This past week has been a furious combination of packing, more packing, even more packing, cleaning, movies, and bowling. Michael and I had been having a rather laissez faire attitude toward the house over the past few weeks (we’re moving, it’s all eventually going in a box, why should we put it away?). That is, we did until we discovered that our landlord was showing our apartment in the middle of the day when we weren’t home. Thanks for letting us know. Cue furious tidying and making sure my bras aren’t on display for the rest of the world on the towel bar where I had been drying them. Thanks.

On Sunday we decided to take a break from the chaos and cheer up by seeing a nice family movie—Pixar’s Brave. Oh my. Cue maniacal cackling by the dastardly schemers at Pixar.

It’s not that I hate Pixar movies. I love Pixar movies. I’ve seen every single one of them except Cars 2 which, like the second two Matrix movies and the first three Star Wars Episodes I just quietly refuse to acknowledge. It’s just that every single one I go to makes me weep and want to curl up into fetal position while I hold a therapy session with my inner child. Pixar has the art of ripping your heartstrings out by the roots down to a science. You’re sitting there, enjoying a nice warm story when all of a sudden there are tears sliding down your face and your heart is twisted like one of those balloon animal poodles. It’s entirely involuntary. I think the Pixar people clock it. If the test audience isn’t making weepy sniffles and messaging their psychologists an hour into the movie they go back to the drawing board. I thought they had reached their peak in Up when the whole audience started melting ten minutes into the movie, but they’ve just kept the teary magic coming.

Now, I actually enjoyed Bravefor a number of reasons. First, if you know me then you know I love anything Celtic. Second, I was ecstatic that someone had finally made a ‘pro-mom’ movie. Maybe this is just a sign of aging, but I get so tired of seeing juvenile films where the mother of the teenage daughter is painted as a heartless villain.  Although at sixteen I may have thought my mother was an irrational beast from tailing me and my weird boyfriend around town, I am now fully prepared to inflict the same humiliation on my own daughter in the future. She’ll thank me later.

Brave paints the mother-daughter relationship to perfection. There is love on both sides, there is give and take, there is selfishness and selflessness. Its funny and so cute it makes your teeth hurt. If you haven’t seen the movie already I don’t want to spoil it for you, but about an hour in I found myself reaching for a concessions napkin to dam up my running mascara as I re-lived so many moments between my teenage self and my mom. And now that I’m older and I understand what she was trying to tell me all those years just made it worse. And the more I cried, the more I silently cursed Pixar. Just. Too. Cathartic. Bother, I’m tearing up again! Darn you Pixar!!! Darn you! Sniff!!