You know, I feel better reading some of you guys saying that you don’t cry, but you feel something. I really dislike those reviews where they say “If you didn’t shed a tear, you don’t have a heart” or something along those lines.
I don’t know, I find it really hard to cry at movies for some reason, yet I get very emotional over the slightest things with people in real life. Maybe because I tend to watch films in cinemas with my friends or by myself, which means I’m surrounded by people and I try not to reveal my feelings. Or maybe because I know something horrible/touching is going to happen/is happening on screen and I feel the pressure to cry, but I can’t.
Or maybe it’s just plain dehydration. I dunno.
But I always feel this clenching in my chest, and my jaw will slacken and my eyebrows would furrow, and that’s when I know, to quote Donkey from Shrek, that a scene has “cut me real deep”.
The last time I felt this was the ending of Brave, where Merida tells her mother that she loves her and then the blanket reveals that her mum is no longer a bear and the Queen replies in turn. Man, that socked me in the lungs.
No, wait, actually, I think it was Dory’s “I don’t want to forget” scene when I watched Finding Nemo in 3-D. That always gets me for some reason. Interestingly, I read that Ellen DeGeneres truly felt upset when she voiced Dory in that scene, because she thought she messed up the first take.
Nemo made me cry for real - during that scene where Nigel tells the Tank Gang of how far Marlin is willing to go to find his song - when I first saw it in '05 (it also sowed the seeds of my love for Pixar). Cars, the first Pixar film I fell in love with, made me tear up when Lightning pushed The King across the finish line (it’s incredibly cheesy, but man that was truly selfless of McQueen and when the audience knew that he had changed for good).
Toy Story 3 didn’t make me cry at all, but I did feel a sense of dread during the incinerator scene. Some of my fellow audience members and the friend I watched it with laughed when Andy did that little gasp when gazing at Woody and Co. for the last time, so that killed the moment for me. Plus the fact that they dragged the farewell scene out too long and milked it for all its worth (for me).
I’ll think of a few more scenes, but these are the ones that immediately come to mind.