How ‘Inside Out 2’ Presented Riley’s Anxiety Attack (2024)

SPOILER WARNING:This story mentions majorspoilers for “Inside Out 2,” now playing in theaters.

“Inside Out 2” sees Riley hit puberty. Along with that, her five core emotions — Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust — find themselves joined by Ennui, Embarrassment, Envy and Anxiety.

Teenage Riley is at a hockey camp for the weekend when the emotions hit hardest. Before an important game, Riley is on a mission to impress the hockey coach and make the varsity team. Leading the emotions are Anxiety, Envy and Embarrassment. The others have been relegated to the back of Riley’s mind and have become suppressed emotions.

Meanwhile, Riley is under immense pressure when she is placed in a timeout box. This is where she begins to experience a panic attack.

But how would this be visually reflected in the story?

Cinematographers Jonathan Pytko and Adam Habib duo sat down for Variety’s Artisans Inside the Frame and discussed how they got inside Riley’s mind for that sequence. “We wanted to show an image that was compelling. It’s not just something you want to throw out,” Pytko said.

Even though Riley and her emotions are fantastical characters, they needed to be grounded.

Approaching the cinematography for “Inside Out 2” was no different from a live-action film. “We try to come at the cinematography from physical principles of light and camera. With the human world, we try to emulate a cinematic world. We’re doing cinematic cameras. Lighting wise, we’re trying to approach it from a very physical sense, complete with flares and grains and trying to give a real filmic look to the human world, and we contrast that a bit with the minds also,” Pytko explained.

Riley’s anxiety attack sees Anxiety work herself into a frenzy at the console. Habib explained, “We started doing a lot of things like tightening up the shutter angle. Suddenly, everything’s a lot sharper. Focus got a lot deeper as the game is going on and Riley’s putting more and more pressure on herself. When the anxiety attack hits, suddenly we flip almost everything.”

The focus becomes extremely shallow and the world drops away.

As Riley gets deeper into the panic attack and Anxiety is in a frenzied whirlwind, Pytko and Habib discussed the idea of vibrating the background.

“We refined the image in lighting quite a bit, and then we added that element into it,” Pytko explained. “It felt like the images were really trending in this beautiful direction with this flaring, lots of depth of field coming in the camera. We overexposed the light a lot and flooded this light coming around Riley as she’s going through this moment. And then adding that element in there really sold what happened.”

As she gets more anxious, that overexposure was increased. However, as the panic attack dies down, it starts to mellow out, soften and then starts to warm up.

“We start changing the color from a cooler to a warmer tone to start introducing that joy back into the frame,” said Pytko.

Color was an important factor in deciphering anxiety.

Pytko noted the colors in the final hockey game start overcast and dreary to reflect the pressure Riley had put on herself. She’s in a place where she needs to score. “In the hockey rink, she’s also wearing an orange jersey and we worked with the art department to sort of figure out ways we can interject some emotional colors into Riley’s environment, just to tie the two things together,” he said.

But inside headquarters, Pytko pointed out Anxiety is driving the console so hard. “We took all the other light out and just let the orange console take over the whole HQ space. We wanted this to be the moment where the audience knows we’re in HQ. We’ve connected to the original movie. Now, we can get into new visuals and explore the space more. And pushing that orange turned it into this completely different thing.”

Meanwhile, the back of the mind was a deep purple, murky space.

In keeping the world grounded, the cinematographers conducted camera tests making sure that what’s shown on screen felt realistic. Said Habib, “The mind world lenses have a lot less distortion, a lot less character, they’re a lot flatter – they’re akin to an Ultra Prime lens. And the human world is anamorphic, and so you have a lot more barrel distortion.”

Habib wanted to use a visual reference, so he turned to Olivia Wilde’s “Booksmart.” “That was a comedy film set in a high school that was on anamorphic. I would show the sets to the team and say, ‘Hey, look, the barrel distortion is pretty intense, and yet, the audience still laughed and they didn’t run out of the theater screaming.'”

Watch the video above.