Anxiety was causing stress from the start. The problem was that the makers of Inside Out 2 had initially conceived the fretful character (voiced by M
Anxiety was causing stress from the start. The problem was that the makers of Inside Out 2 had initially conceived the fretful character (voiced by Maya Hawke) as the villain of the sequel, but she wasn’t working out as they’d hoped. “I remember we were struggling with the character,” says director and cowriter Kelsey Mann. “I always pitched the movie as a takeover. It’s about All About Eve with emotions and having a new character come in and send the kind of older, more simple emotions away.”
In that classic 1950 film, Bette Davis stars as a sardonic aging actor, while Anne Baxter plays a adolescent usurper who gains her confidence then undermines her. Similarly to Baxter’s character, Anxiety originally schemed her way through the story of Inside Out 2, knocking Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler) out of her leadership position in adolescent Riley’s head. “She was knowingly manipulating things and kind of lied about who she is,” Mann recalls. “The character was very hard to understand and to like.”
Then a delicate bulb went on in the heads of Mann and fellow writers Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein, enabling them to rethink their approach to Anxiety. Maybe Anxiety wasn’t all bad—rather than behaving maliciously, she was just misunderstood and occasionally went too far. That illumination was provided by Dr. Lisa Damour, author of the parenting guides Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions Into Adulthood and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. The writing team was already devouring her books as they broke the story, then Pixar brought the psychologist herself aboard the film as a consultant.
The notion of little characters running around your mind and steering your thoughts and actions is obviously fanciful, but Inside Out 2’s storyline about Anxiety hijacking the control booth was actually shaped by real psychological insights about how the brain works. That guidance from experts also inspired the filmmakers at Pixar to treat Anxiety as less of a villain and more of a tragic figure who actually does some good when she’s not out of control.
Having teamed with the filmmakers, Damour believes Inside Out 2 provides a metaphorical guide for the way emotions actually do run out of control. “They actually give a masterclass,” she says. “I think it will do more to help people understand anxiety’s problems and its values than anything clinicians can do.”
“It’s that balance between creativity and science,” Mann says of the formula that earned Inside Out 2 an Oscar nomination for best animated feature. “You want to get that as accurate as possible. These movies can be really helpful to people. The last thing that I wanted to do is to put a wrong thing to do out in the world in terms of how to deal with these feelings and, in particular, a panic attack. I did not want to send the wrong message and have therapists come to us and say, ‘You told people to do what?’”
Pixar.
Getting it right was especially essential because the Inside Out movies are about a adolescent child named Riley, and kids interpret the misfit characters rattling around her head as symbolic representations of how the mind actually works. “It was Lisa that helped us with what [Anxiety’s] motivations are. Why do we have anxiety, and what is it trying to do for us? She’s like, ‘It’s really there because it’s trying to help us.’”
This was the very subject of Damour’s 2020 book, Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls. “The reason I wrote Under Pressure was to help people understand there’s unhealthy anxiety and there’s healthy anxiety,” says Damour. “I am so thrilled that this movie has made it clear that ‘she’ plays both roles. She’s valuable and she belongs on the team, but she’s got to be under control.”
The writing team would send scripts and scenes her way, and Damour would address how the metaphorical Anxiety matched or contrasted with the actual phenomenon of anxiety. “Lisa would talk a lot about how having good mental health isn’t just feeling good all the time. It’s feeling the right emotion, for the right amount, for the right moment,” Mann says.
That inspired an early scene in which Riley is gabbing with her friends while their hockey coach is addressing the team, leading to all of them getting punished. Anxiety was alert to the possibility of trouble, even if it was ignored. “I didn’t want [Anxiety] to come in and just cause problems. We actually wanted her to have solutions and actually be helpful, just not go too far with it,” Mann says. “That’s a moment in which Joy is driving, and things go wrong in Riley’s life because she’s goofing off with her friends and being silly and playful. Anxiety is there going, ‘Hold on, Joy, we shouldn’t be doing this.’ Joy just doesn’t see it…and Anxiety is much more equipped to kind of navigate this new teenage world.”
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