Both Like Father and Like Son
Posted by Jake Cohen on 6/12/2009
Walter Griffin, Up’s perpetual dreamer, encourages his son, Mikey, to resist a traditional career path. “Don’t tie yourself down…” Don’t be “a slave to the dollar.” “Be your own boss; that’s what I think.” Despite his deep admiration for his father, after a series of enchanting events, Mikey soon finds himself defying Walter’s ideology and secretly working “every morning and every night.” As the money flows in, Mikey can imagine no other path for himself; Mikey, the unremarkable teenager, has quickly become Michael, the celebrated entrepreneur. Oblivious to Mikey’s capitalist ambitions, Walter dreams on. And so, in a reversal of stereotype, UP presents a father’s unwavering sense of adventure pitted against a son’s developing sense of practicality.
Several of us on the Up team are young adults, taking the first steps of our careers. While I can’t speak for my peers, I wouldn’t be surprised if they felt, as I do, that the Mikey-Walter unrest lies within all of us. Regardless of whether our parents have encouraged us to think broadly or narrowly about how to pay the rent, we seek to hold fast to dreams while, simultaneously, we fear that too much dreaming might lead to a nightmare. As we begin the first unstructured years of our lives, our sympathy oscillates between the two outlooks on an almost-daily basis; one day we obsess over Mikey’s concern (”How do I make money?”), the next we return to Walter’s doctrine (”Be free!”).
I feel not only extremely privileged to be a part of this team, but also immensely grateful that this collaboration explores questions that resonate as deeply as they do, given my own transitional chapter of life. I imagine the answer to the question at hand only grows more elusive with time, and that it’s not just as we stand in this threshold that we’ll struggle to reconcile our inner dreamers with our inner providers.
Then again, as we observe some of our mentors in the rehearsal room, we have some encouraging signs that the Walter and Mikey within us might, at times, become one and the same.