy can only exist with sadness in the first movie, what we call “good emotions” can’t exist without the “bad”. So there needs to be a new version of self, which requires looking at the good and bad from the past.

Spoiler alerts end…

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