PUBERTY!! OMG!! The second entry in the Inside Out franchise, Inside Out 2, hit theaters in the US on June 14, about nine years after the first movie. This time, the main character, Riley, has to deal with puberty: a new character, Anxiety, meets Joy. Overall, I found the movie to be a predictably charming sequel, but opinions among student reviewers were mixed.
Giving the movie a 1 out of 10, Kate Dziewinski at Downers Grove South High School west of Chicago says her “Anger character fumed while watching” the movie.
“The film did a great job showing how young people change when they hit puberty,” she wrote. “But, one of the new characters, Anxiety, made the movie annoying to even watch. …” First, “All the characters except Anxiety [were] ‘good looking’,” she wrote, “which just made it hard to look at the screen because Anxiety was on it all the time. She genuinely looked as if she got electrocuted for an hour straight.”
As with teen life, anxiety does create a few bumps in the road, but Kate would say not as extreme as the movie makes it out to be. Some of Riley’s life events wouldn’t even be possible, she wrote: “For example, Anxiety manipulated Riley to wake up in the dead of night to walk to the hockey rink and sneak into her coach’s office to read the ‘red notebook’ which had all the coach’s notes.”
But Jeanie Auguste at Inlet Grove Community High School in Riviera Beach, Florida, near Palm Beach, wrote that the movie was “phenomenal”: “Riley ended with her own mind of emotions and … learns that it’s okay to feel every emotion because that’s what makes ourselves, … what makes us human.
“I recommend this movie to a lot of people, mostly teenagers, because they get to see they are not alone and that it’s okay to feel either one of the emotions.”
She quotes another student in her review: “Never have I EVER related to a movie more in my life. It was worth every penny spent watching it. This last year really has been anxiety-inducing for me, from tests to friends, and Inside Out 2 was so accurate with all of the emotions that can come from stressful changes in one’s life.”