On Thursday night, my lifeguard coworkers and I got together and saw "Finding Dory"--the youngest of us being 14 years old. This would be considered slightly unusual purely because "Finding Dory" is a children's movie, but from the audience we could see, the youngest person looked to be 13. Why are so many older kids going to see these kids' movies? Well, there are a few schools of thought on that (heh, fish pun), some more plausible than others.
The first idea is that we don't like the fact that we're growing up and we're desperate to get back to the days where we were free of responsibilities. I would agree with this concept, since we're scrambling to get back to our comfort zones. But there's more to this love for films targeted toward younger audiences--it reminds us that no matter how old we get, we can do anything we put our minds to, no matter who tells us no. It refreshes our sense of determination, and keeps us looking at the world with fresh eyes.
There's another perspective that says we love these movies because we find new hidden meanings. While that may have been true for films that came out when we were really young, there isn't much behind the curtain for newer films. We can still find a way to search for secret themes or ideas that aren't seen on impact, but to say that's our motivation would be less than correct. We love the occasional joke we didn't catch the first time around, but we don't watch new movies to find more of them--they're only accessories to the ensemble of a movie.
The true reason we watch these films is because we enjoyed them so much as kids. Watching "Finding Dory" after seeing "Finding Nemo" when we were littler gives us an experience of true nostalgia, and we feel like our lives have come full circle. The same thing happened with "Monsters University" and "Toy Story 3"--we knew and loved these films from an early age, and now that we're older, it's like our favorite movies are growing up with us, and we're coming full circle in our own lives. We're relearning how to cope with life, and it reminds us of our buried innocence, tucked away and forgotten by harsh reality.
"Finding Dory" is more than a movie to us--it's a reminder of our childhood, a ticket back in time to when we were younger and we didn't have the same level of crazy responsibility. It's our gentle push to accomplish the crazy things we didn't get to before--after all, if a fish with short-term memory loss can travel across the oceans, we can too: we need to just keep swimming.
