SEVERAL YEARS AGO—this was back around 2014—I was at the theater with my wife and sons. We were there to watch Big Hero 6, which is about a boy who befriends an inflatable robot and starts a superhero team. It was a fun movie (the robot was fucking hilarious¹), but one that had roots in real and true sadness (the star, Hiro, is a gifted fourteen-year-old robotics enthusiast who’s forced into greatness after his mother, father, and brother all die within, like, a ten-minute stretch of movie time). And so I remember watching it, processing that part of it, then realizing how many other animated movie characters have a measure of that kind of gigantic heartache built into their existences.²

Simba from The Lion King is a good example (he watched his father die, and then was made to believe it was his fault). Bambi from Bambi is also an obvious one (his mother gets shot dead). Carl from Up is a big time choice here (he had to watch his wife get sick and die, and then he had to realize that she never got to go on her dream trip that he’d promised her decades earlier), as is WALL-E from WALL-E (my second favorite animated movie character³). There’s also Elsa from Frozen (I remember watching an episode of House one time where we find out that a mom and a dad had a second child solely because they wanted to use the second child’s bone marrow to help try and heal their first child because the first child had some rare disease and I know that’s not exactly like Frozen⁴ but it’s what I thought about during that scene where Anna is singing about wanting to build a snowman while poor Elsa is locked away in her room⁵).

And don’t forget about Doc Hudson from Cars (as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more susceptible to feeling badly for people and things that lose their utility as they age). Or Geppetto from Pinocchio (he was so lonely that he built a puppet and then tried to wish him into becoming a real boy). Or Ralph from Wreck-It-Ralph (he just wanted some friends, or at least some appreciation for his efforts). And so, so, so many others.

Also on that list, and somewhere near the top of it, really: Marlin from Finding Nemo. Because, okay, I mean, sure, he ends up saving Nemo after Nemo gets captured by a scuba diver, yes. And that’s the part of the movie that everyone focuses on because that’s the whole thrust of the movie, of course. And Marlin and Nemo have a wonderful and beautiful and fruitful father-son relationship, absolutely. But you have to remember that those two are, in effect, pushed toward that life by a horrible, horrible, horrible tragedy, which we’ll talk more about in a moment.

Face/Off is a silly movie.⁶ It stars John Travolta as an FBI agent named Sean Archer who, as a way to find where a massive bomb has been planted in Los Angeles, volunteers himself for a surgery where he’ll have his face cut off and replaced with a bad guy’s face so he can then pose as the bad guy and trick a different bad guy into telling him where the bomb is. (The bad guy Archer trades faces with is Castor Troy, a globally feared madman played by Nicolas Cage. He and Archer were fighting and Castor got blown backward by the blast from an airplane engine and bonked his head really badly and never woke up again.⁷)

The face-swap plan actually works (after the surgery, Sean-as-Castor is dropped into a maximum security prison with Castor’s brother, Pollux, whom he eventually tricks into telling him where the bomb is). But the problem is Castor ends up waking up from his coma a day or so after the surgery, calls a few of his bad guy friends, has them kidnap the doctor who performed the surgery, forces the doctor to put Archer’s face on him, then kills the doctor and burns down the facility where the surgery took place so that nobody will ever know that the switch happened. So by this point in the movie you’ve got an FBI agent wearing a criminal’s face trapped in prison, and a criminal wearing an FBI agent’s face running around in the free world. And everything just sort of plays out from there.

And I know that sounds like a lot (and I also know that it is a lot), but that’s the most streamlined version of the plot I can come up with.⁸ And everything in it is set into motion by the movie’s first three minutes, which contains a horrible, horrible, horrible tragedy, which we’ll talk more about in a moment.

One quick thing about Face/Off, one quick thing Nic Cage, one quick thing about face-swapping, one quick thing about Finding Nemo, and one quick thing about intense movie openings:

Face/Off: Face/Off has aged into this very specific and very hokey kind of reverence. This, most people would assume, is because Travolta and Cage are fucking bonkers in it (and I suppose that is part of it). But really it’s because John Woo, perhaps the greatest action movie director of all, ripped out the brake lines on the movie and floored it the whole way through. He’s beautiful, and it’s beautiful.⁹

Nic Cage: Nic Cage had one of the all-time great career stretches during the back half of the nineties. He was in Leaving Las Vegas in 1995 (he is uniquely brilliant here), The Rock in 1996 (my favorite thing about The Rock is when they spend a bunch of time talking about how hard it’s supposed to be to break out of Alcatraz and then Sean Connery does that shit in like two minutes), Con Air in 1997 (a masterpiece), Face/Off in 1997 (also a masterpiece), City of Angels in 1998 (a movie that finally got around to asking: What if angels could fuck?), Snake Eyes in 1998, 8MM in 1999 (two movies I somehow always manage to get confused even though the only thing they have in common is that Nic Cage is in them), Bringing Out the Dead in 1999, and Gone in 60 Seconds in 2000 (somehow simultaneously beloved and underrated). The part that always jumps out at me whenever I revisit that list is realizing that he won an Oscar for Best Actor for his role in Leaving Las Vegas and then was like, “You know what I’m going to do now? A movie where I trade faces with someone.” It’s the second oddest post-Oscar heat check, losing out only to the time Gwyneth Paltrow won the Oscar for Best Actress with her role in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love and then three years later she costarred with Jack Black in Shallow Hal, a movie about a guy who gets hypnotized by Tony Robbins into seeing the inner beauty of overweight and unattractive people.¹⁰

Face-Swapping: The idea of switching one person’s face with another person’s face brings up a number of interesting questions, the most lewd of which being: Wouldn’t Sean’s wife have noticed when his penis wasn’t his penis when she had sex with Castor-as-Sean after Castor had started wearing Sean’s face?¹¹ Or are they penis twins and that’s why she didn’t notice?

Finding Nemo: In Finding Nemo, the guy who scoops up Nemo when he sees him while scuba diving mentions later in the movie that he did so because he thought he was helping him. “I found that little guy struggling for life out on the reef and I saved him,” he says, and it took me a good three or four times of watching Finding Nemo before I realized that this was (probably) a wink by the filmmakers acknowledging the way that oftentimes when we think we’re helping in a situation we’re really actually making things a billion times worse than if we’d just minded our business.

Intense Movie Openings: I like them. I like when the beginning of a movie feels like someone’s holding a running chainsaw a few inches from your throat. The one from Mad Max: Fury Road is wonderful. The café explosion in Children of Men is a real ride. The countdown at the start of Mission: Impossible III is masterful. The one from There Will Be Blood doesn’t feel like it’s going to be intense but then you get to minute eight or nine of no words at all being spoken and suddenly it feels like you’re walking a high wire between two buildings. I don’t know if the car ride in Lady Bird counts as “intense” but it certainly counts as “goddamn artwork.” The jolt from watching the two guys get shot in Seven Psychopaths is incredible. The beach scene in Saving Private Ryan sent actual former soldiers into fits of post-traumatic stress.¹² There are a bunch. I like them, is the point.