Child(ish) Review: Inside Out 2

When we first saw the trailer for Inside Out 2, we knew we had to get it on the blog ASAP. From the Whole-Brain Child to executive function, our posts cover a lot of a child’s emotional development as well as physical development. So we made it a movie night and now are bringing you our first actual Child(ish) movie review.

Inside Out showed us how emotions influence and establish our memories and how those memories can be a mix of emotions. I mean, how many times have you deemed something a core memory recently? The sequel expands on this foundation and shows how memories create our Belief System and in turn, our Sense of Self. For instance, if you were constantly praised for being smart for acing your classes, those positive memories will have you believe that you as a person are smart and should try out for Jeopardy!. I love this because we have written about how childhood experiences not only shape our identity, but also affect how we parent.

Inside Out 2 begins with Riley’s start of puberty/teen years and overnight, her logic, rational, and reasoning has gone out the window. Her prefrontal cortex is refining its neural connections and her emotional brain (aka the limbic system) is in charge. This means that her adolescent decisions are driven by risk, reward, impulse, sensations, and of course, emotions.

We appreciated Pixar’s depiction of the brain console renovation. It literally has a wrecking crew demoing HQ to make room for the new emotions: Embarrassment, Envy, Ennui, and Anxiety. Although many other emotions were considered for this film, these four serve as extensions from the primary emotions in the first film. For example, Embarrassment is an emotion categorized under Sadness, Anxiety is related to Fear, and Envy is a form of Anger. Ennui and Joy serve as polar opposites of each other in terms of arousal level (boredom and listlessness versus a get up and go, happy-go-lucky attitude).

The emotion that takes center stage in the film is Anxiety and her portrayal made a somewhat complex feeling easy to understand for all ages (or at least helpful for parents to explain it to their kids). Even though Anxiety is the antagonist to Joy, the movie’s ability to explain her intended purpose and what happens if she takes over was thorough and well done. Yes, she’s there to protect us from what we can’t see and prep us for worst-case scenarios. However, if not checked, she could skew our perception of every impending event or situation, turning our imagination against us, and freaking us out when something doesn’t go as planned. She may look like the “bad guy” here, but what Pixar did was show that she wasn’t; just misunderstood and scared (mad Elsa vibes regarding a misunderstood “villain”, if you ask us). In the end, you find that Anxiety is necessary to get us ready for upcoming situations that we can address in the near future (like, a math test, a competition, or writing this blog post).

What really brought things together was the climax of the movie where Riley’s repressed memories flood her brain while she’s having a panic attack. Multiple moments are occurring here, all of which we felt spoke directly to parents. As Anxiety forfeits control of Riley, both Joy and Anxiety come to the realization that they can’t dictate who Riley is. Even though Anxiety was only feeding competitive, driven and “try hard” mentalities to Riley in hopes to be a better version of herself, Joy was also banishing any negative thoughts and memories to make her believe that she was only a kind/good person. Both fail at “fixing” Riley versus letting her be the emotionally complex person she really is. As parents, we try so hard to mold our kids into a certain image to protect and prepare them for the world. Unfortunately, we may forsake the other critical parts about them. This is especially true during the tween/teen years.

During the panic attack scene, Riley has to acknowledge her contradictions and flaws on her own. The moment is frenzied. Rather than try to remove all of these thoughts and memories, Joy and the other eight emotions push through the chaos and embrace this new emerging sense of self. It made us think back to our previous posts of how parents can just be there for your child as they go through their feelings and accept them as they are; the good and the bad.

We both took our kids afterwards and they had some notes as well:

“I don’t like the orange person. She’s making Riley do bad things. That’s not okay.”
“I got scared that Anxiety was making Riley do bad things and she almost got caught.”
“I really liked Pouchy and the characters talking to us.” Fourth wall break, who doesn’t love that?
“I like this one over the first movie because there was more action in it.”
“I like Ennui so much. She’s so cool, just lying on the couch like that (imitates Ennui).”
“I didn’t like that Anxiety got frozen.” Because anxiety can be paralyzing

For the Parents

Both Inside Out movies do a great job of explaining basic brain function and build the foundation for understanding emotional intelligence. After the first movie, A&Z would tell people that they have five guys in their head. From there, Patti was able to use those characters to help explain what was going on in the girls’ brains when they were having complex/complicated/big feelings.

Riley’s Islands of Personality also explain very well how our foundations can vary/rebuild/expand over time. The joke that Family Island was tiny compared to her other islands was very appropriate for a new teenager. Probably giving us Millennial parents a bit of an early warning.

For Mary and I, our kids’ early childhood/developing years are fairly done and we are moving into a phase of life where they are developing that sense of self. Throughout the movie, we see a Riley whose sense of self is just butterflies and rainbows. By the climax, we see what she is like when her sense of self is dominated by anxiety. How can we help our kids strike this balance in a healthy way?

Encourage and celebrate their passions.
Reinforce the habit of slowing down and connect the brain and body.
Be patient when our kids are sifting through big feelings.
Understand that peer pressure will have a growing impact.
Explain teachable moments.
Model emotional intelligence ourselves.
Be their voice a reason while they are developing their own.

We thoroughly enjoyed this movie. So many of our friends are calling it required watching for parents. We’re genuinely excited thinking about how much of a positive impact this movie could have on our kids’ emotional intelligence.

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