The movie scene that always makes Ana de Armas cry: “It kills me every time”
If there’s one thing you can count on Pixar to do, it’s obliterate audiences through the most singularly devastating scenes of all time. The beloved animation studio has held our hearts in their hands since the very beginning, possessing the unique ability to create stories that flit through the entire spectrum of human feeling, making films that are life-affirming, nostalgic and completely crushing.
As a child, their stories wash over you and lull you into a state of blissful peace, but as an adult, it’s an entirely different story – the opening to Up or final door scene in Monsters Inc will leave you a complete snivelling wreck, wondering how you ever mustered the strength to withstand this level of emotional terrorism as a child.
But despite this, we keep going back, feeling comforted by the stories we loved as children and returning to the familiarity of the characters who sparked our love for film in the first place. It could be the timeless ensemble cast of Toy Story, the ingenious casting of a real-life rat in Ratatouille or the hidden reference to The Shining in Finding Nemo, but regardless, Pixar films have become a cure-all for the pains of adult life, even if they make us cry in the process. It’s for this reason that Ana de Armas is such a huge fan of the studio, describing the one scene from their work that always brings on the water works.
The day that a film was pitched, which took place inside the human mind, with the characters voicing the different emotions in our brain, cinematic history was made. Inside Out is perhaps one of the most profound and revolutionary films from Pixar’s filmography, with the studio finding a way for young people to articulate their feelings through the concepts created in the film and allow adults to reminisce on the memories and experiences that best define who we are.
The idea of personality island and core memories is one that still lingers in our collective lingo, allowing us to get in touch with a deeper part of ourselves and visualise it in a way we couldn’t before. But while it might be helpful on an emotional level and also highly entertaining, it can also bring up bittersweet memories relating to parts of ourselves that have been lost and people who have left our lives along the way.
When discussing this, de Armas described the moment that truly got to her, saying, “I cry and am very emotional with everything, I probably cry every day watching something. But I think, you know the scene in Inside Out when Bing Bong and Joy are trying to get on the rocket and just go up, and he lets himself off the rocket, and he just stays there and disappears. It kills me every time”.
It’s a moment that destroyed audiences all over the world, with people joining together in their misery over Bing Bong’s death and the struggles that Joy faces to prevent Riley from becoming completely depressed and emotionally desolate. While we might feel snippets of intense joy and comfort through Pixar movies, they also know how to appeal to the inner child and completely destroy it, leaving us feeling as fragile as de Armas did after watching it.
