Fun with Parenting: The Disney Curse

 

I have issues with Walt.  Him and his cronies have not done a nice job of representing mothers in their movies.  Mothers, in most Disney movies, are either evil bitches that you want nothing to do with, or they are nowhere to be found.

 

Where is Snow White’s momma? That’s right, she’s dead. She has been replaced by the evil stepmother, and we all know how that worked out. The princess gets to clean the palace, and is almost taken out by one of the evil queen’s employees (”I was just following orders!”). She survives the assassination attempt, only to end up with seven (?) strangers in some dingy cabin. Once there, she gets to –you guessed it- clean some more. Then she is attacked again, and is subsequently rescued by a French-kissing anonymous prince, who kidnaps her and makes her his wife. What? Why can’t he take her out to dinner first? And a movie? It’s all a little sudden, isn’t it?

 

But I digress.

 

Cinderella’s mother, where is she? I think we’re supposed to assume she is also dead, and has also been replaced by an evil stepmother.

 

Belle: no mother anywhere to be found. This time they don’t even bother to explain it. She may be dead, or she may have run away with someone else, or maybe she’s in jail, serving out a sentence for heroin possession…who knows?

 

Ariel the mermaid doesn’t have a mother, Sleeping Beauty has one but isn’t allowed to live with her, and then there’s Nemo, who may not be a princess, but still has to live with the knowledge that his mother was brutally murdered by something scary with lots of teeth.  Jasmine, no mother. Tinkerbell: forget about it. 

 

They finally broke the mold when they made the Lion King, and killed the father instead. Although they only did it because that’s what happened in Hamlet, it was still refreshing.

 

I know for most of these movies, the blueprint already existed. Maybe a better question to ask would be why, in all these old fairy tales, are mothers depicted so poorly? But I don’t think that’s a good counterargument: the folks at Disney are more than happy to change the facts when it benefits them. If they weren’t, Pocahontas would have been a very different movie.