In Inside Out 2 , Riley hits puberty and faces new intense emotions like Anxiety, Embarrassment and Ennui. Pixar/ hide caption Move over Joy and Sadness. Anxiety and Embarrassment are taking over.
Riley has hit puberty. Pixar's new animated movie, Inside Out 2 , reaches theaters this weekend, nearly 10 years since the first movie became a sensation, winning an Academy Award, topping the box office and then earning millions more fans on streaming. In the sequel, as in the original movie , emotions are portrayed as anthropomorphized characters who control the mind of a spirited young hockey player named Riley.
She was 11 in Inside Out . Now she's 13 and facing an onslaught of intense new emotions. Pixar is expecting Inside Out 2 to do well at the box office, partly because the characters continue to resonate with teens and adults who saw the original as younger kids.
José, a ninth-grader who lives in New Jersey, said he saw Inside Out for the first time when it came out in 2015. "Six-year-old me, after I saw that movie, I thought people were inside my head," he said. (NPR is using only José's first name because he attends a school for teens with social-emotional challenges.
) As he got older, José says, the movie played differently. He understood, for example, what happens when Riley pretends she's joyful when she's really sad. "It was all like a hot mess.
Like, she needed to let out her feelings," he said. Clinical social worker Kristi Zybulewski has dressed up as Sadn.
