(There is a spoiler for "Inside Out" below, read carefully)
Imaginary Friend is a term that I have only heard frequently in the United States, which means a partner imagined by children.
For me, when I was a child, I didn't have such a small partner, nor did I remember that my childhood friend had such a partner, so I guessed from the beginning that this was just a term used by Americans to fool around, and didn't pay much attention to it.
Then not long ago, in "Inside Out", Pixar's first "parental guidance" cartoon, I met an Imaginary Friend—Bing Bong.
With very no artistic modification, the order to break the suspense is that Bing Bong is the little girl's Imaginary Friend when she was a child-let's say that he is a pink elephant who can talk and jump candy when crying. The pink elephant spends a lot of happy time with the girl. When the little girl gradually grew up, the girl slowly stopped playing with the pink elephant, and the pink elephant finally wandered in the maze of the girl's long-term memory. One day, the pink elephant met the "emotions" of the little girl who accidentally arrived in the maze. In order to help these emotions return to the headquarters of the girl's brain, and secretly to make the little girl remember herself again, the pink elephant promised to help The emotions go back to the headquarters. As a result, there was another accident, and the pink elephant and emotion fell into the abyss of forgetting. In the abyss of forgetting, all memories will slowly fade, and then disappear forever. The pink elephant finally sacrificed himself and helped his emotions escape from the abyss. When the final emotions returned to the headquarters, the world (little girl's) was saved, but no one ever mentioned the pink elephant.
So, maybe our group of big kids who think they don't have Imaginary Friend actually have such an Imaginary Friend. He/she/it may be a pink elephant, it may be a yellow panda, it may be a green soybean, or something strange that we older children can't even imagine. When we were young, when our parents had no time to take care of us, and we were playing on the ground alone, these partners accompany us by their side, sing with us, and pick up our words; pretending to be monsters against Transformers, playing Other characters in the family...When we grow up and start to receive new things that we can't catch up with, they let our recent memory to receive these new things and slip into long-term memory by themselves. Then later, some stay in long-term memory, some are forgotten, some are like pink elephants, in order to preserve our most important things, we sacrificed heroically...
Maybe, the whole paragraph above is just literary youth. The daydream about eating and doing nothing, Imaginary Friend or something, is just a concept marketed by DreamWorks, and the pink elephant is just the next hot-selling Elsa doll and so on. However, just thinking about it makes my heart warm: we must know how many times we have been in danger after so many years, we have to lose a certain part of our humanity, we have to compromise one of our dreams, and we have to give up certain persistence. ...However, the various emotions living in us and these imaginary little partners worked together to turn the danger into a breeze, so that we finally saved ourselves. Suddenly, I felt my skin glowed golden.
So I think I still have to commemorate the partner that I or I have forgotten. Thank you for your persistence, thank you for helping me.
Then I thought about it, Bing Bong disappeared, and no one mentioned the name again. But Joy should remember that there was such a person who sacrificed herself for Riley. She must also remember the sentence "Take her to the moon for me, okay?"
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