HELLO FRIENDS!

I hope you are getting some restful holiday time with friends and family. I know for many of us that includes watching movies together. One that really resonated this year was “Inside Out 2,” which, in addition to being the highest-grossing animated film of all time (!!!), also generated a lot of discussion about tweens, teens, and emotions.

One of the reasons it was so good is because it was shaped with close consultation from Dr. Lisa Damour. Back in June, I interviewed her about the making of the movie - I’m resharing that interview in this post. I also wanted to share Lisa’s new guide to talking about the movie with kids. Here’s what she says about it:

By bringing the complexities of teenage development to the fore, the film paves the way for parents and kids to engage in meaningful discussions about our emotional lives. To make the most of these conversations, use this 26-minute video as a guide.

I think this guide would also be super useful for any teachers who are thinking about using this film as part of their classes. Plus, it's just a fun movie to watch together! I hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtain of how it was made.

Big Love,

Christopher

Behind-The-Scenes: The Making of “Inside Out 2” With Dr. Lisa Damour

Inside Out 2' - Everything We Know So Far About Pixar's Next Sequel

In “Inside Out 2,” the main character, Riley, has become a teenager. The emotions she’s dealt with since childhood - Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust - have been joined by a whole group of new emotions: Anxiety , Embarrassment, Envy, Nostalgia, and Ennui. You can learn all of this from the the trailers. What you might not know is that the movie was shaped with close consultation from Dr. Lisa Damour.

“When we decided we were making a movie about a teen girl and the chaos that comes with adolescence we knew we needed to talk to an expert, so we immediately called Lisa,” says director Kelsey Mann. “Not only does Lisa have an incredibly empathetic understanding of the emotional lives of teens, she’s a storyteller herself, and that combination of experience and creativity was just what we needed.”

This working relationship was kept secret for years - it wasn’t until a few weeks before its release that Lisa could finally tell the world.

Although Lisa and I are friends and we’ve worked together this year, her contributions to this movie were as much of a shock to me as anyone. I wanted to find out more about how this came to be and what it was like to work on this project. Here’s what she had to say:

Most people know you as an author and speaker - how did you get involved with making a movie?

So in May 2020 I got a call from Pixar, and I hopped on a Zoom with Kelsey Mann, the director, and Meg LeFauve, one of the writers, and they were holding two of my books, Untangled and Under Pressure. They explained that “Inside Out 2” is about Riley turning into a 13-year-old girl and becoming a teenager, and anxiety is now a major player in her life. It just happened to be that the work I was doing dovetailed with the story they wanted to tell.

What role did you end up playing in the movie’s creation?

I'm one of two psychologists consulting on it. Dacher Keltner, who's at UC-Berkeley, consulted on the first one, and is also consulting on this one. They would show us drafts of the film, and then we would have readouts with them where we give feedback. We started in 2020, so everything was Zoom for a while, and then I've been out to Pixar a couple times for meetings, and love getting to be with the team and also just seeing the back end of how these incredible films get developed.

How did you feel when you saw the finished film for the first time?

It's wonderful - so compelling. The thing I love about it is that the movie is funny, engaging, and visually fantastic, but it is still thoroughly grounded in the science of what we know about feelings and adolescent development.
The movie shows that you can thrive at this time of life, even with all of the strains of things like social dynamics changing, worries about how you're coming off to the people around you, and aspirations that are hard to achieve. All of these critical themes around being a young teenager are addressed so beautifully in the movie, while it is simultaneously wildly entertaining and funny, and wonderful to watch.

What surprised you about the movie making process, in comparison to other work you’ve done?

I think the economy of storytelling. There's a scene early in the movie where Riley has become a teenager, and then she's with her mom, and she gets incredibly angry out of the blue. She surprises herself and her mother with how angry she gets.
And then it cuts to the inside of her mind, and all of the feelings have turned on Anger, who has touched the console, and he's like, “I barely touched it.”
I mean, it takes just a few seconds for these two events, the anger and then his reaction inside her mind, to occur. And those few seconds capture what we know to be true about teenagers: their feelings suddenly become much more intense and potent than they were when they were younger. It’s surprising to them. It's surprising to their parents. It's a natural part of adolescence, it's actually caused by the changes that are happening in the mind, and in just a few seconds it gets told in a joke - a wonderful, apt, and funny joke.

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How does the production timeline compare to other projects you do, and how many people are involved?

I probably don't even know the full extent of how many people are involved with it! Minimally, they were thinking about the story at least four years ago, but probably longer ago than that.
On one of my visits to Pixar, I got to meet all of the different teams that work on a project like this. It's so interesting. There's the team that builds the physical spaces and comes up with the animation for the physical spaces. And the way it was described to me is that “we build the dollhouse for the dolls that are the characters to go in.”
We saw the giant screens of physical space building, and then the clay models that are the characters, made so that animators can look at them from all sides. It's incredible. And then the editing, and then the animators who are coming in, and then the voice work that lays over it. I'm sure I still don't even understand the half of what is actually happening. It's unbelievable.

One of the things I admire in your work is that you seem to find teenagers delightful and fascinating. Are there things about how adults talk about teens that you hope to change with this movie?

Thank you for asking that. I wish that we extended more respect to teenagers for all that they are trying to manage and navigate at once. And this movie does a good job with that. Riley’s dealing with peer stuff. She's dealing with athletic aspirations. She's dealing with trying to think about who she's going to be, and so much is changing so fast for her, and that is inherently stressful.
What I think this movie can and will do is do a little level-setting about the fact that being an adolescent and raising an adolescent is a challenging thing. I feel like we as a culture are in an unhelpful place of thinking that any discomfort is a sign that something's really wrong, or maybe even a sign of a mental health concern.
I'm so, so grateful to the team behind this movie for telling a story that involves a whole bunch of uncomfortable emotions in Riley and her parents that are natural and important parts of the experience of being a teenager.
The take home message from this film really builds on what was in the first one, which is that uncomfortable emotions are valuable and important, and they are protective and orienting. They gave us feedback on our lives, and they belong in our world every bit as much as the emotions we enjoy having more. We need that message now more than ever.

What do you like about the way these movies show emotions as individual characters that sometimes are in conflict with one another?

What a structure, right? Like, what an incredible world to build that you can then play within. It's really clever to personify the emotions and to create conditions in the plot where sometimes emotions are grappling for control.
I also think that by personifying emotions, Pixar has given parents a lob for having really important conversations at home.
So for instance, one of the new characters is Envy. You and I both know that social comparison online is a big issue for teens, and when teens are struggling with social media, social comparison is often a factor.
I am so excited for families to see this film and then to be able to carry that through to a conversation over dinner about looking online and feeling envy when people have things that you want or present themselves in ways that you desire and just to be able to talk about that feeling. Talking about feelings helps bring them down to size, and having a character that you can think about and talk about makes those conversations easier.

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The movie comes out on Father’s Day weekend. Do you think it's a good thing for dads to see with their kids?

Absolutely, absolutely. First of all, the adults are going to enjoy it. And part of what Pixar is so clever about is they put in plenty in there that's actually going to crack up adults. So the parents will enjoy it in their own right.
We have decades of research on what makes programming educational for kids, and what makes it educational are actually the conversations after the movie. That's how you pull through the educational value of these productions. So dads need to go see this so that they can have the conversations about the film with their kids who have seen it.

For parents who are thinking about taking their kids to see this movie, what age would you think is kind of the “sweet spot” age-wise for people taking their kids along?

There's nothing that I think is scary in the film, so I actually think this movie is going to be very, very appealing to an extremely wide range of ages. I think that kids between the ages of about 9 and 19 are going to feel really seen.

Movies and TV can do a lot to normalize taboo topics or reduce stigma. Are there topics addressed in the movie you think could benefit from more open discussion?

I think normalization of uncomfortable emotions is incredibly valuable. And I think there are things that Riley struggles with that a lot of people will recognize in themselves, and the fact that the fact that she struggles with them is not cast as evidence that there's something wrong with her or grounds for concern about her mental health. I think that is really, really important messaging right now.

Have you seen Inside Out 2? Are you looking forward to watching it with your family or students? Let us know in the comments.

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Dr. Lisa Damour: How To Use "Inside Out 2" To…