As it stands, Pixar’s animated sequel Inside Out 2 leads the box office for 2024, capitalizing on the success of the original film and appealing to crowds who have grown up with Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and the rest of the cast. Though audience members enjoyed catching up with old friends, helping to make Inside Out 2 one of the best Pixar movies ever made, they also seemed ready to meet new emotions that fit Riley at this time of her life. With those new emotions come new colors, both emotionally and visually, as these hues reflect the way that Riley feels, and the way that WE feel. Color is essential to the palette with which Pixar paints, so I’m not that surprised to learn that the color chosen for Anxiety (Maya Hawke) traces all the way back to the original Inside Out.
Inside Out 2 recently screened as part of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival in Georgia, where I caught up with the film’s director, Kelsey Mann, and his composer, Andrea Datzman. During our lively conversation about the sequel, I brought up the idea of colors, and how Mann came up with the right tones for the new emotions. And he connected the new colors back to a moment in the first Inside Out, telling CinemaBlend:
I remember early on, I made a list of all the possible emotions I could have in the film. And I also made a list of colors. I knew orange. I was like, ‘Orange is an untapped color. It's going to be one of the new emotions.’ And if you look at… okay, here's a nerdy little fact about a little Easter egg thing. If you look at Riley in the first film, she has a striped shirt, like a colored shirt. The (emotions are) all represented on the first film. Orange is on there. Orange is one of the stripes in the first movie. So I knew Orange would be part of it.
Here’s the sweater that Kelsey Mann is referring to. As you can see, it contains blue, green, red, purple… all the colors we associate with Riley’s core emotions. But it also has orange, giving Mann the reference point that he needed to get to Anxiety, the key new addition for Inside Out 2.
I think it’s awesome that there’s a root reason for Kelsey Mann to use orange for Anxiety, pulling it directly from a piece of clothing in Riley’s wardrobe in the first movie. But as he explored the important emotion, he realized it just fit the mood visually. Mann went on to tell CinemaBlend:
Initially, when I first tried drawing her, it just… orange felt right. It kind of has that nervous energy. It's kind of vibrant. It's not a relaxed color. Ennui is more like, ‘I'm laying on the couch and not getting up.’ Anxiety is sitting on the edges of the chair, tapping her restless leg syndrome. So it felt that orange had that vibrancy energy. Pretty early on, she was orange.
You can catch up with Inside Out 2 if you have a Disney+ subscription, to feel all the feels that you experienced the first time around. Now, the movie will see if it can get into a competitive Oscar race, where other animated gems from 2024 – including The Wild Robot – will try for the top prize. But as I mentioned earlier, when it comes to box office, Inside Out 2 is the leader, and no other animated feature is going to come close.
