Inside Out 2.
I have a weird relationship with animated movies because when I was in college, I watched so many of them that now even thinking about watching them makes me kind of queasy. Watching cartoons, for me, feels like there’s not quite enough air in the room, which might be less about the cartoons themselves and more about the part of my life they’re associated with: a part of my life where I was a part of a very intense church that may or may not have been a cult (!). Because we wanted to shield ourselves from all kinds of temptations, we thought animated movies (Pixar, Disney and the like) were a safer bet than most. I have probably seen all of the popular kids movies from like 2013-2015 and have mostly avoided them since.
I’m in Texas as I’m writing this, and it’s weird how my college years are kind of layered onto this state in some ways and totally separate from it in others. For example, when I walked out of the airport and was hit by the velvety Texas humidity, I told my boyfriend, “I love the heat here,” as if this is all Texas has been to me: enormous sky and wet air and vibey hipster coffee shops like the one I’m in now. As if it wasn’t also the place I lost my self and then, by leaving, found myself again. Found myself a bit before leaving by studying literature and writing and meeting friends who let me be radically different versions of myself, who didn’t hold me to any one way of being. Texas has been a chaotic place to me and also a place I barely think about, a place with wild politics but at times fun vibes. It is split in my imagination maybe, a place I know intimately and one I don’t really know at all.
I’m pretty sure I watched the first Inside Out in Texas, and I’m pretty sure I cried the whole way through, so even though sequels are something else I try to avoid (when is it ever as good as the first?), I was not fully opposed to seeing Inside Out 2, especially when I saw that Ayo Edebiri is in it (we love her!). I can’t remember the details of what I liked about the first one, but I can tell you that even as a very different person, I liked this second one a lot too.
It’s still a kids’ movie (and so maybe not for you if you don’t like those), but I found the focus — the way an anthropomorphized Anxiety wreaked havoc on the main character as she entered into puberty—relatable. I am not a teenager but I am someone who has anxiety and whose anxiety manifests mainly as wanting to control as much as I can in terms of my day-to-day and my future. I can be hard on myself and I can also—at the same time—be people pleasing, which sometimes means a strange four square of both trying to get ahead of things and trying not to step on anyone else’s toes. I found the anthropomorphizing of the emotions in general a little comforting and very hilarious. Even if you (like most of us) have been socialized to prioritize thinking over feeling, it is helpful to think about breaking these emotions down, think about how they interact with each other, about which emotion rules for you. And if that’s interesting to me as an adult then surely it’s beautiful for kids to be able, at a young age, to think about these things — to have anxiety and panic and sadness and embarrassment modeled for them from the “inside out” and also from the outside through a kid like them. How do we navigate these things? the movie asks. What do we need?
It was a good animated movie to watch, a good exception to my general hesitation to watch these kinds of things, and also helpful for thinking through how I feel being back in this place that both had its great moments — swimming in lakes, stargazing, school— and its not so great ones. If I had my little team of emotions inside of me, what would they think about all of this? How can a character like Anxiety both be there and not be everywhere? I’ll mull over this, and you: you mull over seeing this movie maybe. It’s summer! Ayo Edebiri’s in it! Why not?
Image: Disney
