Inside Out (2015) was a massive hit for Pixar. The story follows the emotional inner workings of an 11-year-old girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), who has to adapt to a new environment after her family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. The five personified emotions that lead the audience through the story are Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Anger (Lewis Black), and Fear (Bill Hader). These emotions administer Riley’s thoughts and actions to try and keep her stable with Joy as the de facto leader. As with many Pixar projects of this era the movie was a critical and financial success grossing over $800 million at the global box office on a budget of $175 million.

The plot is pretty straight forward, but there is one thing I noticed that stands out about Riley’s emotions. Throughout the movie everybody’s emotions are the same gender as they are. Riley’s mom has all female emotions lead by Sadness and Riley’s dad has all male emotions led by Anger. What’s different about Riley is that she has 3 feminine emotions – Joy, Sadness, Disgust – and 2 masculine emotions – Anger, Fear. This could just be Pixar wanting to diversify their main cast to attract a wider audience or maybe, just maybe they are hinting at something deeper within Riley’s emotional makeup.

Riley is shown to be attracted to a boy during the movie. There is also the fact that she strongly misses her best friend Meg from back in Minnesota. Emotions can be very confusing around this age. It makes sense for Riley to miss her oldest friend, but maybe her feelings were stronger than the movie let on. Riley’s strong feelings for may could be because of her masculine emotions Anger and Fear. When Meg mentions making a new friend they are the ones who cause her to become jealous and stop talking to her. Maybe she’s still figuring herself out? Disney is very noncommittal on issues such as this and tend to leave things up in the air for fans to take however they want. This way it makes it seem like they are doing something political when in reality they aren’t doing anything.

So why does Riley have coed emotions? One possibility could be that they are currently all female and once puberty hits Fear and Anger will become more feminine to match Joy, Sadness, and Disgust. In the trailer for Inside Out 2 viewers are treated to Anxiety, a new emotion voiced by Maya Hawke who seems to be coded as female. Another possibility could be that everybody’s emotion start out as coed, but as they get older they eventually solidify as a single gender group. Meaning by the time Riley is an adult Fear and Anger will change into feminine forms as with the emotions her mother has. Or maybe it’s just for the sake of comedy and I’m reading into things too deeply. Strangely none of the new emotions from the sequel are present in Riley’s parents so it will be interesting to see how long they stick around or if they operate in a different part of the brain.

Inside Out 2 will open in theaters on June 14, 2024.