I will call him Squishy and he will be mine, and he will be my Squishy.

Ahem. I'm aware that rather a lot of recent posts have opened with an apology for not posting enough, and leaving a month since the last one is something of a record. So, sorry. But hey, it's the Internet, where the vast majority of people who ever read this will be doing so by reaching it through a Google search for something hopelessly vague, several months after I post it. (The number who get here by Googling something like "hypothesis on beauty" is remarkably high.)

We're well out of the Christmas season, and into what certain members of my family term "Winterval", which is essentially an excuse to have open fires every night until Easter and watch old episodes of The West Wing. Not that I'd usually be complaining about this, but as it happens this is the first year since Winterval was founded that I've been living in a completely different city, and I am therefore going to have to console myself with fake open fires and episodes of CSI.

What was I talking about? Oh, yes, Christmas. My younger sister (notable on these pages for her slightly snarky comments recently) received the Pixar box set for Christmas, which has meant that the whole family has been basking in what are pretty much the only good animated films that Disney has released for about the last 12 years. They're also some of the only ones with original stories, Disney having exhausted their stock of family-friendly fairy tales some time ago. However, just because they have new stories, that doesn't mean that they can't use Disney's oldest and best-used storytelling trope: deeply broken families and desperate tragedy.

That might seem strange. Disney films are explicitly aimed at children, after all, and they do have something of a reputation for being saccharine and schmaltzy. However, that's only ever the case towards the end of the film as the happy resolution is approaching. Looking only at the opening premise, the number of on-screen families where something is badly wrong is just astounding. Here's a relatively recent selection.

Film (Year)	Setup
The Little Mermaid (1989)	Ariel's mother doesn't appear throughout the movie. That said, maybe mermaids reproduce like fish and Ariel is one of five million offspring of King Triton. Who knows?
Beauty and the Beast (1991)	Belle's mother is not only absent, she's never even mentioned. And although the Beast clearly has rather more pressing problems than just having no family, he apparently has no living parents either.
Aladdin (1992)	Aladdin is an orphan, and Princess Jasmine has – you guessed it – no mother either.
The Lion King (1994)	Mufasa and Sarabi may be a happy pair of lions at the beginning of the movie, but it's not long before Mufasa is being trampled to death in an unusually shocking scene. I don't recall corpses of major characters being shown in any other Disney film, even if Mufasa's looks rather less buffalo-trampled than you might expect.
Pocahontas (1995)	Oh, this is getting ridiculous. Guess who's dead as this movie opens? Yep, Pocahontas's mother.
Toy Story (1995)	Now we're into Pixar territory, with the world's first CGI feature film. And things have changed enormously. Yes, this time it's Andy's father who is conspicuous by his absence.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. So with that context, let's have a closer look at the extremely impressive 2003 Pixar effort, Finding Nemo. Nemo, our little clown fish hero, is not only without a mother (who, predictably, dies horribly in the film's opening scene), he's also disabled. Oh, and he lives inside an anemone to protect him from the thousands of fish who want to eat him. Life's hard for him from the word go. Marlin, his father, has some deep-seated emotional issues that manifest in extreme over-protectiveness. And then we have Dory.

Dory is definitely my favourite character in this film. She gets some of the best lines, including the whole "you can speak WHALE?" scene (Ellen DeGeneres voices her superbly, by the way) and the way the script deals with the character's short-term memory loss is hilarious without laughing at the medical condition itself. Well, not too much, anyway.

Dory's hilarity, though, distracts from the fact that her situation is terribly sad. We get that the first time we meet her, with the line "No, it's true, I forget things almost instantly. It runs in my family. Well...at least, I think it does. Umm..hmm. Where are they?" In a way, that's worse than the way the above-mentioned characters have lost one or more members of their family. If they had simply died, Dory could find a way to cope with that (even if, like Marlin, it's a very bad way). However, she knows they're somewhere out there in the ocean, but has no idea where. Her memory loss cuts her off in a very fundamental way from everyone around her. (More on that in a later post.)

It's towards the end of the film that we get the worst part. It's the low point for the main characters anyway: Marlin has just seen what he thinks is Nemo's dead body and is slowly heading home, defeated. Dory can't bear to see him go, and pleads with him not to leave her:

"Please don't go away. Please? No one's ever stuck with me for so long before. And if you leave... if you leave... I just, I remember things better with you. I do, look. P. Sherman, forty-two... forty-two... I remember it, I do. It's there, I know it is, because when I look at you, I can feel it. And-and I look at you, and I... and I'm home. Please... I don't want that to go away. I don't want to forget."

For my money, that's pretty close to the saddest thing any character says in any Disney film. Dory has finally found a way of tenuously re-connecting herself to a world that she has effectively lost (the mention of "home", connected with the earlier revelation that Dory has no idea where her home actually is, serves as a particularly effective twist of the knife), and now that's disappearing, literally in front of her eyes. And Marlin – possibly understandably at this point – does absolutely nothing to help.

One of the reasons why Disney movies have passed into film legend – and particularly why pretty much all the Pixars have – is that they end well. Unlike Steve Spielberg, who clearly has some horrible mental illness that causes him to add between ten and thirty completely unnecessary minutes to the end of every film he directs, Disney directors know that they have to wrap up all the loose ends in a happy and fulfilling way, ideally taking us back to the situation we saw at the start to show how it's changed, and then just stop. So in Beauty and the Beast, the final shot is in the same stained-glass style that we saw in the prologue, The Lion King ends with Rafiki holding up Simba's daughter on Pride Rock in the same way that he held Simba in the opening scene, and Finding Nemo closes with Marlin chivvying Nemo off to school, in a neat role reversal from a similar scene near the beginning.

I think that's why Disney gets away with putting so much tragedy into their films. Kids watching them may be scared at the appropriate points (I knew someone who, at the age of 18, was still unable to watch Mufasa's death in The Lion King without crying), but they know that when they reach the end, the villain will have received his suitably violent and frequently deliciously ironic comeuppance, the comic relief will be heading off into the sunset to do something wacky and/or zany, and the guy will get the girl. It's a simple formula, but one that works, and that nearly guarantees a good story.

Oh, and most importantly, they all live happily ever after.