Taking my 10-year old nephew to movies this summer has not only helped us bond, but also made me review the purpose of life and characters in it. But, before I share my interpretation and point out the uncanny resemblance of characters from these two movies (The Jungle Book and Finding Dory) to real life, let me share about a craze that hit our generation (the 1970 borns) like an epidemic.
The craze
I was my nephew's age then. Gold Spot, a popular soda, promoted their drink to kids using the Jungle Book. A certain number of bottle caps when turns in earned us the Jungle Book comic, which had a simple story line with vacant spots for key characters. Beneath every bottle cap of the drink came a character, which we collected and pasted in appropriate empty spots in the comic. We used our pocket money to buy Gold Spot drinks for the sake of collecting these characters and when we ran out of money, we walked by small shops in our neighborhood looking for Gold Spot caps.
Sometimes, we got lucky, but most times we either spotted empty caps or those from other brands. A few of those lucky spots earned us multiple copies of the same character, which we swapped amongst our friends. May be we replaced these fictional characters with formulas, equations, theorems and science laws. Should we also include prejudices and biases to the above list?
A common theme
Both animation movies revolve around shortcomings, searching the past and returning home with help of friends. Returning home is a metaphor that can be used for jobs, people, relationships.
From Mowgli's perspective, the Jungle Book is a story of friendships and how it helped him handle vissicitudes of life and return home. From Shere Khan and King Luois's point-of-view, it is a tale of how prejudice, revenge seeking mentality, desirescan reduce one to ashes.
Finding Dory, a sequel to Finding Nemo, not only involves return of Dory to her parents, but also return of species who were being forcefully taken away from the ocean in California to an aquarium in Cleveland.
Reel is real!
Gone are those days where we exchanged duplicate characters in bottle caps, while today we discuss tales of such characters in our life.
In our professional lives we often come across managers who mirror Shere Khan in their attitude and venomous peers like Ka who pretend to be our true friends. Fortunately, it is folks like Baloo, Bagheera, Akela and Raksha who make our lives happy.
Like Dory many of us have shortcoming that eclipse our objective of life. We happily move around lforgetting our goals and priorities like Dory. It is people who meet along the journey who help us get back on track and realize our dreams.
The two movies besides being funny, poignant and thought provoking remind us that life is often a mix of both good and evil characters and that one must pause and think of their objectives and not be hijacked by emotions and instincts.
Watch the movie and come up with your own interpretation. Don't forget to listen to Baloo sing...The bare necessities of life will come to you...They'll come to you! - https://youtu.be/Gu8mFbBvoMI
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