The most heartbreaking sequences in the animation studio’s filmography tend to revisit the characters’ painful pasts to pave the way for their emotional catharses, writes Yasmin Omar.
We all remember when we first saw it. A young couple, starry-eyed with possibility, lying on a picnic blanket under a perfectly blue sky pointing out shapes in the fluffy clouds. The young couple slotting coins into their big glass travel-fund jar and envisioning their jet-setting future. That same couple, now matured into old age, together in a hospital room realising they waited too long to fulfil their dream of seeing the world. That is, of course, the beginning of Up (2009), a devastating, wordless montage that distils a lifetime of happiness and grief, domesticity and compromise into just over four potent minutes, and has been known to reduce even hardened adults to blubbering sobs. Memories are a touchstone of the Pixar experience, the bedrock of their sentimental canon. The most wrenching scenes in the animation studio’s back catalogue are often centred around a character wistfully looking back at a joyful past, since lost and never to be retrieved again.
Up (2009)
The aforementioned Up sequence gains much of its power through mirroring: showing us the carefree fun of distant memories, then juxtaposing them with more recent distress. On a bright afternoon, a young Ellie enthusiastically beckons Carl to join her at the top of a hill and, though winded and stopping to catch his breath, he eventually makes it up there. Later, on a metaphor-laden sunset, it’s elderly Carl who’s at the top of the hill and Ellie – unwell by this point – doesn’t have the strength to meet him, and collapses on the slope. It’s a poignant reminder of their role reversal, how illness has robbed Ellie of her former vitality.
Up (2009)
Similarly, a shot of Ellie and Carl hopefully decorating a nursery with sunshine paint suddenly pans to the two of them in a doctor’s office, heads bowed, with Ellie doubled over in pain as they’re told they can’t have a baby. The tonal shift is evident in Michael Giacchino’s Oscar-winning score, whose bouncy optimism transitions to a minor key and slows in tempo when the news is delivered. Visually, too, all the yellows and blues and pinks leak away – colour, and its attendant cheer, is gone. The frame is almost entirely black, a rectangular strip of sanitised grey office the only thing visible in the darkness. We feel for Ellie and Carl’s loss more deeply because their excitement for parenthood is still fresh in our minds.
Such contrasts are also at the heart of the ‘When She Loved Me’ montage in Toy Story 2 (1999), another emotionally fraught Pixar sequence in which Jessie the cowgirl remembers the days of being cherished by her previous owner Emily. Structurally, it lays the groundwork for Up, since it establishes a pattern of callbacks that sharpen Jessie’s soft, honeyed memories. As Sarah McLachlan’s mournful ballad starts, green-leafed trees whoosh past the window and Jessie sits in a car – seatbelted alongside Emily, whose hand protectively guards the toy – looking dotingly up at her. Jessie’s face fades into an image of the sun, which demonstrates just how good she feels, lit up from within. The pair then ascends a hill (as in Up!) and plays in a tyre swing.
Toy Story 2 (1999)
When the song draws to a close, and a newly teenage Emily rediscovers Jessie under the bed where she dropped her years prior, we’re soon back in the car, but the trees outside are an ominous orange. Autumn – that transitional phase, that harbinger of impending death – is near. Emily arrives at the same hill, and Jessie, like the audience, expects the playtime she’s yearned for to finally resume. But no, Emily puts her in a donation box and drives away. The scene mostly plays out from a third-person perspective, except for this cutting revelation, which is filmed from Jessie’s point of view: the inside of a cardboard container.
Coco (2017)
Much like Toy Story 2, being forgotten is a primary concern in Coco (2017), with Land of the Dead inhabitant Héctor worrying that his eponymous daughter has wiped him clean from her memory. Where Jessie ruefully looks out of a window before her reverie, it’s a ripped-up sepia family portrait that sparks Héctor’s reminiscence. He begins singing the aptly titled ‘Remember Me’, and we flash back to him as a young man performing the lullaby to the then infant Coco.
The imagery in this scene has the hazy quality of a souvenir, and the worn look of a sun-bleached photograph, blurring at the edges to suggest its fragility (just a little longer and it, like the memory, will be damaged beyond repair). Coco watches her father with open adoration, her slippered feet kicking in time to the guitar, then places her little hands on his cheeks. The film’s emotional catharsis comes when its lead Miguel, Héctor’s great-great-grandson, tearfully sings ‘Remember Me’ to a wizened, music-averse Coco. Somewhere deep inside her, a memory is stirred and she, to the surprise of her assembled family, picks up the melody with Miguel. It’s memory that heals intergenerational trauma in Coco, and literally mends the torn photograph.
Inside Out (2015)
Cerebral adventure Inside Out (2015) – and its sequel – is explicitly about memory, signified by glowing orbs whose colour corresponds with a particular emotion in 12-year-old Riley. Pete Docter’s original neatly summarises a thesis that runs through multiple Pixar movies (including Up, Toy Story 2 and Coco): that happiness can come even after crushing heartache. When the anthropomorphised emotion Joy rewinds one of Riley’s core memories, of being lifted up by her hockey team, its yellow colour (indicating contentment) turns blue (indicating sorrow). The upbeat, glass-half-full Joy is confused: how could that unhappy memory transform into pure elation?
Inside Out (2015)
Until now, she has seen Sadness as her antagonist, blackening otherwise glorious moments with her misery. In actuality, Joy and Sadness are yin and yang, both necessary for Riley’s overall wellbeing. When they simultaneously press the button on the child’s sentimental-control panel at the end of the film, they fill her with bittersweet emotion and produce a new memory orb: a complementary swirl of yellow and blue. This is the Pixar way. Rather than ignore difficult memories (of bereavement, estrangement, loss), these films recognise their importance, confront their painful reality and reconfigure them into something beautiful.
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