re: #55 wheat-dogg

These backstories are in a lot of so-called kid’s movies or TV shows, though the sadness is often glossed over for TV. Think about how many single-parent families there are in Disney flicks or TV shows, even going back to the 1960s. Lots of widows, widowers and divorced couples with kids. Orphans, too.

Pixar, to its credit, doesn’t gloss over those traumas, but includes them in their plots, very subtly, as the video suggests. And TBH some of them had not occurred to me before. For example, Wall-E. It’s no wonder the little guy wants companionship and love so much: he’s watched all his co-workers die one by one. I’ve watched this film several times, and frankly that bit never sunk in. So thanks for the clip.

The bit in the clip about Hopper from ‘A Bug’s Life’ bothered me alot because the context of his employment was to simply to terrify. When I was a kid, Hopper seemed to embody the nameless dread of another human being animalised (atavism in what is essentially an anthropomorphic narrative is now so technically meta that it raises my estimation of a fairly weak film retrospectively) but the bits where he was clearly unable to conceive of his tribe’s ultimate aim and thus the problematic nature of his role, was lost.

Hence my amazement.