Every filmmaker has their signature moment: the one that comes up time and again in discussions of their work. For Lee Unkrich, it’s the time he threw Woody and Buzz Lightyear in the furnace. As the director of Toy Story 3, Unkrich is responsible for what was, at least until recently, the animation house’s most existentially frazzling moment, in which his loveable plastic heroes slid hand in hand towards a thundering incinerator, and almost certain death.
“A lot of people asked me, ‘Aren’t you worried that this is too intense for children?’, the 50-year-old tells me. And honestly, he was. He’d originally planned the scene by imagining how he would act if he were on a crashing airliner with his wife and three children: “a little morbid,” he concedes, “but I wanted it to ring emotionally true.”
Hysteria and gallows humour felt absolutely wrong. “I’d just want to hold my family close, and we’d face it together,” he says. To check he hadn’t taken things too far, he tested a rough cut of the scene on his own kids, then aged between 12 and five years old. They approved.
The experience confirmed a hunch. “Kids are more resilient than we give them credit for,” he says. “When adults experience strong feelings, they naturally want to protect their kids from them, but experiencing good and bad things and bad is part of growing up. And the safest place to experience the most troubling of all is movies.”
A 2014 study in the British Medical Journal chalked up the toll. After surveying 135 popular films made between 1937 and 2013, the researchers found that main characters in animations were two-and-a-half times more likely to die, and three times more likely to be murdered, than their live-action counterparts.
For psychotherapist Julia Samuel, the author of the book Grief Works and a founder patron of Child Bereavement UK, these films don’t ask too much of their young target audiences.
“Children need as much truth about death as adults, just expressed in ways they can understand,” she explains down the line from New York. “And telling stories is how we understand ourselves and make sense of our world. So having a story to talk about together can help children not feel so alone with all of their strange thoughts and questions.”
In her book, Samuel writes that children can understand the concept of death – its universality, irreversibility and permanence – from around the age of eight. So simply avoiding the subject can do more harm than good. “Often adults will try to protect children from the reality of death, but what children don’t know, they make up to fill the gaps,” she says. “And what they make up is always more frightening than the truth.”
“What we talk about now is that the relationship and the love continue – perhaps through visiting a grave, or cooking grandma’s favourite chicken, or telling stories about what the person was like when they were alive,” she says. “Whereas my parents’ generation treated it very differently. For them, you forgot and moved on.”
She points towards that “postwar attitude” in older children’s films, which often depict bereavement as “something to fight through and come out of stronger” – like Bambi in the snow, or the orphaned Mowgli in The Jungle Book, surviving on his animal wits.
In fact, Unkrich had a hand in a classic of the type. In Pixar’s early days he co-directed Finding Nemo, and so bears some responsibility for the film’s prologue, in which Nemo’s mother Coral and his siblings are devoured by a barracuda, leaving his father Marlin alone in the ocean but for one unhatched egg.
“We feel like children when we’re grieving – very young and powerless,” she says. “So films that access our emotional self while bypassing our adult facilities of logic and reason can be immensely cathartic.” Which is reassuring to know, in sad times or otherwise.
Source: The Telegraph