OK, so I took the grandkids to see Incredibles 2 last weekend. Pixar typically (always?) has a little "short" at the start of Pixar movies, and Incredibles 2 was no different. This one, however, seems totally inappropriate for children. It starts off with a Chinese woman preparing dumplings for her husband. She feeds them to him and he inhales them quickly as he runs out the door, presumably running late for work. She then starts eating her dumplings, of which there are three of them. She eats the first two and then when she puts the third into her mouth, it starts crying! She spits it back into the dumpling dish and it morphs into a little, living baby dumpling...
The little dumpling baby grows up, and she takes it out on walks, and shopping, etc. but never lets it go run on his own. (It is a "him" as we find out later). There are a couple scenes involving donuts, a donut shop and sitting on a train or bus sharing donuts. We're getting kind of attached to this little dumpling child by this point.
Then, the dumpling has some facial hair on his chin... goes out with friends even though the mom does not want him to. Later, he comes back, with a girl, he runs upstairs and packs his bags and while he's heading for the door - "mom" pushes the girl out - slams the door and the little dumpling is still fighting with her to leave - and she reaches down and EATS the dumpling! At this point, my grandson lost it... he was bawling. I held him on my lap until Incredibles started, and then he settled down and watched the movie. I must say, while I didn't get emotional over this - I was quite startled and even shocked when she ate the dumpling! My grandson was quite traumatized over this scene.
At the end of Bao, we see the mother laying in bed, depressed - and then the silhouette of the dumpling, only as a full-sized person now, is standing in the doorway. He comes up to his mom, sits on the bed - she ignores him at first and then he offers donuts and she eventually warms up to him and sits with him to eat a donut.
So, I had to go look this up. As it turns out, the director of this short is from Canada, but from a Chinese culture there - and she grew up with an over-protective mom. This short was a representation of her life growing up with her mom. OK, it makes more sense now - but to coldly throw that at children in a theater who are their to watch a fun movie - that was quite inappropriate. @DisneyPixar, give us a head's up, or better yet, don't put something so disturbing at the start of a movie for children.
If you agree, please share and/or comment below. If you disagree, I'd still like to see your comments below.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep in mind while posting:
1) Please respond ON TOPIC to the article at hand.
2) Posts more than 4 weeks old are set to automatically save new comments for moderation - so your comment may not show up immediately if you're responding to an older post.
3) The "Spam Filter" is on - and randomly messages get caught in that filter. I have no control over which messages get caught in the spam filter and those that do must wait for me to mark them as "not spam." A message caught by the spam filter may show up for a moment, making you think it posted, and then disappear. Do not assume I have deleted your comment, it's probably just the spam filter and it will show up.