As youngsters, our girls were choosy about the movies they wanted to watch. While many girls their ages were intimately familiar with movies like Frozen and its quite-famous song, Let It Go, our girls were not drawn into the story because they found some of the characters a bit too overwhelming, specifically Marshmallow. We experienced similar uncertainty around Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. (although they watched it a couple of times before Randall became too problematic). This is not surprising for autistic viewers who tend to experience movies like these more intensely than their neurotypical peers. And so, we tended to screen trailers with them before choosing to watch a new-to-us movie. Honestly, I still tend to do this for myself even now because I’ve been burned by what I thought was supposed to be one kind of experience that turned out to be something else altogether.
As they got older, we enjoyed many of the Disney Pixar options that provided more laughter than uncertainty, with Toy Story and Cars and occasionally Finding Nemo becoming some of our standard and preferred movie-viewing fare. While we have enjoyed other options, including Wreck-It Ralph and Ralph Breaks the Internet, some of Ice Age movies, and a handful of other options, I have still suggested some of my former favorites, like The Incredibles and The Lion King and others, they have mostly taken the movie-watching reins into their own hands through the years. And, of course, I’m good with that.
Still, I remember when our girls first entered their tween years and decided that Disney Pixar movies were too childish for them. To say that I was disappointed with this declaration would be an understatement. No matter my argument, they were having none of the idea of watching some of our favorite Pixar cartoon movies like Cars or Finding Nemo or any of the other classic Disney movies we’d watched when they were younger. To my suggestion that plenty of grown ups watched Disney and Pixar movies, they told me it was fine for adults to do that, but definitely not for tweens or teenagers. I’m not sure when they relented at least in part with their refusal to watch these movies, but we have enjoyed one or two here and there.
The other night, however, I scored a pretty good victory when I convinced my 15 year old to watch Mulan with me. I showed her the trailer, which she’d watched previously, and shrugged non-committedly, but I told her that most movies have what screenwriters refer to as a 10-minute hook and suggested that if those first 10 minutes didn’t grab her, we would turn it off.
Mulan lived up to the 10-minute test easily and we settled in for the full 88-ish minutes of the movie. It is always a treat to share these kinds of moments with our girls. Not only their experiencing a movie for the first time, but the sheer delight that well-known and well-loved characters elicit from them; in this case, Mushu, voiced by the incredibly talented Eddie Murphy. The lucky cricket, Cri-Kee, came in a very close second (he may have even edged out Mushu).
Because she’d enjoyed that one so well and because her sister had missed it while she listened to a favorite Saturday night radio program from Dee Snider, House of Hair, we decided to try another older Disney standard—Aladdin. Because Robin Williams, of course. Interestingly, while we all enjoyed it, we agreed when it was said and done that it seemed a bit too random in its storytelling and while the Genie character voiced by Williams was quite funny, the overall experience was not what Mulan had been for our youngest.
Even so, I am always grateful to come together as a family and spend time in a shared activity. While I doubt we will put either of these movies into the viewing rotation again, it was an experience rooted in nostalgia for me for sure. For years before I got married and long before we had our girls, I owned Mulan, Aladdin, and similar older Disney movies on VHS tapes. And that is definitely a throwback to my younger years. And so to share that nostalgia with my girls remains something I cherish (and, of course, reminds me why we tend to enjoy Inside Out 2 and its references to Nostalgia). Hmmmm. Maybe we should put that one in the rotation to watch again soon.