How We Learn to Say the Unsayable: Grief in Fantasy/Animation

Fig. 1 - Over the Moon (Glen Keane & John Kahrs, 2020).

In many ways, 2020 is a year marked by many different intertwined sources of grief: all the different kinds of loss associated with a global pandemic and its effect on daily lives; the political and economic situations that have forced a reckoning with an acknowledgement of a loss of idealism – that maybe we aren’t, and never have been, the enlightened society we (the Western European and North America, the Anglophone West in particular) have considered ourselves to be; the losses that continue to spark a need for a global reckoning with anti-Blackness; the grief associated with the continuing degradation of the climate and environment and the lack of will to seriously address it; the list goes on. The full weight of the world has been made more apparent to those who had been previously able to perhaps ignore it. What has also emerged this year is also the realization that we do not really know how to talk about grief and loss, about our sadness, beyond stages and moving beyond these feelings in a rush to reclaim as much of a sense of normalcy as possible. In a period of extended, multifaceted, layered losses, that lack of language, our space to acknowledge such feelings, becomes ever present. It is in this context that I find the treatment of grief and loss in popular fantasy films so fascinating, how recent films such as Over the Moon (Glen Keane & John Kahrs, 2020) (Fig. 1), but also Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (Zach Helm, 2007), Frozen 2 (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2019), and Onward (Dan Scanlon, 2020) (as discussed in part here) demonstrate an incredibly deft handling of how grief is something felt both individually and in community, and how it can shape and intersect with personal identities. Most importantly, as this blog post will just begin to explore, these films put on screen in visual metaphor through their strongly animated identities, or in moments of reflection, or in song, what grief or loss might feel like, without preaching how one might manage or handle such a feeling, but rather, how to hold onto those feelings in the moment they are felt.

Fig. 2 - Fei Fei is trapped in space in Over the Moon.

If you, like me, came across Over the Moon (Glen Keane and John Kahrs, 2020) on Netflix this fall, you might have also been surprised to find yourself in a narrative defined by the different ways that we all might move through loss. There is a lot for someone else to say about this film, but what has stuck with me is its emotional pull, the honesty of what it might feel like to lose someone, and adjust to life’s changes in incredibly artful ways, without really holding back from any part of those feelings. While I pretty much sobbed start to finish, there is a moment about three-quarters of the way through the film where protagonist Fei Fei follows the Moon Goddess Chang’e into the (impenetrable) Chamber of Exquisite Sadness, following the goddess’s loss of her love Houyi forever. Fei Fei, marked by her own sadness is able to push through the barrier, but then, as she crosses the void of space, and tries to traverse the darkness to reach Chang’e, she is instead overwhelmed by her own sadness at the loss of her mother, as her moments of pain play out in front of her in stardust. Fei Fei ends up stuck, too, in her grief, curled up, floating as a speck in the darkness as her friends are stuck on the other side of the barrier (Fig. 2).

The toy store goes ‘on the fritz’ in Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.

This image from Over the Moon struck me as one of the most honest, and instantly recognizable depictions of how grief can sometimes feel – overwhelming, isolating, something to drown in. There is so little light; despite being in space, the stars and the moon have been extinguished in the moon goddess’s grief, and the little bit of light reflecting off of Fei Fei’s jacket is not enough to truly reflect the light of the friends who are trying to reach her. While the narrative has to this point focused on the Moon Goddess’s loss, and Fei Fei’s need to prove the goddess’s existence to her father because of her lost mother’s belief in the face of change, this scene makes visible what has been under Fei Fei’s motivations for the film to that point. Although the narrative does move forward from this place—Fei Fei’s new stepbrother Chin runs through the barrier to reach her and pull her out of her grief, and after they return to Earth, at the film’s end a new blended family has been established—the animated fantasy space given to embrace this sadness, to give it full due on the screen, felt novel in a year where the byword has been in some ways ‘getting back to normal.’

These kinds of scenes are rare, and often powerful because the fantastic gives space to move beyond the confines of reality, to address the human in beyond human ways, such as the effect of the void of space deployed in Over the Moon. Similarly, the space of the magical toy shop is slightly anthropomorphized in Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, communicating its feelings about the departure (death) of the titular owner through its walls turning grey from their normal red, and the magical aspects going on the fritz (see left). Just as these events communicate the store’s anxiety at being left behind, the sapping of the color from the rooms when Magorium dies, the shift from the shop to beyond makes visible what, loss, absence, and the disruption of our normal – and its utter inevitability – might look and feel like (see above). The space of the magic toy shop allows for the environment to visualize Mahoney’s internal emotional journey, and make visible what is hard, if not near impossible, to articulate in the face of losing loved ones.

Frozen 2 - The Next Right Thing.

Similarly, Anna’s song sequence for “The Next Right Thing” in Disney’s recent Frozen 2 uses the environment to accompany Anna’s grief at realizing that both Elsa, and through the loss of Elsa’s magic, Olaf, are gone from her (see right). This scene, following Elsa’s descent in to coldest depths of the glacier and surviving just long enough to send the truth of their family’s past to Anna, starts with Anna curled up on the ground against a rock in the caves she and Olaf were trying to get out of, and asking Olaf and Elsa “What do I do now?” As Anna sings about the ‘gravity’ of the grief, she sinks lower to the ground, clutching her bag to her stomach and chest. The background is dark, lit only by the fog surrounding her, and rocky. She uses that to clamber up to standing, take slow steps, and, narrating through song the idea of just doing one thing at a time, as she tries to leave the cave and step into the light, and weigh her choices in the face of her loss – destroy the dam that cost her family so much. To watch Anna visually move out of the darkness with what is extreme effort – both narrated in song and depicted with the weight of her movements as she makes her way to the cave exit – and step into the light, not without her grief but driven by it, was a moment of animated honesty that again gives viewers the same space to bring such emotion into the light, into the discourse and the open, and acknowledge it.

When talking about loss, or being publicly sad or down is somewhat taboo, these animated fantasy examples focus so clearly on these moments and give them space to breathe, honoring them in life instead of pushing past them to ‘back to normal’ feels incredibly poignant right now. What I find most important, too, in these scenes, and across these films, is that the narratives do not punish the characters for grieving, for being sad, something that needs more reflection on. While Magorium might be stern with the toy shop for its anxiety, he doesn’t begrudge it the feelings it is having, nor does he begrudge Mahoney her need to try to make the inevitable not happen. Neither Fei Fei nor Chang’e in Over the Moon ever have their grief invalidated by the narrative. And Frozen 2’s Anna, surprisingly for a Disney animated film, is given space to not only grieve on screen, but put that into words, into song – a departure from things like the opening of Pixar’s Up (Pete Docter, 2009), or the wordless cut away from Rapunzel’s parents as they realize their child has been stolen in the beginning of Tangled (Nathan Greno & Byron Howard, 2010). These are powerful sequences in their own right, but by being non-verbal leave interpretation more to a particular viewer’s ability to read the visual cues on the screen (for example, a child is probably not going to understand the reference to a miscarriage in Up, and so the experience of loss is not going to be as much a part of the reading of the framing of the rest of the film). In comparison, in Over the Moon, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, and Frozen 2, space is given for grief, for sadness to be specifically vocalized, to be seen, to be heard. I find these scenes and films worth returning to, in the permission they lend us to grieve what needs grieving, in whatever ways might be needed.

**Article published: January 22, 2021**

Biography

Michelle Anya Anjirbag recently completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge as a member of the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Cambridge in the Faculty of education. Her dissertation was on depictions of diversity in Disney’s fairy tale adaptations from 1989 through the present. Her research interests include adaptations of fairy tales and folklore, and cross-period approaches to narrative transmission across culture and societies, hegemony and the fantastic, and deep stories. Her work has appeared in Social Sciences, Jeunesse, and Adaptation. More information can be found at michelleanjirbag.com.