Adult Animation: The New Image of "Old"

Why old is the new young

The traditional or Old School view of the elderly is not a pretty picture. Free associate to the words, "Old" or "grandparent" and you are likely to activate the following images: trembling hands obliviously unwrapping hard candies with barely the motor skills to complete the task; a conversation that starts as a conversation but ends in bewildered silence, as names and dates are chronologically twisted beyond all hope and recognition. And then there are the cliched personality changes - an increasingly grumpy preoccupation with "how things used to be," or the serene, blanket dismissal of all things technological.

However stereotypical, this litany of "old person" symptoms - cemented anachronistic thinking, declining physical and mental abilities, sedated personality - are commonly perceived to constitute this phase of life long thought to be a meaningless wait for death. And although most stereotypes contain a nugget of truth, this Old School view may distort the truth to flagrant degrees. It is easy, for instance, to take note of the two million residents in nursing homes across America, but it is far easier to forget the 35 million senior citizens living and maybe even thriving outside of such assisted living settings.

In recent years an aggressive onslaught of academic research is presenting a New School view of aging that, oddly enough, resembles a rebirth of unexpected fulfillment and untapped creativity.

This attitudinal about-face is captured with striking accuracy and enthusiasm in the recently released, "Up," another blockbuster from Pixar, the leading film company in modern animation, according to Roger Ebert.

"Up" is the story of Carl and Ellie. They meet as 8 year-olds with shared adventurer spirits and dreams of traveling to Paradise Falls, a Lost Land in South America. They spend the next 70 years not doing this. Then, conflict arises. After Ellie passes away but before Carl's imperfect judgment can land him in a retirement home, Carl ties thousands of balloons to his home and takes off in pursuit of Paradise Falls. The film acknowledges Old School thinking, as we first meet a 78 year-old Carl who is in full cantankerous curmudgeon mode: He is a comedic recluse who actively resists the change coming to his neighborhood by shaking his cane at anyone who enters his line of sight, including Russell, the wide-eyed, optimistic Cub Scout who accidently comes along for the ride.

Despite this stereotypical start, the research supported New School thought soon dominates the plotline. Two main threads can be followed in this vein - the adventurer personality changes exhibited by Carl and the imaginative texture of the world in which Carl operates.

In recent years, the halls of academia have watched as the image of the elderly has experienced a counterclockwise effect - growing more youthful and energetic as far as achievement and creativity are concerned. In a recent Psychology Today blog post, Shelly Carson describes how this makes sense, as the aging brain increasingly resembles the distraction and disinhibition of the creative brain. Versus the young brain, the aging brain has proven triumphant in the following cognitive contests: production of novel associations, broadening knowledge base and focus of attention and diminished need to please or conform. If these are not the ingredients of a creative mind, I don't know what is.

Further, this epiphany of positivity about the elderly is reversing an assumption about genius long thought to be dead and buried. In a New Yorker article earlier this year Malcolm Gladwell challenges the premise that creative accomplishment is a young man's game played with exclusively youthful tools like exuberance and energy. He discusses "late bloomers," those geniuses who take a dramatically different approach to achievement compared with the more well-known and precocious prodigies of history. Unlike Mozart, a man whose achievements came full circle before his thirtieth birthday, painters like Cezenne, according to Gladwell, experienced greatest production in later life, because of age, not in spite of it. Cezenne benefited from an experimental, trial-and-error approach characterized by repetition, incremental gains and imprecise goals. This late bloomer path seems to accommodate an old man's game, best played with such tools as wisdom, patience and perseverance.


In "Up," Carl embodies both the creative brain and the late bloomer approach. After all, converting his house into a giant hot air balloon could not be more out of the box. Tethering that same house to his torso and stubbornly pulling it across treacherous underbrush could not be more tedious. In fact, by flying through the earlier stages of life in montage form, the last stage of life is presented as the most exciting and growth-inducing.

This New School of thought is not only counter-intuitive, it is paradoxical. As an individual ages and physically appears older, his/her mental state may be pulling a Benjamin Button. "Up" attempts to capture this notion by playing with our expectations and creating a fantastical, child-like physical landscape that speaks to the potentially re-born elderly audience members. A mature and sophisticated storyline is presented. but couched within a world that resembles a generic Disney movie for kids. After all, there are exotic creatures, goofy sidekicks and wild adventures. And in case we miss this point, the movie marks its animated narrative with the footprint of classic cartoon shows. The spontaneous adventure in a faraway land channels "Duck Tales," and the extended battle scenes high in the sky pays homage to "Tale Spin."

We know that this G-rated appearance is a head fake, however, because of the tongue in cheek humor. The subtext is rated at least PG-13, as the narrative reads like the kind of bedtime story that an adult tells his child to keep himself engaged. For instance, in a child's imagination, the exotic birds and talking dogs in "Up" would act as human as mommy or daddy. And yet the animals think and behave in exactly the ways an adult mind would have imagined them to - the dogs seem to have a genetic predisposition for tennis balls and they call sudden timeouts in order to chase imaginary squirrels. Inside the mind of an elderly individual may be a newlyformed youthful spirit; inside this youthful looking movie is a wise and elderly spirit.

As cinema starts to play catch-up to the literature that now exists on this hidden, positive side of aging, the take-home message is this: old age may always be a time of existential angst filled with fears and mourning. But with substantial effort and determination such negative experiences may be amenable so that the angst of death can be rerouted into an adaptive energy that catapults old age into a transformative experience. "Up" is a rich and vivid example of how "old" may be the new "young."

Saturday, July 25, 2009