“Inside Out 2” is set to premiere in Philippine theaters this week and one thing’s for sure: it’s going to be one emotional ride, no matter what your age is.
The sequel to the movie that begged the question “What goes on inside our heads?” continues to ask the same thing, only this time Riley is officially a teenager and is about to experience even more inner chaos as she goes through puberty. By now, audiences know that four new emotions are entering the scene to disrupt the balance that Joy had made together with Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger, and leading the charge of this new group is Anxiety.
WhenInManila.com was able to speak briefly with director Kelsey Mann and producer Mark Nielsen of “Inside Out 2” to know more about their decision to make Anxiety the star (or accidental villian?) of the sequel and what we can expect from the movie.
Photo from Disney
Hi Kelsey and Mark! First of all, congratulations on the sequel that’s coming soon. I personally am so excited to watch “Inside Out 2” because I cried in the first film. So is it safe to say that I’ll get super emotional here too?
KELSEY: When you’re making a movie about emotions, it should be an emotional journey that you’re going through. So I hope you feel all kinds of different emotions while you’re watching this. It’s something that I think we’re really excited about, and I can’t wait. I’m really excited for audiences to go to the theaters and experience those emotions together. But I think so much of it is we’re watching things on our own and feeling emotions and the whole point of this movie is to connect us all together! I think, especially at the time that Riley’s at, when you’re a teenager, you think you’re the only one going through what you’re going through. It’s the real power that we have with this world of “Inside Out” [which] is to show what goes on in our heads. Sometimes it’s like [I want to say] ‘I feel that too, but I was afraid to say anything about it!’ I really hope that people are able to go out to the theaters together and have that emotional journey that you had on the first film, and then go to new places, and then deal with new emotions in the second film.
Speaking of these new emotions, we have new ones! What was the process in choosing these new emotions to be added to the party, having to research what would feel right for a kid to have entering puberty, and how did you arrive at anxiety, embarrassment, ennui, and envy?
KELSEY: It took a long time to figure out who’s going to show up. I could probably cover the anxiety part of it, Mark. Maybe you can talk about the other three. But for me, when I first started, I wanted new emotions to show up, but I didn’t know who. I said, ‘Okay, let me just start making options.’ I wrote down on my board all these ideas of what we could do. And I kinda stood back and I got immediately drawn to Anxiety. I walked up and I circled it. I’m like, ‘This really feels like there’s a story here.’ It’s something I can relate to now. It’s definitely something I could have related to when I was Riley’s age because I feel like she definitely came in and drove at the console a lot at this age. And so I got drawn to anxiety immediately from the beginning.
MARK: We really wanted these emotions to be the ones that are like the self-conscious emotions, right? You’re so aware as a teenager what people are perceiving about you. And so embarrassment and ennui and envy all felt like really sensible candidates to me. They’re very present in our teenager’s life. Kelsey and I are both fathers of teenagers, both girls and boys. And man, we wanted those emotions that we see every day at home in our teenagers because there are certain emotions that come on stronger at that age. And so we did the research on which ones those are, and the story really helped us infer what the four were that were going to be most impactful for this story.
One last question. There seems to be a confusion now regarding these new emotions because, at the end of the first film, we saw that the core memories can have a combination of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear to represent other feelings that are more nuanced. Will this be explained in the film, or can you share your thoughts on that?
KELSEY: We want to stay true to the original film and everything that it’s doing. We ended the first film with the five emotions and they have all the swirls [in the memories], and they’re all mixed together. But then we wanted to introduce new emotions. We actually had a whole scene where they showed up and explained where they were, and they were like, “Actually, pull up a memory.” Then they’re like, “There I am. I’m right there.” [The others are] like, “Where?” And they had to get a magnifying glass and see a tiny little dot of just Anxiety. Like, “Yeah, I was always there!” If we ended up cutting that scene, it wasn’t because we didn’t like the idea. It’s because you only have so much time in a movie to tell the story, and sometimes it can drag on and you’re like, ‘[let’s] get the story going faster.’ So we ended up cutting it. But it’s a concept that I still think is there and I believe in, that if you zoom in on some of the memories in the past, Anxiety and Embarrassment are there, but they’re just tiny little dots that are on Riley’s memories in the past.
Photo from Disney
(ALSO READ: Experience This Exciting “Inside Out 2” Outdoor Carnival When You Visit Singapore)
“Inside Out 2” will be showing in cinemas nationwide starting June 12, 2024.
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