I’m pretty guarded about expressing my emotions (INFP here). This is perhaps especially true when it come to what you might call “spiritual experiences.” I’m generally cautious about attributing random things to the divine, unless we’re talking about bacon cheeseburgers, at which point I become a heartfelt evangelist.

But while my heartstrings are not easily accessible, if you can name a Pixar film, then I can tell you which scene will make me openly weep like a baby.

Spoilers Ahead

When Nemo is reunited with his dad, there is something beautiful going on there that messes me up. I can’t tell you why it does this. I’ve always had a loving, understanding, and generally drama-free relationship with my father. Of course, that might be why it’s so meaningful to me. Nemo and Marlin remind me of how much I love my dad and how thankful I am for him and our relationship.

In Toy Story 3, as the toys are sliding down the giant trash heap into the fiery furnace to meet their “death,” they start to hold one another’s hands as if to indicate plaything-solidarity in their inevitable demise.

And I’m a goner.

We’ve lived with these characters for ten years. They are our friends. My daughter loves these toys. I love these toys. You love these toys, and if you don’t, then what’s your problem?

But it’s not just the fact that we’re about to lose them. There’s something going on between them. They’re connected. They begin to hold onto one another as if to console. If they’re going down, they’re going down together, unified. I’m weeping. And let me remind you, these are cartoon toys. I don’t typically become verklempt during films starring actual human beings, but for some reason Pixar has been capable of making me choke on my heart while watching animated robots, monsters, and plastic space rangers. It’s as if they’ve made these characters more real than real people. I’ve never been a toy cowboy, but for some reason I’m capable of understanding – or Pixar is capable of making me feel – what it’s like for Woody to know he belongs to Andy. We think it’s precious that the toys want to belong to somebody, but we’re sitting there watching our own story and experiencing our own longing for connection and relationship.

This isn’t just about Pixar, although they’re pretty consistent. I just watched the trailer for a documentary about a man named Kevin Clash. I don’t know how many people would recognize Kevin’s name, but the whole world knows his work, including my three-year-old daughter. Kevin is the puppeteer who animates and gives voice to Sesame Street’s Elmo. Being Elmo follows Kevin’s early dreams of working with puppets to his global domination of people’s hearts using red fabric and googly eyes. Just the trailer was enough to moisten my eyeballs. Maybe because I know my daughter loves Elmo, maybe because I know a lot of people love Elmo, maybe because I sometimes hate Elmo, but I saw that there was a beautiful story going on behind (below?) Elmo.

A voice in the trailer says, “When a puppet is true and good and meaningful, it’s the soul of the puppeteer that you’re seeing.” Being Elmo is the story of the man who makes Elmo come alive. Elmo, Woody, Buzz, Mike Wazowski, and Wall-E are not real. They don’t exist, but they are part of stories that touch us and speak to the realities that exist inside us. There are real people using fake creatures to talk to us in ways that real people sometimes can’t. They put fake characters into real messes just like in the real world, and they exploit my fears, hopes, and dreams.

To put it bluntly, they manipulate us.

With cartoons and puppets.

And we love it.

These are divine experiences. They force me to remember there is something larger than me, and even if that something is only a concept or a relationship, remembering sets the stage for something more complex. They get inside me and teach me about my dreams, my family, and my friends. When Nemo and Marlin unite, I know that there are bigger things happening in the world that I too often overlook or forget. When I start choking up over how much scripted cartoon fish love each other, I’m being opened a little, even for just a few minutes, to explore part of my own story I might have been ignoring.

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Cory Piña is a hard working Master of Arts in Theology student at Fuller Theological Seminary. If you want to read more of his thoughts, check out his blog This Is Cory, where Reel first found this article. You can also follow him on Twitter if you like (@corypina), where he very consistently cracks up the Twitter-verse with his wit.