“Inside Out 2” used a teen chat group called “Riley's Crew”

Being a teenager is hard, but if you want to understand how hard it is these days, you should probably talk to some of them.

That's exactly what the team behind Inside Out 2 did so, creating an advisory group of teenage girls they dubbed Riley's Crew to help ensure Riley's experiences in the film were as authentic as possible.

The film reunites us with Riley's core emotions – led by Joy (Amy Poehler) – who are suddenly invaded by a group of newcomers, including Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) when Riley turns 13 and enters puberty.

Riley leaves for a weekend hockey camp, hoping to secure a spot on the high school team, only to discover along the way that her two best friends won't be going to the same school as her. her in the fall. This sends Riley into a spiral, leading her to desperately try to make new friends and impress her potential future coach – until she ends up breaking down and having a panic attack. Stressful but too relevant.

“I’m not 13 anymore,” says director Kelsey Mann. “There's still a 13-year-old in me. I can tap into that, but I can't tap into that as much, especially if you want everyone to relate to that. I'm like, 'I have to go directly.” the source.' A lot of what we do at Pixar is doing research, and we had some really great people at Pixar who have a lot of connections to organizations outside of Pixar. I asked them to give me a very diverse group. of people, of girls. I was afraid that they would come from one area. So I said, “I don't just want people who live in California, right next to Pixar. We went across the country and that. really opened up because we didn't necessarily have to meet in person.”

Once they gathered their group of girls, ages 13 to 18, they looked to them for feedback the same way they would any other advisor on the film.

“Essentially, we had a Zoom room full of 13-year-old counselors watching every screening of the film and giving us feedback,” says co-writer Dave Holstein. “Making a Pixar movie is a never-ending conversation with a lot of very smart people from all walks of life, including a room full of 13-year-old girls. We talked to professors and doctors and all that, but it's an amalgamation of people's ideas. Our own kids weighed in and Kelsey has teenagers, but it was great to have this objective focus group. It was so much more rewarding when one of them got the joke, when. we knew something was going to happen with a 13 year old maid dealing with the same thing.

Want more movie news? Register for Weekly Entertainment's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, movie reviews and more.

Mann says the girls have been part of the filmmaking process for several years now and that Riley's Crew has seen every edit and screening of the film since the beginning. “They were incredibly helpful,” he reflects. “They tell us what's right and what's wrong, what they're interested in and what's not. The only way to do that is to go straight to the source.”