Fridays in my childhood were reserved for trips to Blockbuster, the long-gone video store chain romanticized by generations. Movies were portals – some to familiar places, others to new frontiers – through which us offline, suburban kids frequently jumped.
Last week, for my own family’s Friday movie night, I put on something, as my kids say, “for work.” Given my job as a film writer, my two daughters have seen almost every age-appropriate flick released in the last five years.
“Arco,” which came to theaters this week, is a time- and space-traveling odyssey with a tender vision of the impending environmental crisis and humanity’s machine-reliant future. It’s also undeniably higher brow than the last work movie they saw with me, “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants.” All three of us went into “Arco” blind, and I was reassured by its PG rating and recent Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature.
On- and Off-Screen Heartache
“Arco” follows a young boy living in a distant future who travels hundreds of years in the past, where Earth is struggling with climate change and a society is disassociating under the growing weight of advanced technology. Written and directed by French filmmaker Ugo Bienvenu, the film emulates 80s Japanese anime, taking inspiration from Miyazaki and spinning a story that feels far more urgent than Studio Ghibli’s pastoral perspective.
At the film’s climax, a young girl named Iris has an emotional, tear-filled goodbye with Mikki, her robot nanny. An artificial stand-in for her parents who live and work outside of the family home, Mikki offers the only form of physical love that Iris experiences in her daily life, and its “death” is a tearjerker.
“I’m sad,” my six-year-old said, tears welling in her eyes. She nuzzled into me harder.
This admission, coupled with the waterworks, wasn’t enough to force me to my feet. Hardly a day goes by that someone in our house doesn’t cry. This is the age of big feelings and high emotions, the usual culprits being hunger, fatigue, minor injury, or sibling rivalry.
But her swell of sorrow wasn’t due to any of those reasons. This was a moment of empathy for fictional characters, a phenomenon that she’s experienced before. She’s seen a fair number of movies in her six years, but she has also been shielded from the incessant emotional whiplash that older generations endured.
The Sad Movies We Grew Up With
For much of its existence, Disney has made unavoidably sad movies. Films like “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Dumbo,” “Pinocchio,” and “Bambi” featured scenes of death, or near-death, and unending suffering.
In the late 20th century, the Disney Renaissance revitalized the market for children’s animated features. Films like “The Lion King” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” pushed the envelope of what young viewers could expect from a “kid’s movie.”
Scanning the Blockbuster aisles in my mind’s eye, I revisit the movies that once brought me the same feelings of sadness my daughter was experiencing. I see Shadow stuck in the pit at the end of “Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey,” Littlefoot’s mother sacrificing herself in “The Land Before Time,” and Charlie saying goodbye to Anne-Marie in “All Dogs Go to Heaven.”
As an adult, I don’t particularly seek out movies likely to make me cry, but the gut-punch never stopped me in my youth. Oftentimes, it was the opposite: feeling something by film’s end was more gratifying than not. Feeling something was far better than feeling nothing.
A recent study in Media Psychology found that children can be moved by “moral beauty” in film, and the ensuing emotion they experience opens their heart and mind to greater empathy in real life. The study, which placed the 2015 Pixar film “Inside Out” at the center of its investigation, concludes that movies can fuel a child’s social intelligence, offering them a new awareness of their own feelings, as well as the emotions of those around them.
What Movies Teach Kids About Empathy
As my daughter sniffled and pursed her lips, my initial reaction was to reassure her or to distract her from the sentiments bubbling over at the sight of the dying robot. As an adult viewer with a college degree in film studies, I didn’t find Mikki a particularly endearing character.
But my daughter was not crying about the robot. She was empathizing with Iris, whose sorrowful goodbye was big, loud, and wholly human. She had put herself in Iris’ place, reacting the way she might if her own pet robot decombusted before her eyes.
Like “Inside Out,” “Arco” employs a traditional blueprint known as the “Hero’s Journey,” a classical narrative that follows a hero who goes on an adventure, encounters challenges and overcomes them, returning changed by the journey. The act of following their journey, parsing through the story’s themes and messages, is an early test of cognition that helps kids make sense of complex ideas and situations that they will likely encounter in their own lives. That same study found that films can provide young viewers with insights about life. Stories can introduce topics like death, loss, separation, and any number of traumatic life events in a controlled setting, allowing the young viewer time and distance from the event to process it.
I don’t enjoy seeing my children upset, but I was touched by my youngest daughter’s expression of compassion and by her ability to connect, at just six, with a fictional character and a situation that has no resemblance to her own life. Films are meant to broaden our perspective, and “Arco” did just that.
Despite the brief tears, my daughter said she liked the movie. My other daughter asked to watch it again. she was smitten with the hand-drawn aesthetic and the plot that did not dumb itself down for them, even the ending’s twist. They had questions about some of the nuances of the plot, and I answered them as best I could. Our family movie night has never felt as meaningful as it did that night. We all need a good cry once in a while.
“Arco” is in theaters now. The film stars Juliano Krue Valdi as Arco and Margot Ringard Oldra as Iris, with voice work from Mark Ruffalo, Natalie Portman, Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, Flea, Roeg Sutherland and America Ferrera.
