What I Need To Know In Life I Learned In Movies

Animated films to be exact.

As a child, I wasn't brought up watching cartoons or animated movies. I grew up with basketball, boxing, wrestling and action films on the boob tube. My only chance to watch a non-violent movie is when my father is not in the mood to watch Hulk Hogan slams Undertaker.

It's when I grew older when I began to appreciate animated films in their wondrous cinematography and dazzling cinema effects. There is something magical in it that entice both young and old to take on its wild, wind in your hair adventure.

Apart from the tummy-aching laughs, most animated movies I've seen pitched some moral lessons I learn to value over the years.

Last Saturday (my usual movie day) I watched How To Train Your Dragon in DVD. I'm not sure if that movie has been released here in the Philippines. Coz if it was, and I wasn't able to catch, then I really hate myself for missing it on 3D.

It all started in a village lived by sturdy, ass-kicking Vikings and a nerdy kid named Hiccup. They're at war, pretty much all the time, with fire-spitting dragons who raid their homes, snatch their livestock and leave anything in sight on fire.

Hiccup is the son of a Viking leader who has no fervor in slaying dragons. When he found a wounded dragon in the woods, whom he named Toothless afterwards, he befriended it, healed it, fed it and learned to fly with it.

The movie is packed with terrific flying sequences. It serves a  moral lesson that revolves around ignorance, of the two species that truly hate each other without knowing fully why. It is a heartwarming story of courage, friendship, overcoming ignorance and hatred. It is about peace, of how two different species come together. 

One thing I like about this film is that it captures your imagination and makes you feel whatever you're feeling. But in the end, it gives you a happy glow and makes you delightfully satisfied.

*******

Come Sunday....

After debating over Shrek or Prince of Persia, I finally came to a concerted decision...

Shrek!

Yes. Shrek, Donkey, Puss in Boots win all the time. I just loooove this trio that I can't trade the final chapter for Prince of Persia or Robinhood.

 In this sequel, Shrek is feeling bored and over domesticated. He misses his roar, those times when the villagers were afraid of him, those mud-dipping and all those ogre mojo stuff.

So he signed a deal with Rumpelstiltskin for a day to become a real ogre. As expected, the pact goes awry and Shrek is confronted with what life would be in Far Far Away if he had never existed.

Okay.

I'm not going to talk about moral of the story here. I just figured that ogres too go through midlife or quarterlife crisis like most of us do hahaha! Seriously, there are times when we silently wished we could have taken a different turn and wondered what life would like be. Sometimes we felt trapped and bored in our present situation that we wished to go back to those times when everything in the world makes sense (the last 6 words I got from the movie).

And when we get that chance to go in that direction, to do what we thought we like to do, to finally have that moment we've been waiting for... Bang! It hit us. It hit us like roaring thunder that everything we wanted to have, everything we wanted to feel was there all along. We already have it but we refuse to see. We refuse to acknowledge coz we keep on looking back thus we fail to value what is right there in front of us. It would take a single twist of fate before we come to realize that we are complete.

We just have to learn to be grateful. Welcome change like welcoming a brand new day. Appreciation is all it takes.

The movie was not after all uber hilarious unlike the previous sequels. But somewhere in the twisted life of the characters you can see a faint reflection of yourself.