SEATTLE — In many ways, 17-year-old Tacoma, Wash., resident Riya Richardson is exceptional.

Last year, the Boys & Girls Clubs of South Puget Sound named the 4.0 student its Youth of the Year as she was serving a two-year term on the Tacoma mayor’s youth commission. And this year, the Tacoma School of the Arts junior also enrolled full time at Tacoma Community College to chase her dream of studying international women’s law and juvenile justice.

But a peek under the gleaming veneer of Richardson’s accomplishments reveals experiences most teenagers would recognize: the ache of losing a beloved childhood pet, the nervous excitement of making new friends and the exhausting pressure of meeting high expectations.

And when the makers of the Academy Award-nominated film “Inside Out 2” were looking for teens to advise them on their main character, a 13-year-old girl named Riley, it was Richardson’s quintessentially adolescent life experience — not her accolades — that brought her behind the scenes.

Richardson is now about a week away from learning whether the movie she helped create — a sequel to Pixar’s “Inside Out” that premiered in June — will win an Oscar for best animated feature film, as its predecessor did in 2016. But absorbing the movie’s message of learning how to understand, regulate and value every emotion, even the hard ones, was its own reward.

“That’s something that isn’t really talked about,” Richardson said in September at the Boys & Girls Clubs’ Milgard Family Eastside Branch in Tacoma. “My emotions do matter and it’s OK to cry.”

Richardson spent three years as a member of Riley’s Crew, a nine-member group of teenagers from across the U.S. advising the creators of “Inside Out 2” as they developed the movie. The story follows Riley Andersen, a newly minted teenager on the precipice of starting high school, as her posse of personified emotions — Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust — clash with new arrivals brought on by puberty: Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui.

Richardson’s journey to becoming an adviser on the film began in late 2020, when someone working on the movie contacted her mentor, Boys & Girls Clubs site coordinator Achiya “Ms. Chiya” Clemons, and asked if she had any kids to recommend for the opportunity.

According to Clemons, the film’s creators were looking for a group of “average teenage girls” between the ages of 12 and 14 to watch early versions of the movie and tell the creators whether their depiction of Riley matched the real experiences of teenagers today. There was one key skill the filmmakers were looking for in their advisers, Clemons said: the ability to “articulate their feelings.”

Clemons said Richardson — whom she watched blossom from a shy sixth grader nervously entering the Boys & Girls Clubs for the first time into a confident, outgoing “force to be reckoned with” — immediately came to mind.

“She is very responsible, very leadership-oriented and she has a servant’s heart,” Clemons said. “But at the same time, Riya will speak her mind and it doesn’t matter what the situation is — if she doesn’t like it, she will let me know.”

Clemons told Richardson in late 2020 that she had nominated her and three other girls from the Boys & Girls Clubs for the opportunity. Richardson, then an eighth grader busy with multiple clubs, school and the daily turbulence of adolescence, said she mostly forgot about it until the following summer, when the film’s creators said they had chosen her for Riley’s Crew.

Over the next three years, Richardson said she and her fellow advisers received iterations of the film every four to six months to review, starting with colorless sketches of stick figures and building up toward the final, fully animated version. The group watched the films on an online portal, then met virtually with the director and producer to provide feedback on what resonated with them, what they did or didn’t like and what they would add, if they had the chance. Riley’s Crew was also given room “to be creative,” Richardson said.

“They were asking us if in a certain situation, ‘What would this look like for you, or would you change the colors of this?’” she said. “They kind of let our imagination run wild, and then they took some of the ideas and some of them made it into the film.”

One of the first questions Richardson remembers filmmakers asking her is which emotion she would recommend adding to the film as a character. A complex new feeling came to mind — one Richardson said she was experiencing for the first time as she grew old enough to reflect upon her younger self. The emotion came from looking back at her life and experiencing joy over how she had overcome her childhood shyness mixed with sadness over losing her childhood pet, a shih tzu named Willie, in 2020. She recognized this alchemy of feelings, accessible to her only now that she was a teenager, as nostalgia.

Richardson said she shared her recommendation with filmmakers, and the character Nostalgia — a snowy-haired, teacup-holding, bespectacled woman dreamily sighing over recent memories — made it into the final version of the film.

“Seeing myself shaping into the person I am today and still growing — that was what was nostalgic,” Richardson said. “It getting into the movie, maybe even for four seconds, was a big deal to me.”

A Pixar representative declined to comment on Richardson’s involvement in the film, but said “Riley’s Crew in general was incredibly helpful in researching ‘Inside Out 2.’”

Watching the movie gradually come to life — especially how it evolved based on feedback from her and other members of Riley’s Crew — was “really cool,” Richardson said.

In an early version of the film, Richardson said Riley’s character, experiencing a burst of anger, “exploded at her mom” in a way that some of the teenagers, especially girls of color like Richardson, felt didn’t match how real teenage girls would speak to their mothers. They shared their feedback with the filmmakers, who ultimately edited the scene, Richardson said.

“As a young woman of color, respect in the household was definitely something that — knowing Riley is a white character — I had to acknowledge for myself, and know that my opinion is definitely valuable,” said Richardson, who is East Indian and Native American. “Not in a brown household, not in an Asian household — that’s just not going to happen.”

Amid the joys of being behind the scenes, Richardson said being a member of Riley’s Crew came with one serious drawback: keeping “Inside Out 2,” and her involvement in it, a “very top secret.” Richardson had to sign a nondisclosure agreement to participate, and no one besides her immediate family could know she was helping Pixar with a project, she said.

The three years of secret-keeping paid off June 10, when Richardson’s agreement expired and she attended the movie’s world premiere with her mother at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles. Richardson sat in the front row of the theater with her fellow members of Riley’s Crew and saw the movie, along with her name listed at the end of the credits under “special thanks.”

Richardson said messages expressing shock and congratulations poured in from family and friends after the movie hit theaters, dominating her text and social media inboxes for days.

But even better than the response from her peers was seeing how “Inside Out 2” helped people, both children and adults alike, have important conversations about their emotions and mental health. And being there step-by-step along Riley’s journey helped Richardson appreciate how her own shy, introverted 13-year-old self would see the person she is today.

“I think she’d be very proud,” Richardson said, her eyes damp. “I think she’d just be in awe.”