By: Yiling Sun

The movie “Inside Out 2” is a story about a young girl’s anxious thoughts. This girl, whose name is Riley, goes through puberty during the movie. Her emotions are controlled by different characters with different colors, such as Joy (yellow) and Sadness (blue).

Anxiety is an orange creature with crazy fountain-like hair. Her major characteristic shown in the movie is her overreaction. In a particular scene in the movie, she is directing a room full of mind workers to draw every possible thing that could go wrong in Riley’s hockey game tomorrow. she makes Riley feel so anxious that she can’t even sleep properly, turning and tossing in her bed.

Joy, a character with short blue hair and a dress, discovers this room full of workers, and is horrified. The workers are drawing pictures of Riley losing awfully in her upcoming hockey game. Then, Joy spots an empty work square and immediately begins drawing images of Riley winning the game and giving flowers to her teammates. Her friends help her draw happy moments, with even Anger helping with the positive feelings. If Joy and her friends didn’t change Riley’s mindset, she would have gone to the game thinking that everything will go wrong, and then likely lose miserably.

Having a positive mindset is also important. If Riley didn’t have a positive mindset at her hockey game, she would probably get extremely frustrated just because she didn’t make one goal and then mess up the entire rest of the game.

Even the film’s director, Kelsey Mann, has anxiety sometimes: “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.”

Anxiety isn’t too good of a feeling, and it appears at the worst times. Just because Riley was frustrated doesn’t mean she should stop trying to think positive. And neither should you!