Friday June 13, 2003 at 11:39 PM
Disney's Broken Homes
Appearing in Domestic Bliss
Why are there so few successful marriages in Disney movies?
In Snow White, we get a queen and a princess but not a king. In Pinocchio we get a father but no mother — unless you want to count the fairy. In Dumbo we get a mother but no father — although we get a sort of father figure in Timothy Mouse. The list goes on and on.
In The Little Mermaid we get seven sisters and a father but no mother. Beauty and the Beast is missing a mother. In The Emperor’s New Groove, Kuzco has no parents but doesn’t seen to be an orphan, although Pacha’s family seems to be holding it together. In Tarzan Jane accompanies her father to the jungle but never even mentions her mother. In Toy Story the mother is around for the packing, the birthday, and the moving but the father doesn’t show up until the final seconds of the closing reel.
In Bug’s Life we get a queen and two princesses but no king and nary a mention of Flick’s genetic heritage. And in the most recent installment, Finding Nemo, mom gets eaten in the first five minutes leaving us with a buddy movie about a psychologically disturbed father and a memory impaired tag-along.
That’s not to say there aren’t a few films with a functioning marriage, but even those situations are less than idyllic. Mary Poppins stars a workaholic father and an inattentive mother. 101 Dalmations is about a couple who adopt 85 puppies but never manage to name any of them save their own. And finally in Hercules, we get a functioning marriage, but that’s between two gods.
Looking at the whole set of films (or as many of them as I can remember) the meta-theme seems to be that if you have only one parent, your life is about escaping danger. If you have two parents however, your life is about trying to get back home.
Conscious or accidental, that’s certainly a powerful message for all the single-parent families out there.
Comments
It is interesting stuff. One of the theories is that most of Disney's movies are, for lack of a better word, fables. And fables historically feature only one parent more often than not. The Brother's Grimm had a huge hangup about stepmothers and stepsisters (all of them wicked) and fathers were often seen as henpecked victims.
As a screenwriter, I can attest to the fact that it's often just easier to only have one parent in the story. They represent "parenthood" and all of its nuances. Unless you're going to create a conflict between mother and father that has its own arc and conclusion (including enough tension and resolution to make it worthwhile), putting in a second parent often just clutters up your character roster, and more often than not you're asking "Okay, so what the heck does is the Father doing in this scene?" or "We haven't seen the mother in 40 pages - do we even need her?"
Ultimately though, it think it's because the stories are about the children and not the parents, and the lessons learned are independence, self-reliance, and confidence. Which is interesting, because people generally think of fables and fairy tales as being something "for children and families." But when you look under the surface, they're quite anti-family in that they encourage the young to strike it out on their own and become strong, free-thinking creative individuals. The son or daughter who leaves the family to become a musician, actor, aritist, or adventurer, has a much more interesting story than the one who stayed home and followed his dad into the shoe business.
Posted by: DisneyThinker on Fri Jun 13, 03