April 16, 2019

Reflection on the movie “Finding Neverland (2004)”

When I was a kid, the TV advertisement of Krim Stix stating that “imagination mo ang limit” would
always catch my attention. And after watching the movie Finding Neverland, the same tagline crossed my mind.
First few minutes into the movie, we get to see they play written by the protagonist, James Matthew
Barrie. However, just at the beginning of the play, Barrie sees how major of a flop the show was and was utterly
disappointed by this. As Barrie struggles to find inspiration for another play, he crossed paths with the Davies
family—ultimately changing his life.
The movie delivered very well with the use of metaphors and comparison of ideas. Thanks to the scene
where Peter pointed out that Porthos is just a dog, I learned to never see things just as they were but to look at
them to what they could be. We could see in our current society, we have people aspiring and dreaming to
become something even more, but we also see people that wants to dash those dreams by saying they’re “just a
[…].” We need more people like Barrie in our society, someone that sees things with just a wee bit of
imagination.
As the movie unfolds, it was revealed that most of the audience were doctors, lawyers, businessmen,
and their wives all dressed to the nines. And this signifies that the viewers of the show are fixated to seeing
things as they were—without a wee bit of imagination. This in turn, prompts Barrie to a turning point in the
story. Here we can learn that, as we grow up, we lose some of our imagination and become a serious person,
this is also the reason why some adults cannot find the happiness and satisfaction that they want.
Over the course of interaction of Barrie to the Davies family, we see their adventures to the Wild West,
the Monarchy of King Michael the Benevolent, Pirate Excursions, and even the Lamentable Tale of Lady
Ursula. As kids, Jack, George, and Michael, showed a great deal of imagination. As for Peter, it was revealed
that he grew up too fast because of the death of his father, which explains his indifference and lack of
imagination towards their adventures [until later].
Towards the end of the movie, Barrie solved the dilemma on the mostly-adult audience by inviting
children from an orphanage. This created an atmosphere in the theatre with the soft giggles of the children, thus
painting smiles to the once serious face of the doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. However, the movie didn’t
just end there, we get to witness the Neverland in the form of a theatrical play for the dying Mrs. Davies.
Ultimately, Peter was once again grieving for the loss of another loved one and further regressed into a
terrible state. Until Barrie arrived and taught him about the biggest lesson—people are never truly lost, they can
be found in every page of our imagination. All the moments we spend with each other, the laughter, the banters,
and even the good mornings, they would later be tools to reminisce the person.
Overall, the movie taught me about the importance of our creativity/imagination. They may not be able
to bend the reality, but it can definitely change our outlooks in life. And in the last moments of the movie, I felt
the urge to just run to my grandmother to hug her. Time will come that they will have to leave this world—the
work of the ticking crocodile— so we must know that we should cherish every moment we spend with them in
this world. So we would have more pages of them, in our memory.