ekveland

There is a set of two movies and a video game, quite unrelated and yet forming a perfect post human animal centric trilogy: The Wild Robot, Flow and the video game Stray. I encourage you all to experience them in that order. They are all beautiful in their own right, but seem to exist in the same universe at different times.

Flow and Stray share a DNA beyond just the main protagonist being a cat, rendered in perfect observation of what the essence of "Cat" is. If you connected with either you'll enjoy the other.

Beyond that they all vividly paint a picture of how animals will go on without us. In the most beautiful and heart wrenching ways.

I saw this with my partner who has lost her parents and our ten your old (for me, step) son. I already knew going in, being skeptical of Pixar sequels, that this one on paper made sense. And indeed it makes sense, as a second chapter in the story of Riley growing up. Becoming a teen. Going through puberty.

But more than that, it stands on its own in sketching out how we are complex, feeling humans. How, yes, puberty is a roadblock. But more than that how we are all the sum of our lived experiences and emotions and how we are not at all really in control of them. But how they all make up our flawed human existence.

And that's a pretty cool thing to explore in a family movie.

It's a bit sad that this will be probably lost in the glorious chaos of Barbenheimer sucking the oxygen of 2023, but James Gunn deserves the award for Millennial of our Generation. He took the brief and the money and ran with it and somehow made it all work out.

Yes, there's a lot of marvel cruft weighing this entire trilogy down, but it truly does rise above as a heartfelt, funny, genuine tribute to everything great about pop culture of the millennial generation - the nostalgia for the music that came before us up until the music that we grew up with. The aesthetics and the references are just perfect.

We grew up with the Spielbergian backwards looking nostalgia sure. But Gunn captures more than the myopic usian view. This is clearly the work of someone who grew up with Douglas Adams, Red Dwarf, the Muppets, Chris Cunningham, Aphex Twin, Monty Python as well as Hollywood, Star Trek/Wars and comic books.

We see you James and we appreciate you. May you inspire generations to come.