Up and down and Up!

I'd heard good things about Pixar's new animated movie Up! in the summer but then a friend told me she heard there was a pregnancy loss involved in the film and we might not want to see it with the children. I didn't know enough about it at that time to make a decision.

It's a beautiful movie. We rented it over the weekend. My husband got it and I decided to keep quiet about what I'd been told about the possible babyloss element. Near the end of summer I had read a news story about a dying girl whose last wish was to see the film and Pixar got a DVD to her home and she watched it before she passed away. I figured if her mother let her see it and found it helpful, well, that was good enough testimony for me and our grieving family.

****spoiler alert****

The movie starts with a little boy named Carl, crazy for an explorer on the silver screen, who meets his match in another little adventure fan named Ellie. They become fast friends and ultimately wed. Their romance and relationship is portrayed very sweetly and then they are decorating a nursery. Our children watched happily as things unfolded.

It then cuts to the couple in an obstetrics office, with Carl comforting a crying Ellie. Immediately our children related to this and our oldest son said, "Oh. Their baby died."

My husband, interestingly, immediately said, "They didn't lose a baby. They can't have babies." I had thought as well that they'd been pregnant (or why start to decorate a room?) and had a loss, only to find out subsequent pregnancies weren't going to happen.

Either way, it's loss and we know first-hand how babyloss hurts. It was poignant and sad and I got quite choked up with the next few scenes of Ellie mourning this new reality she's found herself in.

Then things move along and the main part of the movie chronicles Carl's life after Ellie's death. It's an inspirational tale of grief and sorrow for love lost and how to cope as life continues. Amazingly, Pixar strikes this delicate balance of being comforting without being preachy or saccharine (I'd feared that now that it's Disney-Pixar I must confess). And while it's a message full of hope, it's a message for all ages and all backgrounds and all faith traditions really because it's not about religion or healing. It's about continuing to live while missing what you've lost.

If you like dogs, you'll probably love the character of Dug the dog as much as we did and all the rest of the canine-inspired comedy.

We needed to see this film. It was beautiful for each one of us and it was so wonderful to feel so sad about that moment in the film - a moment that really normalizes things for our surviving children - and then laugh uproariously through the rest, always knowing that Carl's love for Ellie endures.