‘I don’t look back darling, it distracts from the now.’

Surely, when he created and voiced the diminutive and endearingly cuboid Edna Mode, Pixar magician Brad Bird knew the deep significance of the message he was passing on to the wide-eyed youngsters watching his film open-mouthed with joy of pant-wetting proportions. Don’t look back. No regrets. You make your own luck. All those things my mum used to tell me have just been summed up by an artist’s impression of Anna Wintour circa 1982. Blow me down.

Now, my negligent baby-sitting approach is more than a little to blame for this most recent epiphany, seeing as looking after my four-year-old brother feels like being left with a lit stick of dynamite duck-taped to my hand - for which, my friends, the antidote is, always, Pixar on repeat. Bless him. But I’m starting to think more and more that these ‘children’s’ films are some of the most philosophical that surround us today.

As Hollywood churns out superhero sequels, horror porn, barely-disguised regular porn and remake after dire remake, Pixar’s beautifully nuanced characters engage us not only because they’re cute and fuzzy (though I wouldn’t fancy snuggling up with Lightning McQueen), but because they’re so – forgive the cross-species application of the term - human.

In Toy Story, Buzz and Woody tackle questions of existentialist proportions probably more often found in Nietzsche: ‘You’re a toy!’ Woody memorably screams at his misguided, be-spacesuited companion, ‘T-O-Y, TOY!’Ratatouille charts the angst experienced by every teenage misfit, even though he’s ostensibly just a rat who likes cooking. Change that to a council estate kid with a prodigious knack for the violin, or a prep-school boy with a passion for grime and garage, and, if you’ll forgive the gross stereotyping, you immediately see where Remy’s coming from.

And Nemo. How many times, I ask you, has morbidity infringed on you to the extent that you have to say ‘I love you!’ before ‘Bye!’ on the telephone to a loved one, just in case one of you gets mown down by the 42 in rush hour before you see each other again? If you’ve not seen Finding Nemo, just replace that bus with a deep-sea diver and a zip-lock bag. Terrifying stuff.

These films are, ostensibly, for kids. Yet take a look around the cinema and not only is the auditorium filled with adults, but those adults are surreptitiously drying their eyes underneath their 3D glasses. Just look at the bereaved, marginalised Carl in Up, or Andy’s mum’s empty-nest woes in Toy Story 3. Or perhaps don’t look, it’s just too painful. Leave that to the kids. Stuffing popcorn into little mouths with sticky, grubby hands, they don’t look too concerned. They’re clearly the professionals.

 

This article first appeared on lydiawrites.tumblr.com