How was the anxiety attack scene created?

In “Inside Out 2”, the new Disney and Pixar film, we follow the protagonist Riley as she begins a new phase in her life: adolescence. With the onset of puberty, the girl faces the arrival of new emotions (Boredom, Shame, Envy and Anxiety), as well as new demands.

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This is because, from now on, Riley wants to ensure a good future in high school, including joining the new hockey team. However, right at the beginning of the film, the girl also discovers that her two best friends, Bree and Grace, will be changing schools, and they will not have the chance to continue studying and playing together.

With that, in addition to the expectation of being able to enter the new phase with a good reputation, the protagonist also creates a new fear: being alone in high school — a feeling generated after the arrival of Anxiety, which begins to dominate the Control Room after trapping Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness in a jar, and sending them to the back of the girl’s mind.

After “getting rid” of the original emotions, Anxiety starts to command Riley, with the intention of trying to prevent everything from going wrong in the future, creating hypothetical negative situations and assuming attitudes that, originally, would be unlikely for the teenager to carry out — such as abandoning her friends in their last days together to stay with the older girls who are already on the team, or lying about her own musical tastes.

By the end of the film, the orange emotion has taken over much of Riley’s mind, causing her to create a new “Sense of Self” where she claims she is not good enough. Desperate upon realizing what she did, Anxiety tries to fix her mistake, but ends up stuck in the controls, causing the girl to have an anxiety attack in the middle of the game, while going to the bench.

In the scene, Riley, who was under extreme pressure to score three goals and impress the coach so that she would be accepted into the team, begins to feel short of breath and her heartbeat accelerates, symptoms characteristic of anxiety attacks, and is one of the highlights of the film.

As reported by AdoroCinema, Maurissa Horwitz was responsible for editing the scene which, according to the director Kelsey Mannit was something “really complex to do”.

“The distortion of what’s happening with Anxiety, the spinning, she literally is like a storm being swept away, leaving a blur behind her,” the filmmaker explains. “It’s like she’s pressing every button on the console and they’re all happening at once. She’s blinking all the time because she’s so nervous. It’s like what you feel physically when your heart is beating really fast.”

Jonathan Pytko It is Adam Habibthe film’s cinematographers, told Variety that colors also play an important role in this sequence. That’s because when Riley’s crisis is at its peak, the scene becomes cold, with the excess light making everything darker. However, when the moment passes and all her emotions embrace, causing her to return to normal, the colors go “to a warmer tone to bring the joy back into the scene.”