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I know you don't want me to, but... I miss home. I miss Minnesota. You need me to be happy, but... I want my old friends and my hockey team. I want to go home. Please don't be mad.
―Riley telling her parents that she misses her old life in Minnesota[src]

Riley Elphaba Andersen[4][5] is a major character and the main location for her emotions in the 2015 Disney/Pixar animated feature film Inside Out, and its upcoming 2024 sequel. She is a 13-year-old girl who loves ice hockey. She was uprooted from her happy and simple life in Minnesota and taken to San Francisco, California, where she experiences various changes in her life. Her emotions (Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger) help her through this tough time, ensuring her well-being. After reaching puberty, Riley gets a new set of emotions: Anxiety, Envy, Ennui, and Embarrassment.

Background[]

Personality[]

Riley's emotions contribute to her primary behaviors in the film. Overall, Riley is upbeat, honest, and goofy when she is content. However, in adolescence, Riley becomes more sentimental, shy, and uncertain of herself as her other emotions begin appearing. By the time her family moves to San Francisco, she starts to be more troubled, irked, and lonely. Her emotions at this point try to help her get adjusted to the new life. Riley can second-guess herself, but she doesn't always repent her actions.

Riley really misses Minnesota and is unable to cope with the transition. However, Riley is afraid to tell her parents her true feelings as they want her to accept the new home and because she has always been their "happy girl".

As time goes on, however, Riley becomes emotionally vulnerable, entering a sort of numb state of mind and coming to the point where she tries to run away, almost losing herself in the process. But it is here she realizes that she had almost given up on the things that matter the most to her in life and realizes the risk just in time. Returning home and admitting to her parents that she's greatly depressed, she learns to accept San Francisco when her parents comfort her over the personal loss, and Riley (with the guidance of her emotions) eventually adapts to her new home in San Francisco.

With Riley's emotions now working all together and without one suprassing the other, it would seem she had reached an emotional stability. However, once she reaches puberty, that stability suffers with the arrival of four new emotions that end up "bottling up" the old ones, causing a sudden change on her behavior. Riley's usual upbeat and happy demeanor becomes anxious, with Riley trying desperately to be friends with a new crowd (especially with her about to enter high school on the next school year) to the point of abandoning the old friends she already had, while also feeling embarrassed whenever she tries to express her true feelings.

Physical appearance[]

In the first film, Riley is an 11-year-old preteen (later 12) with a slender figure. She has shoulder-length, dirty-blonde hair and cornflower-blue eyes. Both her parents have brown hair and brown eyes, implying that both the dirty-blonde hair and cornflower-blue eyes are recessive traits. She has very faint freckles around her nose, and she also has a noticeable gap between her two front teeth. In the second film, Riley is now 13 years old. Her hair has grown longer, and she puts it up in a ponytail, just like her mother's. She also has braces on her teeth as well.

Riley is seen wearing a different outfit daily. When first shown in the teaser trailer, she wore a long-sleeved shirt with thin horizontal red, yellow, and light green zigzag lines, brown pants, and red Converse sneakers. When Riley arrived on her first day of school, she wore the same outfit but a yellow jacket. When Riley suffered a brain freeze, she wore a solid pink short-sleeved shirt, blue jeans, and green Converse sneakers. When arriving in San Francisco, she wore a long-sleeved rainbow shirt, blue jeans, and pink socks. Riley's pajamas consisted of a green short-sleeved shirt with blue trim featuring a koala bear on the front and dark blue sweatpants.

Mind Locations[]

Riley's mind is extremely large and includes certain locations like:

  • Emotion Headquarters: The central part of Riley's mind, where Anger, Disgust, Joy, Fear, and Sadness (later, Anxiety, Ennui, Envy, and Embarrassment) all live and control Riley and where her memories are produced.
  • Personality Islands: Multiple personifications of different sides of Riley's personality, as determined by the core memories. Whenever Riley is doing whatever relates to a specific island, that island will animate.
  • Long Term Memory: Enormous shelves of various memories forming the main layout of her mind.
  • Imagination Land: A place where everything Riley imagines is built.
  • Dream Productions: Where dreams are filmed.
  • Subconscious: Contains Riley's worst fears.
  • Abstract Thought: A place where ideas (or anyone inside) are simplified to abstract concepts.
  • Train of Thought: A train that connects Headquarters and the rest of the mind.
  • Memory Dump: An abyss surrounding Headquarters, where faded memories end up and eventually disappear to be forgotten forever.
  • Sar-chasm: a chasm formed after Riley reaches puberty and her new emotions take over HQ and "bottle up" the old ones. It is located somewhere at Long Term Memory and turns anything that is said on one side into a sarcastic remark when reaching the other one.

The time of day in Riley's mind changes depending on what Riley is doing at the moment. When she's awake, it's daytime. When she's asleep, it darkens to a night sky. When she becomes depressed and apathetic, it becomes foggy and dark.

Appearances[]

Inside Out[]

Riley is a major character in the film. Her mind is the main location and the main priority of it. When Riley is born, Joy, her first living emotion, is conjured up with baby Riley smiling right at her parents. A few seconds later, another emotion named Sadness appears and makes Riley cry. Joy pushes Sadness out of the way and makes Riley happy again. Over the years, Riley starts to grow up in Minnesota and her other emotions, Disgust, Anger, and Fear, are born. Riley becomes happy and jolly pretty much all the time and hardly sad at all. Because of her happiness and joy, Joy unintentionally mistreats Sadness (who was only used when Riley threw tantrums). Riley also becomes one of the best players on her hockey team, the Prairie Dogs.

When it is time for Riley and her parents to move to San Francisco, Riley becomes sad and misses her life in Minnesota. Riley starts to go from joyous and happy to sentimental and a bit depressed because she misses the good old days in Minnesota, not to mention that their new house is horrible, and the only type of pizza they serve at a pizza restaurant is broccoli pizza. Riley becomes even sadder, and Joy does all she can to prevent this from happening. Things go from bad to worse when Sadness accidentally humiliates Riley by making her sob in front of the class while telling her class about the good old days in Minnesota (although the other kids had empathetic looks on their faces when she was crying). This causes a new core memory to be created, which is a sad one. Joy doesn't want Riley to ever be sad, so she decides to get rid of it. But during an argument, Joy and Sadness literally get lost in Riley's mind, leaving the others to try to keep Riley's head on straight, but only end up causing Riley to become rude, reclusive, and cantankerous.

From there, matters start taking turns for the worst. The next day, Riley video chats with her old friend Meg from Minnesota. Things go well until Meg tells Riley all about the wonders of her new best friend, whereupon Riley feels replaced and gets so angry that she hangs up on Meg. When she attends the hockey tryouts, she doesn't perform too well, partly because of Anger ruled over her. When an excellent slap shot fails to get to the goal, Riley is frustrated.

Riley figures that since everything in San Francisco is horrible, combined with her being so nostalgic about Minnesota, she decides to run away and return to Minnesota (an idea that Anger created, believing it was in her best interest). She steals her mother's credit card and skips school to catch a bus back to Minnesota. As her emotions struggle inside her mind, Riley becomes apathetic and fully depressed. When Joy and Sadness finally make it back to Headquarters, Riley finally realizes what she's doing is wrong and decides to run back home. When Riley returns to her worried parents, she confesses that she was pretending to still be happy and misses the good old days in Minnesota. Her parents confess that they miss Minnesota as well, and Riley finally lets her feelings out. Soon enough, things are finally looking up for the Andersens. One year later, Riley is part of a brand-new hockey team, the Fog Horns, and there are new islands in her mind, and she has finally accepted San Francisco as her new home.

Riley's First Date?[]

Riley returns in the short film, where she goes out skating with a boy named Jordan (whom she met at the end of the film). Meanwhile, her parents suspect that she is going out on a date with him and the Andersen's emotions all try to find a way to make it through this, like when her mother tells Riley in a "cool way" that is Riley hanging with Jordan, leaving Riley confused, with weird and comical results. After assuring her mother that she and Jordan are going skating with a group of friends, she soon realizes that Jordan was left alone with her father. She rushes downstairs to find her father and Jordan listening to loud rock music while playing with air guitars. Embarrassed, Riley drags Jordan out the door.

Inside Out 2[]

Riley will appear in the upcoming sequel where she will grow into a teenager where she gets a new set of emotions, including Anxiety. Her character design is also slightly different, due to the advancements in CGI technology since the first film's release.

Finding Dory[]

Riley is an Easter egg in the movie. When Dory is thrown into Destiny's aquarium, she swims back and fears with a child together with the group of children and Riley is in.

Disney Parks and live appearances[]

Disney-on-ice-follow-your-heart-inside-out-riley

Riley Andersen in Disney on Ice: Follow your Heart.

Riley's mind was built at Hong Kong Disneyland during the Coolest Summer Ever event in 2015. Guests can enter her mind and meet Joy and Sadness at the Art of Animation exhibition in the Opera House on Main Street USA.

Riley made her first actual live appearance in the Disney on Ice show Follow Your Heart.

Gallery[]

Wiki
The Disney Wiki has a collection of images and media related to Riley Andersen.

Trivia[]

  • In the teaser trailer, Riley with her mom and dad are eating from Chinese food boxes of the same type as the one seen in A Bug's Life and several other Pixar films.
  • In the said teaser trailer, the playground scene in Riley's Memory Orbs is taken from Sunnyside Daycare in Toy Story 3.
  • Her last name is based on Pixar employee Darla K. Anderson and the Toy Story character Bonnie Anderson.
  • Riley is cross-dominant, using her left hand when drawing Bing Bong on the walls as a toddler and shooting the puck in hockey and her right when she is eating.
  • Riley is one of the few characters in the film to have emotions of different genders.
    • According to Pete Docter, this was done to make them as diverse as possible, while the emotions of other people were uniformized for quick readability. He states that it's "a little phony, but hopefully, people don't mind."
    • When going into the minds of various characters, the film seems to suggest that children and teenagers all have emotions of different genders while adults' emotions are all the same gender, but a cat's and dog's emotions are identical to the cat's or dog they're controlling.
  • Riley's original hometown was Minneapolis, as shown as the arrival city on the Transway Bus Lines website when she gets the idea to run away.
  • Riley's yelling, screaming, and crying when she was a toddler are actually recycled recordings of Boo's shouting and crying from Monsters, Inc.
    • Coincidentally, both Monsters, Inc. and Inside Out were directed by Pete Docter, which is said in several posters and TV spots.
    • Mary Gibbs, Boo's original voice actor, is even listed under additional voices for this film.
  • Riley's original home in Minnesota might be a reference to director Pete Docter, who was also originally from Minnesota.
  • Riley is inspired by Pete Docter's daughter, Elie (the voice of Young Ellie in Up, which he also directed). Elie Docter was very outgoing and goofy when she was little, but became quieter and more introverted as she got older.
  • What appears to be the A113 Easter egg is positioned on a wall next to Riley before she pulls out her phone the first time when she is running away. It is spray-painted in black behind her.
  • Her middle name, Elphaba, is a reference to the character from the book and Broadway musical "Wicked".
  • Riley appearing as a cameo in Finding Dory could imply that both Inside Out and Finding Dory could take place in the same universe as the Marine Life Institute is in California and Riley currently lives in San Francisco.
  • Unlike other people, all of Riley's emotions wear different clothes and have different hairstyles.
  • When Riley tells her parents she wants to go back home, Kaitlyn Dias was in tears.

References[]

  1. https://ohmy.disney.com/news/2016/11/15/9-finding-dory-fun-facts-and-easter-eggs-you-probably-didnt-notice/
  2. Inside Out: The Essential Guide, page 6
  3. Inside Out Press Kit
  4. Inside Out: The Essential Guide, page 6
  5. Inside Out Press Kit
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v - e - d
Inside-Out-Logo
Media
Films: Inside Out (video/soundtrack) • Inside Out 2

Television series: Untitled Inside Out series
Shorts: Riley's First Date?
Video Games: Inside Out: Thought BubblesDisney Infinity: 3.0 EditionDisney Crossy RoadDisney Emoji BlitzLEGO The IncrediblesDisney Heroes: Battle ModeDisney MirrorverseDisney Magic Kingdoms
Books: The Art of Inside OutThe Art of Inside Out 2

Disney Parks
The AnnexInside Out HeadquartersInside Out Emotional WhirlwindPLAY!Pixar Pal-A-Round

Entertainment: Pixar Playtime Pals
Restaurants: Angry Dogs
Shops: Bing Bong’s Sweet Stuff
Parades: Dreams.... And Shine Brighter!Move It! Shake It! Dance and Play It! Street PartyPixar Play Parade
Fireworks: Disney EnchantmentDisney in the StarsHappily Ever AfterIlluminate! A Nighttime CelebrationMomentousTogether Forever: A Pixar Nighttime Spectacular
Spring: Disney Color-Fest: A Street Party!
Summer: Pixar Water Play Street Party!
Christmas: World of Color: Season of Light

Characters
Inside Out: The Emotions (JoySadnessAngerDisgustFear) • Mrs. Andersen's EmotionsMr. Andersen's EmotionsBing BongRainbow UnicornThe ForgettersJangles the ClownRiley AndersenMrs. AndersenMr. AndersenMegFrank and DaveJordanFritz Brazilian Helicopter Pilot

Inside Out 2: AnxietyEmbarrassmentEnnuiEnvyVal OrtizCoach Roberts
Deleted characters: Gloom

Locations
Emotion HeadquartersLong Term MemoryImagination LandDream ProductionsAbstract ThoughtPersonality IslandsSubconsciousMemory DumpMinnesotaSan FranciscoRiley's House
Objects
Memory OrbsCore Memory OrbsTrain of ThoughtDaydreamsBottomless BagRocket WagonPixar BallA113Pizza Planet Truck
Songs
Bundle of JoyThe Bing Bong SongTripleDent GumItoshi no RileyBack in BlackTake My Breath Away
See also
The Science Behind PixarPixar in a BoxInside Out: Joyful Sweets


v - e - d
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Games
Disney InfinityDisney Infinity: 2.0 EditionDisney Infinity: 3.0 Edition
Playable Characters
Disney Infinity: Jack SparrowMr. IncredibleSulleySorcerer MickeyLightning McQueenWoodyMaterBuzz LightyearMike WazowskiRandall BoggsHector BarbossaDavy JonesElastigirlDash ParrViolet ParrSyndromeJohn ReidTontoJack SkellingtonPhineas FlynnPerry the PlatypusJessieWreck-It RalphVanellope von SchweetzRapunzelElsaAnnaHolley ShiftwellFrancesco Bernoulli

Disney Infinity: 2.0 Edition: Iron ManCaptain AmericaHulkBlack WidowThor OdinsonHawkeyeNick FuryLoki LaufeysonMaleficentMeridaSpider-ManVenomIron FistNovaGreen GoblinRocket RaccoonGrootStar-LordGamoraDrax the DestroyerStitchTinker BellAladdinJasmineDonald DuckBaymaxHiro HamadaFalconYonduSam FlynnQuorra
Disney Infinity: 3.0 Edition: YodaUltronLuke SkywalkerFa MulanAnakin Skywalker/Darth VaderLeia OrganaHan SoloAhsoka TanoDarth MaulObi-Wan KenobiFinnReyPoe DameronKylo RenJoySadnessAngerFearDisgustMinnie MouseOlafChewbaccaHulkbuster Iron ManEzra BridgerKanan JarrusGarazeb OrreliosSabine WrenBoba FettSpotJudy HoppsNick WildePeter PanBalooCaptain America - The First AvengerBlack PantherVisionAnt-ManAliceMad HatterTimeDoryNemo

Non-Playable Characters
Disney Infinity: HammRexSlinky DogEmperor ZurgJoshamee GibbsPintel and RagettiMaccusEdna ModeRick DickerMirageLuigiRamoneFloChick HicksThe KingGuidoFinn McMissileCarla VelosoTractorsArtScott "Squishy" SquibblesTerri and Terry PerryDon CarltonEaster Bunny

Disney Infinity: 2.0 Edition: WaspCaptain MarvelAnt-Man (Hank Pym)SifMODOKFrost GiantsIron PatriotWinter SoldierMysterioDoctor OctopusBlack CatWhite TigerLuke CageJ. Jonah JamesonCosmo the SpacedogThe CollectorThe WitchPleakleyGolden Harp
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Objects
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