Inside Out

The list of animated movies is long this summer.

Those yellow creatures wearing goggles and blue overalls, if you ask me, pale in comparison with the story of Riley. This eleven-year-old only child had to move with her parents from Minnesota to San Francisco. Poor little girl. Her apprehension rose with the new school, the new hockey team, and the new way a pizza tastes. Riley struggled with the five emotion characters coming from her prefrontal cortex; she simply didn't know how to put them in the right order.

I can't tell you how many times my daughter cried throughout the movie. Okay, the truth is she cried a lot, so much so that I'm convinced that it's a touching story.

On the way back from the cinema, we talked and went over her feelings carefully, the way you feel for a hurting aphthous ulcer with your tongue. She began to tell me her worry about new school year. One after another. And soon we discussed how much she feels unprepared for our domestic maid's leaving this year (after working for us for five years). That is one of the worst feelings we can think of, to have had a wonderful maid, to know you had the luck, and then to lose it.

It's time, I know, to teach my girl the nuts and bots of finding an island to keep track of wonderful memory. The way five paper dolls (Ticky and Tacky, Jackie the Backie, Jim with two noses and Jo with the bow) are stored in Julia Donaldson's The Paper Dolls.