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[LSPoorEeyorick]

Well, my review will be so colored by the experience of watching the film that I guess I have decided to include those circumstances within this unconventional review. Most of it needs to be spoiler-tagged because very little of the plot set-up was used to promote the film, and its emotional throughline was surprising to us; I would like to preserve that for people who wish to go in as cold as Pixar may have intended.

Spoiler:

I had to be a six-hour drive away by dinner, but I felt, for some reason, extremely compelled to stay late so I could watch the film with my brother and his kids. Once we made the plans, I then felt extremely compelled to invite my father to join us. He initially refused, but after several discussions, he admitted he was beginning to feel survivor's guilt. He didn't believe he deserved to get to experience all of these things she was missing. We tried to listen and support him, and respect his needs, but remind him that Mom would have wanted him to keep living- something she tried to tell him many times before she passed. We kept the invite open. He said he had a day full of chores and couldn't come anyway.

Well, a series of events caused all of the chores to be completely cleared off his schedule, and he joined us to watch the film.

What we did not know going in was that the whole film surrounds a man whose survivor's guilt leads him to hang on with a fierce grip to the one thing he and his wife wanted to do together but never did. And here we are with my dad, whose life is now full of similar regrets. Watching a montage of a quiet, geeky bespactacled man whose life becomes filled with an immense passion due to a salty, bubbly young woman. We practically cut an identical montage just this week, their photos in slideshow for her memorial.

At first, I was really anxious. How could I have dragged my dad through this emotional minefield, as alternately beautiful and funny as it was?

Then we got to the film's turning point, as he discovers that his late wife's favorite adventures were the little ones she had with him every day. "Go have the next adventure," she writes. And we are all in tears, because it's as if Mom is telling dad herself.

As we left the theater, my dad and I agree that we feel Mom's hand in aligning things to get him there with us. "She's all over this," he says. "I wonder what the next adventure is."

I have never been touched so deeply by a Pixar film. Hell, by any film. So I don't think my review is a fair one. But I found it to be an extremely beautiful, moving and hopeful story that I think I'll be holding close to my heart for a good, long while.