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VOL. 12, ISSUE 3 (2026)
Personifying the adolescent mind: Emotional dominance and identity formation in Pixar's Inside Out and Inside Out 2
Authors
Yamini
Abstract
This paper examines Pixar's Inside Out (2015)
and Inside Out 2 (2024) as a continuous literary text tracing the formation of
personality from childhood through early adolescence, with particular focus on
young teenagers. Reading both films through the lenses of literary
personification and allegory, affect theory, and Erik Erikson's theory of
adolescent identity formation, with a minor supporting reference to Ben
Jonson's theory of dominant humour, the paper argues that each film dramatizes
personality as a structure built through the management of competing emotions
rather than as a fixed, pre-given essence. Using qualitative textual analysis
and comparative film analysis, the paper shows how Inside Out stages childhood
personality formation around the necessary, initially resisted integration of
sadness alongside joy, while Inside Out 2 relocates this argument to early
adolescence, where anxiety, alongside envy, embarrassment, and ennui, threatens
to seize total control over Riley's emerging Sense of Self amid pressures of
peer acceptance and self-image. The comparative reading that follows traces
this movement from childhood foundation to adolescent complexity, situates the
films' concerns within the contemporary pressures facing young teenagers, and
acknowledges their broader relatability across the lifespan without losing
sight of their primary developmental focus. The paper concludes that both films
converge on a single claim: that a healthy personality forms not through the
suppression of difficult emotions but through their balanced integration into a
coherent, plural sense of self.
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Pages:21-27
How to cite this article:
Yamini "Personifying the adolescent mind: Emotional dominance and identity formation in Pixar's Inside Out and Inside Out 2". International Journal of English Research, Vol 12, Issue 3, 2026, Pages 21-27
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