“Deya, you’ve got to write about voicing a character in Inside Out 2. You may be the first Bangladeshi actress in a Pixar film! Just sit down and write about going to the recording studio, meeting the other girls, and speaking to the director. Don’t overthink it.”
As always, my mother made it sound very simple.
Inside Out was released in the summer of 2015. I was eight years old, visiting my family in the UK. It was then that I learned what it meant to appreciate the soundtrack of a film.
The film’s opening scene would be ingrained in my mind for months after leaving the theatre: The soft plink’s of a piano permeated the screen’s warm tones as the audience was introduced to the main character, Riley, and her emotions. I fell in love with the conveyed prospect that when we are born, the first emotion we feel is joy.
At the time, it was more than just my childhood love of film that encouraged my appreciation for the movie. As I was approaching my final days of eight, there was a certain sense of sentimentality that I could recognize growing within myself. At its core, Inside Out is a story about growing up, something that I had a lot of to do in the months ahead of me. I’ve since reflected on how much weight certain ages get: Thirteen, the first year of teenagehood; 16, often associated with the start of the oldest phase in adolescence; and finally, 18, the age of adulthood in many countries.
But for me, eight was the start of the end of childhood. It was a trigger pulled that led to an (almost comically) ornate and abstract series of levers and pulleys which would eventually someday drop the bucket full of adolescence on my unexpecting head. It was the year I began to notice why I loved certain people, and question whether they loved me back. It was the year that I began to question how worthy of love I really was. It was the year I began to look at my life outside of myself. The year I began to grow up.
Before Inside Out, I don’t know if I had ever considered the power of my emotions as tools for change, or even as messengers for what mattered to me. I hadn’t yet registered that emotions weren’t something one could necessarily control. So despite being a talkative, bubbly eight-year-old, I was somehow inexplicably touched by the control and agency that the character Sadness received by the movie’s end. I couldn’t yet word why the score’s soft plink’s as the main character Riley’s broke down in the arms of her parents -- both present, both patient, both willingly participating in their daughter’s perspective -- struck a very similar, plink-like chord within my subconscious.
Almost a decade later, as a 17 year-old aspiring performer, I landed my first professional acting role in the sequel to that very animated movie. Inside Out 2 was released in June of this year, and I was able to voice Dani, one of Riley’s new friends at her hockey camp. When going to see the film in IMAX theatres with my fellow voice actresses from the film, my eyes glittered at the familiar plink’s of the heartwarming soundtrack that had since lived on in my mind.
And my heart sank as Joy admitted at the film’s climax, “Maybe this is what happens when you grow up. You feel less joy.”
This is a part of your story now, I told myself in the theatre, nine years away from who I had once been.
The fact that Riley’s story first resonated so deeply with me in 2015 did seem inexplicable. Riley was an 11-year-old American white girl, an only child, with two stable, married, white American parents; she lived in the United States, she had an easy-to-pronounce name … at the time, my situation couldn’t be more different. But time and experience have given me the gift of knowing better.
While watching the sequel that I was now a part of, I saw that Riley held a piece of my 12 year-old self when she began to change her demeanour to belong in a new crowd. Riley held a piece of my 13 year-old self when Envy and Anxiety and Embarrassment hailed so massively that she didn’t know what to do with herself. Riley held a piece of my 15 year-old self in her when she sat frozen in place, crippled by anxiety, having a panic attack in the middle of her big ice hockey game. As the other emotions succeeded in banding together to take control of Riley back, Anxiety lay defeated on the ground, whimpering, worn out. “I’m sorry … I was just trying to protect her,” she sighed.
I can’t tell you the first time anxiety manifested itself in my life, but I do know that it has always been growing. It had grown much larger than I was emotionally mature enough to acknowledge when I was eight, sitting in the theatre, watching the first Inside Out in 2015. It exploded at around 14. It caused me countless sweaty, frantic, frozen, agonizing panic attacks and stomach aches and breakdowns and sleepless nights in just 14 alone. At 15, in refusing to let go of control over me, my anxiety almost cost me myself completely.
I just wish I knew earlier how hauntingly beautiful it had been.
How beautiful was it that my anxiety was trying so hard to protect me? That it cared more about me then than I did myself?
And I can’t imagine how much I inflamed the situation by trying to belittle my anxiety, trying to dismissively fight it off from the steering wheel. When it was just doing all that it knew how to do. For me.
The most touching moment in Inside Out 2 is when Joy learns acceptance, and accepts that growing up means losing a bit of her. As badly as Riley may want to feel Joy in the coming years, she may not always find her. But Joy doesn’t give up, or submit herself to this fact. She adjusts to fit into the new picture of who Riley is becoming. Like Riley, my emotional freedom arrived when I realized that anxiety had just as much a place in my world as anything else. And that the notion of having control was as ideal as it was unreliable.
I recall myself in 2015, excitedly hurrying out of the theatre to recap Inside Out to my aunt in the chilly London air. I wonder what I would say to eight-year-old Deya today. Would I even tell her that she’d someday be in that movie’s sequel? That one of her favourite stories would one day become a part of her own?
Yeah … probably not.
I just couldn’t rob myself of the journey.
Deya Nurani is a high school student based in the US.
