Inside Out 2: When You Grow Up, Your Heart Dies

The world was a vastly different place nine years ago, when the first Inside Out was released. Though, at the time, it might have felt like a world that was dangerous and unsafe for children to grow up and develop in, the truth is, they were probably better off doing so in 2015 than they would be in 2024 (good luck to the sociopaths that have to do that now). And so, yes, 2024 feels like the “perfect” moment to introduce a “new” emotion to Inside Out 2: Anxiety! Of course, even though nearly a decade has passed since last we saw Riley Andersen (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias in the original, and presently, Kensington Tallman), she’s still only just now turning thirteen. Better known to most parents (and teachers…or anyone else subjected to the horrors of interacting with a teenager) as: the Scary Age.

Incidentally, “Terror” doesn’t appear as a more nuanced emotion than “Fear” in the complex range of new ones that are rolled out with a brand-new console that gets installed by the “mind workers” the night before Riley “hits puberty.” A previously uncharted era during which, suddenly, the limited range of five primary emotions—Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Tony Hale), Disgust (Liza Lapira) and Anger (Lewis Black)—are hardly sufficient enough to convey all the confusing, disordered feelings Riley is having at any given moment now that she’s thirteen. Enter Anxiety (Maya Hawke), the key emotion freshly presented into the fray that best encapsulates all those crippling, inexplicable sentiments that go hand-in-hand with an increasing fixation on social status. Granted, Anxiety isn’t alone in terms of being part of a new burst of emotions that only get introduced once a person enters teenhood. Especially when that person is a girl.

Thus, she is joined by Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and Envy (Ayo Edebiri). For a brief instant, even a new emotion called Nostalgia (June Squibb) pops out, stylized as an old lady with glasses. But Anxiety tell her she’s much too early to be there, and she’s promptly sent away from headquarters. Unfortunately, Joy has to admit that Anxiety does seem, in contrast, to be right on time—to know much more about Riley’s new set of concerns and worries than Joy does. And yet, that doesn’t stop Joy from fretting over the fact that Anxiety is negatively impacting the meticulously crafted “Sense of Self” that Riley currently has…thanks to some clever manipulations from Joy via filing memories with unpleasant associations to the back of her mind. Which is for Riley’s “own good,” of course. In fact, all Joy wants is for Riley to think and feel that she’s that wonderful thing: a good person.

Alas, as someone becomes a teenager, all sense of “goodness” tends to go out the window if it means interfering with how that adolescent wants to be perceived. And, no matter how much time goes by or what changes occur in technology, how a teen always wants to be perceived is: cool. Accepted. Well-liked. Best of all, popular. For while Gen Z might think such concerns went the way of the dodo after millennial teenhood, it’s still very much alive and well on an even worse scale thanks to social media and its impact on self-esteem. Riley is a victim of her own intense desire to feel embraced by an older group of girls once she learns that her best friends, Grace (Grace Lu) and Bree (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green), are going to be attending a different high school when the summer is over.

And so, instead of seeing the hockey camp they’re invited to attend (and as the only junior highers, to boot) as an opportunity for a last hurrah together, Riley, under Anxiety’s so-called guidance, takes it as a chance to gain the favor of a popular star player named Val Ortiz (Lilimar). And, when Val actually seems to take a liking to Riley despite how awkward and socially inept she is (in the 00s, Riley is the girl who would have been freely referred to as a “spaz”), the latter can’t help but jump at the chance to “rebrand” in order to better fit in with Val and her older crew of friends.

Horrified at the way Riley is ignoring the carefully crafted “Sense of Self” Joy worked so hard to create, she can’t understand that Anxiety is part of a larger phenomenon that comes with growing up (particularly in a world that, increasingly, prides itself on desensitizing youths): kindness and empathy being stamped out, your heart dying. This being the very accurate and eloquent phrase Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy) from The Breakfast Club wields when she laments, “When you grow up, your heart dies.” An aphorism delivered in reply to Andrew Clark’s (Emilio Estevez) question of whether or not they would become like their parents (that is to say, assholes). Allison also insists, “It’s unavoidable. Just happens.” For Riley, she might not be becoming like her wholesome, largely checked-out parents, per se, but she is becoming more impervious to the notion of “morality.” Of whether or not what’s “good” is necessarily good for her.

Anxiety only serves to fan those flames of sociopathy, prompting Riley to do whatever it takes to achieve “her” goals (though, all along, one has to ask: are they really “hers” or merely what she thinks should be hers due to societal and peer pressures?). In this case, getting onto the Firehawks team as a freshman so that she can have a secured group of friends in her teammates, including Val. When the other girls tell Riley that Coach Roberts (Yvette Nicole Brown) always holds a scrimmage on the last day of camp and it’s what ended up getting Val on the team as a freshman, Anxiety sends Riley into peak panic mode about doing well enough the next day so that the coach puts her on the team for next year. Of course, Val tells her that all she has to do is stop stressing and “be herself.”

In response to that notion, Envy asks Anxiety a fair (and slightly philosophical) question: “How do we be ourself if our ‘self’ isn’t ready yet?” Anxiety, ever the “problem-solver,” reacts by putting more anxiety-ridden memories into the Sense of Self bank that will supposedly propel Riley to act in a way that secures the best possible future. Naturally, what Anxiety doesn’t understand is that Riley won’t be securing much of anything if she’s a tightly-wound ball of panic that can barely function because of all her crippling worries. Nonetheless, Anxiety can’t be bothered with considering how she’s actually hurting Riley, remarking to Envy, “I wish we knew what Coach thought about us.” It’s then that, while Riley is just trying to fucking sleep that Anxiety plants the idea in her head to sneak into the coach’s office and look at the notebook where she writes down all of her “hot takes” about the players. Thus, Riley commits yet another act that goes against what Joy would call her true Sense of Self (even if it was manipulated by Joy): breaking and entering. Oh, an obtaining information that’s supposed to be “confidential” by any means necessary.

As Anxiety has turned Riley into someone she isn’t—someone whose core Sense of Self repeats, “I’m not good enough”—Joy and her “follower emotions” finally make it to the back of Riley’s mind, where the Sense of Self Joy had originally created was exiled by Anxiety. Initially relieved to have recovered the trophy-looking structure, Joy can’t help but take notice of the literal mountain of bad memories she’s stockpiled back here, in a place that suppresses what Riley’s true self might actually be. And when she calls upon Sadness to launch them back to headquarters through the pipe Joy built to jettison those bad memories there in the first place, Anxiety manages to destroy the pipe so that Joy and co. are stuck there. Needless to say, this smacks of the same pickle Joy was in during the first Inside Out, when she got booted into the Memory Dump—a location of the mind where any memories that get deposited there are doomed to fade out for good. Feeling hopeless and defeated, she can no longer even fake a plucky attitude to the other emotions, telling them, “I don’t know how to stop Anxiety. Maybe we can’t. Maybe this is what happens when you grow up. You feel less Joy.” In other words, “When you grow up, your heart dies.”

This is exactly why so many memes about Riley as an adult have come about in the wake of Inside Out 2. For example, Depression as an emotion stamping out all the other ones. Or alcohol being used to briefly chase the emotion of Euphoria before it quickly disappears. And yes, it’s obviously true that there’s no place for Joy in the adult mind. Her presence becoming nothing but one of those faded memories in the Memory Dump (this is perhaps why that incident in Inside Out was nothing more than foreshadowing for Joy’s inevitable disappearance during Riley’s adulthood).

And yet, none of the adults involved in the making of Inside Out 2—and certainly none of the adults who control the system in place—would ever stop and think that perhaps there’s something very, very wrong with how it’s simply accepted that to grow up is to experience the death of Joy. The loss of “heart” a.k.a. any sense of humanity. And all in the name of getting “ahead.” As Anxiety phrased it, “It’s not about who Riley is, it’s about who she needs to be.” But why does anyone “need” to become an asshole in this life? To adhere to the subjugating “tenets” of capitalism, duh.