By: Jingwei Zhao

In the recently released movie, “Inside Out 2”, we see Anxiety as a character influencing a girl named Riley as she begins going through puberty.

In the movie, Riley has all of her emotions embodied as characters inside her brain. In the first movie, we see Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. However, the sequel adds an additional set of emotions, including Anxiety. In the movie, she is characterized as, “wild-looking orange creature with a busy plume and a tendency to overreact,” according to the New York Times.

We can see Anxiety affecting Riley in one particularly vivid scene, as Anxiety directs mind workers to conjure up negative possibilities of what could happen during Riley’s hockey match the next day. Luckily for Riley, Joy comes in to stop Anxiety’s plans and instead creates positive thoughts for the game tomorrow to make Riley feel better.

As Joy attempts to get the mind workers to rise up on Anxiety, we see many film references in the scene, such as “Jerry Maguire,” Norma Rae,” and a few from “Network”.

Film director Kelsey Mann, describes how he made the scene: “I always envisioned this being a movie about anxiety taking over, and was reflecting on my own life and how my anxiety does that in me.”

By incorporating the director’s own past experiences into the actual movie, we get a more real and relatable idea of the anxiety that Riley was feeling.