. The sequel follows the original movie’s Riley into teenagerhood, and introduces a new emotion to battle Joy for supremacy in the emotional “headquarters” of her brain: Anxiety. As a parent whose own teen has struggled with anxiety, I was curious to see how Pixar would handle a plot point that touches my family’s life directly—and one that, over the course of the movie’s yearslong development, has turned into something of a hot-button issue nationwide. The first.
Anxiety, voiced by Maya Hawke, may be the movie’s antagonist, but she’s presented, at first, as a solution to Riley’s teenage woes. She plans for the, she says. She differentiates herself from Fear by noting, “He keeps Riley safe from things she can see. My job is to keep her safe from things she can’t see.
“I’m a good person,” it says—until Anxiety breaks it and sends it far into the back of the mind. Riley needs to become an entirely different person, Anxiety claims, to get through the challenge of hockey camp. When Joy and the other original emotions protest, she banishes them as well. “OK, Riley,” Anxiety says, in a moment that will elicit bitter laughter from many parents of teens: “Let’s change everything about you.
Late the night before a big scrimmage, Anxiety orders the staff that make up Riley’s imagination to draw up terrible possible scenarios for the next day. She thinks she’s helping Riley avoid future discomfort, but really she’s just keeping her awake all night, catastrophizing wildly.
That’s a great lesson for kids to learn, if they can untangle the movie’s complex cosmology. Not every negative emotion represents a pathology, something requiring treatment. “Psychologists only consider anxiety to be pathological if it’s way out of proportion to any actual threat,” Damour told me. Yes, anxiety is frightening, and when it gets out of control, damaging. But Damour hopes the movie will help parents understand the role that even uncomfortable emotions play in healthy development.