Over the past few weekends, I’ve rewatched the first three Toy Story movies and watched the fourth, which I didn’t see in the theater, for some odd reason. These films are so clever and imaginative, and it’s fun to track the progress of the Pixar technology from the first through the last one. But watching these has made me wonder if maybe I was a bad toy owner as a kid.

I don’t recall having a “best friend” toy like Andy had Woody. I might have when I was really little, before I have clear memories, but I certainly didn’t have one who stuck with me to the point I was planning to take it to college with me. I guess I did have my R2-D2 action figure, but that was more about showing my fondness for Star Wars, and R2 is kind of a personal mascot. I didn’t have any particular feelings for that figure.

My toys were generally my cast to play out stories I made up, so whatever feelings I had for them were for the roles they were playing at that particular moment. The object itself wasn’t that important to me. I didn’t sleep with toys. My parents didn’t do the “you can bring one toy with you” thing when we went to restaurants. If I ever did bring something with me, it was most likely a book. A toy on its own wouldn’t have been any fun unless I could have it acting out stories, and I couldn’t do that properly in public.

I was also pretty fickle. I might be really into a new toy soon after getting it, but then I’d move on. I suffered a lot from 70s TV commercial oversell (as the fourth movie so hilariously depicted), so the toy that looked like so much fun on TV, that I desperately wanted and begged to get for Christmas or my birthday, ended up not doing anything like what was shown on TV. I remember in particular the Baby Alive, a baby doll that would actually eat and drink and then you’d have to change its diaper (it came with this powder stuff that you made into a glop with water to feed it). I’m not sure why that sounded like fun, but I had a baby brother at the time, and I guess I wanted my own baby to feed. One time dealing with the grossness, and I didn’t use that feature of the doll again. As I recall, if you “fed” the doll, you then had to pour a lot of water through it to rinse it out, and it was more trouble than it was worth. Then there was the bride doll I desperately wanted, got, and then wondered, “Now what?”

When I was little, I mostly played with the Fisher Price “little people.” I had the house and the school, though the school also got turned into things like churches and auditoriums. My brother inherited those, and he also got the farm and the airport. One house where we lived had a full basement with a room we got to use as a playroom, and we set up a whole town for the people, with other buildings built out of blocks.

My Barbie dolls were mostly used to act out plays and musicals (I’d make up stories to connect the songs on my record albums, so I guess I invented the “jukebox musical” decades before that trend hit Broadway). They also served as models for clothes I designed and made. In that same house where we had a full room as a playroom, I set up a kind of town for my dolls. I had the Barbie Dream House, and I built all kinds of additions to it, including a fireplace and balcony. I was around 10 during my most intense Barbie phase, and I think I used that as a way to imagine what my ideal adult life would be like. I had a Malibu Barbie, but my primary doll was actually a Francie, who I think was Barbie’s cousin. She was brunette, a bit less voluptuous and had slightly flatter feet instead of being designed for high heels. Mine was the “quick curl” model, with wiry hair that you could curl with a “curling iron” plastic rod. But basically, her hair ended up all clumpy and frizzy, which meant she was just like me. At one point, I tried to fix this with scissors, and that never goes well. During that more intense Barbie phase, when that doll was pretty worn out, I got a PJ (a brunette Barbie), sent my Francie to a spa for a makeover, and she came home as that PJ, so I saw her as essentially the same doll. Then about six months later we moved, and I pretty much stopped playing with Barbies. We didn’t have a good place to put up the Dream House, and since I was going into junior high, I didn’t want it in my room.

I have that last doll in a box in my closet, and I guess it’s weird that the one I kept is one I didn’t play with all that much. According to the Toy Story films, that’s been a horrible fate for that doll, to be boxed up in a closet and never played with. I don’t have a daughter to give her to, and given that she’s more than 40 years old (yikes!), I’m not entirely sure how safe she’d be. There’s no telling what they were putting in toys then.

Now that those movies have made me feel bad, maybe I should find her and let her look outside, or something.

I did have a bit of a Toy Story 3 experience with my books. My parents cleared out their attic with boxes and boxes of childhood books. I knew I would probably never have kids, but my church works with a summer program that provides summer enrichment for kids in disadvantaged neighborhoods. As part of it, they have a reading program, and they like for the kids to be able to take home a few books of their own to keep. I donated all my old books to that program, and I felt like the end of Toy Story 3, in which a grown Andy gives up his childhood toys to a child, when I handed over all those boxes. I did feel attached to some of those books, and now I like to imagine children who didn’t have books of their own bringing those books home with them, and maybe getting even more attached to them than I was because these might be the first books they got to own for themselves.

I’ve been keeping up my weekend movie night habit, but I’ve lost track of talking about them, so here are some thoughts on things I’ve watched recently, in no particular order:

A Fish Called Wanda — I needed a laugh, and I remembered this being very funny when I saw it at the theater when it first came out (I am old). It was still funny and quite an 80s time capsule, but not exactly the thing to watch when you’re a bit down because you’re losing faith in mankind, since even the “nice” people in this movie are fairly awful people. Still, brilliant writing and acting.

Weekend at Bernie’s — I guess I was on an 80s kick (and once I watched Wanda, Amazon started suggesting 80s movies). I remember wanting to see this when it came out because I thought the premise sounded fun, but I never did, and I’m not sure why. It came out during a summer when I was interning and had an apartment on my own in Austin (back in those days, apartments in Austin were dirt cheap over the summer. Times have changed), so there was nothing stopping me from seeing it. I went to a lot of movies alone that summer. Anyway, I finally saw it, and it didn’t quite live up to the premise. The core of the movie — the two guys pretending their dead boss is still alive because they’re afraid they’ll be killed if anyone realizes he’s dead while the assassin is going nuts because he’s sure he killed that guy — is rather brilliant and quite fun. But it’s a very small part of the movie. The movie’s only about 90 minutes long and we don’t even get Bernie killed until more than 30 minutes into the movie, and it’s another half hour or so before they learn their boss put a hit out on them and start really faking Bernie being alive. There’s a lot of padding with a romance subplot that doesn’t really add anything to the story. But, wow, the 80s vibes. It took me right back to my college years. The hair! The makeup! The clothes!

Ladies in Lavender — now for something a little more PBS-like. Two elderly spinsters during the 1930s find an injured young man washed up in front of their cottage on the Cornish coast and get a little too invested in him. That sounds like a horror movie, but it’s actually rather sweet. The guy is a Polish violinist who was on his way to America but ended up overboard from the ship, and the ladies want to support his dream, but fear they’ll lose him as one of them experiences her first crush late in life. Surprisingly, this gentle little movie was written (based on a short story) and directed by Charles Dance, perhaps best known now for playing Tywin Lannister. It has a great cast, starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. The young man looked really familiar, and it turns out he plays a villain in the Marvel movies, but he’s all grown up now.

Free Guy — This was the “restoring faith in humanity” movie I needed. I wasn’t sure about the idea of it, since it involves video games and I am not a gamer at all, but I was able to follow it well enough. In the world of a violent video game, one of the non-player characters becomes self-aware, falls in love with the avatar of one of the gamers, and starts being a hero in the game, doing good and stopping the violent acts, which inspires a worldwide movement in the real world — much to the chagrin of the guy who owns the video game company. He may destroy the game’s world unless that “Free Guy” can find the evidence the owner stole the code at the heart of the game. This movie is so sweet while also being fun and exciting. I found it oddly inspiring in the way it showed the impact of someone who does what he can to make the world better, one act of kindness at a time. At the same time, I felt like my lack of interest in video games was validated because that game didn’t look at all like fun to me.

West Side Story (the new one) — I love the original version. I have that soundtrack on cassette. I’ve seen the movie so many times, including on the big screen (thanks to the campus theater when I was in college). I’ve also seen numerous productions of the stage show. But I was intrigued by what could be done in a remake, and I was really impressed. The film is beautiful to watch, and the performances are terrific. I think the music is better than in the original. It was a little weird seeing something that was so familiar and yet so different. They took the basic story and the music and wrote a new script, in consultation with experts on the Puerto Rican community in New York in that time period, and I think the story works much better now. I intend to get this one on DVD so I can watch it whenever without worrying about whether it will stay on Disney+. I’d thought that this might be one Spielberg movie that didn’t involve John Williams, but it turns out that he consulted on the score because he was the pianist in the score for the original version!

Turning Red — A 13-year old girl from a Chinese immigrant family in Toronto in the early 2000s finds that her family has an interesting blessing/curse: upon puberty, the women turn into a giant red panda when they get emotional. Her overprotective mother intends to do a ritual that will remove the panda, but that’s the same night as the concert by the hot boy band the girl and her friends are determined to attend, whether or not their parents let them go. And she actually kind of likes the panda and isn’t sure she wants to get rid of it. It’s Pixar, so it’s sweet, funny, emotional, and has a universal emotional core even if it’s about a specific group of people. I’m from a different era and ethnicity and my parents weren’t nearly that overprotective, but it reminded me of my 7th grade year when I was 12. My friends and I were obsessing over Star Wars instead of a boy band, but otherwise the things they did at school and the way they talked about their obsession were all so familiar. The heroine even carried the same flute case I have (that I had then). There were a few moments when I was dying of secondhand embarrassment, but that was the universal part. Even if your parents didn’t go that far, when you were that age you probably felt that way because you feared you’d get embarrassed.

The Sword in the Stone — I don’t think I’d ever seen this Disney classic all the way through. There were scenes that were familiar that I know I’ve seen, but the rest was entirely unfamiliar. I know the story, of course, and I’ve even read the book it was based on. I’m not sure how well it holds up. It’s rather episodic, just a series of events rather than there being any kind of narrative drive. It was still cute and funny, and there’s always the game of finding the spots where they reused bits of animation from other movies that you can play with Disney films from that era.

Now I have to think of something to watch this weekend. I’m not sure what I’m in the mood for.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve focused my weekend movie nights on rewatching/watching the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. I saw the first three in the theater when they came out. I have the DVD of the first one and have watched it multiple times all the way through. The second and third were the sort of thing I’d stop on if I was channel surfing and they were on TV (back when I had cable). I don’t think I’d ever rewatched them straight through from beginning to end. I would drop in on them, watch my favorite parts, and then move on. I’d seen most of the fourth one on TV, but I don’t think I’d ever watched it through from beginning to end. There were scenes that were familiar, but there was a lot I didn’t recall. I hadn’t seen the fifth one at all.

It occurred to me while I was watching that these really are more “fantasy” movies than “pirate” movies. The only actual piracy — as in raiding, looting, and pillaging — happens near the beginning of the first film in the attack that kicks off the story. For the rest of the series, “piracy” is treated as a culture that’s being oppressed by the British government/East India Trading Company. It works like a secondary-world fantasy in which there’s something similar to something in our world, but is actually quite different in the way it works. The plots are all about breaking curses and finding magical objects or substances, and the resolutions to most of the stories involve magic in some way. I think the geography even works differently, since they seem to be making quick side trips to Singapore from the Caribbean, long before the Panama Canal. So, fantasy.

Looking at it that way, these movies actually work to scratch my itch for a particular kind of fantasy movie. There’s lots of swashbuckling adventure, a good dose of humor, and a dash of romance, all woven around magic and some decent worldbuilding (not so great if you’re looking at these as historical fantasy, set in a particular place and time, but it works pretty well if you consider it secondary-world fantasy where some of the places happen to have the same names as in our world).

I think the pacing on the second two movies gets weird. They’re very episodic, going sometimes rather abruptly from one sequence to the next. There’s a lot of “and then” instead of “so then.” It helped when I started thinking of those two movies as a season of a streaming series. They divide pretty neatly into episodes, so that you resolve something, that’s the end of the episode, and then you pick up in the next episode with a new problem.

The fourth movie doesn’t really work for me. I’ve mentioned the fact that it doesn’t have a protagonist. There’s a story line that just ends without any resolution. It gets better with the fourth film, where we have a protagonist again and a fun love interest. It’s lacking the magic (the storytelling kind, not the literal supernatural kind) of the original films, but it’s still a lot of fun.

I have a weird fascination with sailing ships, so I love the idea of a fantasy with a tall ship. There’s something so romantic about the image. The centerpiece of my last real vacation, a trip to Chicago, was an excursion on a tall ship on Lake Michigan. I got to help hoist the sails (hard work!) and then experience traveling only under sail power. I’d been on smaller sailboats before, but not one that big on that big a body of water. I seem to live in entirely the wrong part of the world for the things that fascinate me. A person who feels most alive in a forest and who loves tall ships probably shouldn’t be living on the prairie.

I need to find some sailing-focused fantasy novels to read. I loved the Liveships books by Robin Hobb. I’ll need to dig around for more.

On Twitter, I’ve been playing around with what the opposite of the standard Hallmark Christmas movie would be, reversing or inverting all the tropes. So, instead of the city girl with a corporate career and a successful, wealthy boyfriend going to her hometown for Christmas to help save her family business and deciding to ditch her career and boyfriend and get back together with her high school boyfriend, you might have the small-town girl working for her family’s business and dating her high school boyfriend who goes to the city, where she ends up getting a corporate career and successful, wealthy boyfriend.

There are also the movies where the big-city girl has to go to a small town that she’s not from, where she discovers the wonder of Christmas and finds it all so magical. I can kind of see someone going to her hometown and being touched by traditions she remembers from childhood, but it seems less likely to me that a city girl would ditch everything for a small town she’s not from.

Really, I don’t get their fascination with small towns. I’m from a small town and have no desire to go back to one. Though I think we might disagree on the definition of “small town.” The town I’m from had a population of about 3,000 when I lived there. They’re a bit above 5,000 now. The “small” towns in these movies are more what I’d call a small city. I can somewhat see the appeal of moving from a major metro area to a smaller city that’s still an actual city and that isn’t part of a major metro area. But if we’re talking about a place where Christmas is particularly magical, I’ve had small-town Christmases and big-city Christmases, and the city wins, hands down. I guess if you’re from a city in the South, you might be charmed by a New England village where you get to take a sleigh ride, but it’s still not going to be a case of “Wow, I had no idea Christmas could be so magical!” unless she was living under a rock in the city.

In most small towns, Christmas amounts to some sad, weathered plastic tinsel and lights on the lampposts of the downtown area and a Christmas parade in which Santa rides on a fire truck. There might be a tree-lighting ceremony in a park. And these things happen early in December, not a day or two before Christmas. There are smaller towns that do bigger things for Christmas, but they do this for tourism purposes and bring in a lot of people from outside the area. One lone visitor wouldn’t stand out among the crowds enough to be adopted by the friendly locals (and that’s another thing — in my small-town experience, the locals are friendly to each other but suspicious of outsiders).

The “small town” in my area that comes closest to the Hallmark Christmas ideal isn’t truly a small town. It’s a former small town that has become a big city in the heart of a major metro area. It still has the quaint old downtown Main Street, and they do it up big for Christmas, but beyond that is major suburban sprawl. At Christmas, the downtown area gets really crowded and has a lot of traffic. People come in busloads, and they book vacation packages at the big resort hotels in the town. It is really festive and Christmassy, but it’s not a truly “small town” experience.

There’s a lot more Christmas stuff going on in big cities than in most small towns. Just about every city in the metro area has a light display, a parade, and a tree-lighting ceremony. There are holiday markets, outdoor concerts, outdoor ice rinks, and concerts involving big-name groups and artists. If I have to watch a production of The Nutcracker, I’d much rather watch the New York City Ballet than the kids at Miss Edna’s Dance ’n’ Twirl. You could do a different Christmas thing every night in December. When I was in high school in a small town, we had church youth group excursions to the big city, in which we’d load up the church van and go to Dallas to go to one of the big malls for Christmas shopping and ice skating. I think it’s far more likely that someone from a small town would go to the city and think everything was so magical than the reverse.

I’m not sure where Hallmark got this small town fetish, but their older movies don’t have it. If you look before 2016 or so, a lot of them take place in cities. No one has to give up their careers or get back with their high school boyfriends. I watched one last weekend, Naughty or Nice, that has the heroine living in the suburbs of a city, and she stays there and stays with her lawyer boyfriend. From around the same time, there’s It’s Christmas Carol, a retelling of A Christmas Carol in which a high-powered professional in Chicago becomes nicer but stays in her career. That one also has Carrie Fisher as all the ghosts, carrying around and drinking from a champagne bottle.

I’d toyed with drafting a Christmas story during this month as a way to keep the writing habit while I’m working on research, but then the month got away from me, and now it’s a week until Christmas. Instead of adding work, I’m going to take next week off, so no posts (especially since my scheduling doesn’t seem to be working). I may do a “year in review” post the week after Christmas, but I’m mostly going to take it easy, bake, and snark at Christmas movies.

I’ve scheduled this post a couple of times, and it never seems to post, so it’s originally from right before Thanksgiving. Maybe my server just hates Frozen.

I’ve been watching movies that give me a “fall” vibe, so I rewatched Frozen 2 recently. It’s got an autumn setting and plenty of pretty fall forest imagery. And I came to the realization while watching that I might like it a bit better than the original film. It doesn’t have any one song as iconic as a couple of the songs in the first one, but I think I like the story better, maybe because it’s more of a fantasy story and less of a Disney princess story. As much as the first one tried to interrogate the usual Disney princess tropes (like mocking the idea of marrying someone you’ve just met after you sing a duet together), it was still pretty princessy. In the second, I feel like there’s more worldbuilding and some actual development of the magic instead of there just being magic because it’s a fairy tale. Maybe that’s the distinction: the first one was more of a fairy tale, while the second was a fantasy story that actually developed the culture and history of the world and looked into what the magic was all about. We seldom learn much about the world where a Disney princess movie is set. There’s little culture or history. We just know there’s a prince.

I found myself thinking that you could take the story of this film and make a decent “serious” live-action fantasy — not in the way that Disney has been doing live-action remakes, but making a different movie with the same core story. Take out Olaf, the musical numbers, and the cutesy stuff like pretending the reindeer are talking — basically, the stuff aimed at kids — and treat the history and the battles more realistically, and you could have something that fits in the Lord of the Rings mold. Thinking about how I’d rewrite it, I think I’d pretty much ignore the first movie and just start with the given that there’s the queen with ice powers and her more extroverted sister, then bad stuff happens in their kingdom and they have to go on a quest to resolve it by facing their family’s history. I might make Kristoff one of the reindeer herders, so Anna meets and gets to know him on the quest rather than them being in an established relationship with all the waffling about proposing. Or possibly he’s someone she meets on the journey to get to the place where the enchanted forest is. Have real battle scenes in the flashbacks and real fighting in the present. CGI could make the water horse look really cool.

I noticed that on Disney+ you can get a version dubbed in Norwegian. I’ll have to try watching these movies that way when I’m a little more advanced in my language study. Right now, I can read a lot pretty well, but I can’t seem to understand much when I hear the language spoken. I don’t even pick up many words on the train announcements on Slow TV (real-time videos of train journeys in Norway — you can watch it online, and it’s nice and relaxing. They just put a camera in a train, so it’s like being on a train ride, watching the scenery go by). They’re using words that are in my vocabulary, but I don’t pick up on them when I hear them. The only time I’ve been able to actually follow and understand what a Norwegian was saying was in a video I saw of a speech by the current king of Norway. I could understand him, but he apparently is considered to have an American accent, since he spent a good chunk of his childhood and went to elementary school in the US during WWII. Maybe watching a movie with a familiar story in that language will help me tune my ear into it. I don’t think I can count on running into the king if I ever go there to travel, so I need to be able to understand what I hear. Most people there do speak good English, but it’s good to be able to understand some of what you’re hearing. That also makes eavesdropping more entertaining.

After reading about and watching The Princess Bride last week, I followed it up by watching Lady Jane. Cary Elwes mentions that movie a couple of times in his book about The Princess Bride. That was the role that got him noticed so that he was cast in The Princess Bride, and it was filmed at one of the locations that was also used in The Princess Bride. It’s been sitting on my watchlist for a long time, but I’d been putting off watching it because the previous time I saw part of it, it was a painful experience.

Back when the History Channel had actual history-related content, they used to have a program called something like Movies in History, in which they’d show a film based on a historical person or event, then have historians talk about the actual history, comparing it to what was depicted in the movie. I loved this because I often would look up the real history after seeing a movie, and this was in the early 90s, before Google and Wikipedia, so looking up the real history required going to the library and looking in the encyclopedia or finding a book, and that was before my neighborhood had a library branch, so I had to drive downtown. When I was in college, I’d even look up the microfilm for newspapers at the time of the event (it was convenient living across the street from the main research library) so I could see how the event was covered in the news at that time. Seeing movies through this program saved me the trip to the library (unless I was still curious enough to want to read a whole book on the subject, but it at least dealt with the immediate curiosity so it could wait until my next trip to the library).

Lady Jane came on this program during the early 90s when I still only knew Cary Elwes from The Princess Bride and Helena Bonham Carter from A Room with a View. I was familiar with the history in general, so I knew about (spoiler!) the royal cousin who was made queen very briefly before Mary took the throne and had her executed, but I didn’t know a lot of details. I’d heard of the movie but hadn’t seen it and stumbled upon it partway through while channel surfing. The movie plays out like a tragic romance, with the couple in a marriage arranged by their parents, hating each other at first and then falling madly in love, then having a brief moment of hope that they could do great things leading the kingdom before their tragic end. Lady Jane was depicted as serious and scholarly, and we had her and a slightly younger version of Westley bonding over intellectual discussions of religious doctrine, so this movie was totally my jam. When the movie ends with the idea that they may have been executed, but they were going to be together in heaven, I was sobbing. It was a great romantic tearjerker.

And then the historian came on and ruined everything by talking about how it was all false. They hated each other, never fell in love, never really spent any time together. She even refused to see him before their execution. They also wouldn’t have had any impulse for reform while she was queen, since that wasn’t a way people would have even thought at that time. It ruined the movie because it was such a disappointment. I’ve since found other information that while it is true that they didn’t spend any time together and probably were not in love, her reason for refusing to see him before the execution was that she thought there was no point since they were about to be reunited in heaven. Also, the word “Jane” was carved into the cell of the Tower where he was kept before his execution. So, maybe not a love story, but it’s possible that if they hadn’t been executed so young they might have worked out. It is true that she was very studious and was considered one of the most highly educated women of her time.

I didn’t get nearly as weepy on this viewing, and I watched it with the idea that it was basically a historical romance using characters and situations that existed. It also helps to imagine the novel My Lady Jane, which puts a fantasy twist on the story and gives it a happy ending. It’s amusing seeing such a young Helena Bonham Carter, long before she went into Tim Burton mode. The costuming and scenery are lovely, and I had fun playing “name the location.” There are a few scenes set in the same courtyard where Princess Buttercup is introduced to the people, and there’s an exterior set at a castle I’ve visited but that doesn’t actually play a role in this story. They’re pretending that part of that castle is also part of that other manor house, even though they’re in different parts of the country. Aside from the two young leads, most of the cast were from the Royal Shakespeare Company, including Patrick Stewart (pre Star Trek) as Lady Jane’s father, so it’s very well-acted.

If you like costume dramas and tragic romance, this one can be entertaining. Just ignore the history.

I recently read a book on dealing with stress and burnout, and one of the things they recommended was completing the stress cycle. The physical responses we have to stress are fight, flight, or freeze, but we can’t respond that way to most of the things that stress us out in the modern world (or we’d get in trouble if we did). If you run into a lion while hunting, you’d run back to your village, and then you and the other villagers might fight it. You’d have a cathartic moment when you knew you were safe and your body could move out of the stress response. You don’t really get the same cycle of stress and release when your coworker gets annoying in a meeting, so you stay in a state of stress.

One way to deal with this stress is through exercise, letting your body feel like there’s been a fight or flight so it can relax. Another way is to work through emotions. Have a good laugh or cry. Watching a tearjerker movie can work you through the cycle because if it’s done well, it covers a full emotional journey that comes to a satisfying conclusion. Reading that, I realized that would make Pixar films actually work as therapy. You go on an emotional journey that makes you laugh and cry and come out feeling transformed (and they’re very conscious about doing that).

So, last weekend, I opted for some Pixar therapy on my movie night and watched Onward, the movie that kind of fell between the cracks because it was released a couple of weeks before the pandemic kicked in and movie theaters closed. It was utterly delightful and a perfect example of that laugh/cry emotional journey.

The story is set in a high-fantasy world that’s moved into modern times, like what would happen if a Dungeons & Dragons setting got electricity and technology but forgot about magic. It’s a modern American suburb, but with mushroom tract houses and trolls running the toll booths on the turnpikes. In this world are two teen elf brothers whose father died while the older was very young and before the younger was even born. The younger feels deeply the lack of a father and has very little confidence. The older is a fantasy geek who wishes for the kind of life from the old days before people forgot their magical heritage. On the younger’s 16th birthday, they get a wizard’s staff, a magical stone, and spell that will allow them to spend one day with their father. They get the lower half reconstituted, but then things go wrong, and they’ll need another stone to get the rest of their father so they can actually talk to him. Off they go on an epic quest with their father’s legs, relying on the older brother’s knowledge of fantasy and the younger brother’s latent magical abilities, but the longer it takes them to get what they need to complete the spell, the less time they’ll have with their father.

This movie is laugh-out-loud funny, both using and poking fun at established fantasy tropes, while at its heart it’s a serious and emotional story about loss, family bonds, parenthood, and finding confidence. During the big, climactic sequence, I was alternating between laughing and sobbing. It’s perfectly cast, with Tom Holland (Spider-Man) as the timid younger brother and Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy) as the brash older brother. I suspect the animators were inspired by the actors because you can see their facial expressions and mannerisms in the animated elf characters. I’m sure there were little details I missed in all the fantasy worldbuilding, so I’m sure I’ll be watching this one again.

This one might be either rough or cathartic for people who’ve lost a parent, depending on where you are in the grieving process. It might help a kid who’s lost a parent process their feelings, or it could just rub on the emotional raw spot, so be aware of this before watching.

It gave me just the right emotional journey I was looking for, and the balance between deep and silly was so good that I’m going to have to analyze the writing to figure out how to pull that off.