Inside Out and Inside Out 2, as successful as those movies were/are, I think are still terribly underrated with respect to their instructional/mentoring value for pre-teens and teenagers.
They each pack within an hour or two what you'd probably need a few lifetimes to figure out otherwise. And if you ever did figure it all out yourself, by the time you did, you would be old enough that your mind/intelligence would be too "crystallized" to change in light of it, and most of the opportunities to do things better would have already passed.
Inside Out and Inside Out 2 are both ingenious in the way they use physical mechanisms and narratives in the fabricated "inner world" to represent actual (meaning "actual" within the movie) mental/emotional mechanisms and narratives in the subject, and the lessons are more or less universal in nature. It's full of apt metaphor after apt metaphor, some of them obvious, some of them subtle enough that you might not consciously get them—at least not without thinking for a bit.
(I suspect that, even if you don't "get" some of the metaphors on a conscious level, they may still ultimately sink in in the way that matters, much like how the symbolism of a dream has a positive/healing/normalizing impact on your subconscious mind whether you consciously understand it or not. Not all subtle metaphors in the world of fiction have this quality, of course, but the metaphors in question are directly about the workings of emotions and the mind.)
And I can tell that the fact that this is all represented as a story with emotions as characters and various mental props gives it a powerful impact and enables it to settle/osmose into the minds of young viewers without any necessary effort, unlike, say, a psychology text or even a good self-help book. Even therapy would be a lot of drudgery compared to these movies (but not to claim that these movies necessarily completely replace the utility of therapy, nor probably of a good book for that matter).
Please have your kids see Inside Out and Inside Out 2. (The protagonist is 11 in Inside Out, and 13 in Inside Out 2, to give a hint of age-appropriateness, but I think the range of applicable ages is actually very wide.) And tell all your friends about it.
The creators of these movies make me envious and make me want to do something equally good for humankind.
