He may be of the wrong species ( Kung Fu Panda). He may be a tyrant ( The Little Mermaid) or a ne’er-do-well ( Despicable Me). He may start out hypercritical ( Chicken Little) or reluctant ( Ice Age). In a striking number of animated kids’ movies of the past couple of decades (coincidental with the resurgence of Disney and the rise of Pixar and DreamWorks), the dead mother is replaced not by an evil stepmother but by a good father. Oh, the perfect part? She’s dead.” Dad’s magic depends on Mom’s death. (Usually when a widowed father is shown onscreen mooning over his dead wife’s portrait or some other relic, it’s to establish not how wonderful she was but rather how wonderful he is.) To quote Emily Yoffe in The New York Times, writing about the perfection of the widowed father in Sleepless in Seattle, “He is charming, wry, sensitive, successful, handsome, a great father, and, most of all, he absolutely adores his wife. In the parlance of Helen Gurley Brown, he has it all! He’s not only the perfect parent but a lovely catch, too. He is protector and playmate, comforter and buddy, mother and father. Thus Marlin not only replaces the dead mother but becomes the dependable yet adventurous parent Nemo always wanted, one who can both hold him close and let him go.
#Super mom cartoons movie#
He starts out as an overprotective, humorless wreck, but in the course of the movie he faces down everything-whales, sharks, currents, surfer turtles, an amnesiac lady-fish, hungry seagulls-to save Nemo from the clutches of the evil stepmother-in-waiting Darla, a human monster-girl with hideous braces (vagina dentata, anyone?). Before the title sequence, Nemo’s mother, Coral, is eaten by a barracuda, so Nemo’s father, Marlin, has to raise their kid alone. Take Finding Nemo (Disney/Pixar, 2003), the mother of all modern motherless movies. Here’s a challenge: show me an animated kids’ movie that has a named mother in it who lives until the credits roll. In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), Bruno Bettelheim, the child psychologist, saw the dead mother as a psychological boon for kids: In Death and the Mother From Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (1998), Carolyn Dever, a professor of English, noted that character development begins “in the space of the missing mother.” The unfolding of plot and personality, she suggests, depends on the dead mother. The dead-mother plot is a fixture of fiction, so deeply woven into our storytelling fabric that it seems impossible to unravel or explain.īut some have tried. As Marina Warner notes in her book From the Beast to the Blonde, one of the first Cinderella stories, that of Yeh-hsien, comes from ninth-century China. The dead-mother plot has a long and storied history, going back past Bambi and Snow White, past the mystical motherless world of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, past Dickens’s orphans, past Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, past the Brothers Grimm’s stepmothers, and past Charles Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.
Fox), I have to admit that I am shocked … and, well, just a tad wary.īut I’m getting ahead of myself. And when I see a movie that does ( Brave, Coraline, A Bug’s Life, Antz, The Incredibles, The Lion King, Fantastic Mr. Here’s another challenge: show me an animated kids’ movie that has a named mother in it who lives until the credits roll. The cartoonist Alison Bechdel once issued a challenge to the film industry with her now-famous test: show me a movie with at least two women in it who talk to each other about something besides a man. Either the mothers died onscreen, or they were mysteriously disposed of before the movie began: Chicken Little, Aladdin, The Fox and the Hound, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, The Emperor’s New Groove, The Great Mouse Detective, Ratatouille, Barnyard, Despicable Me, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and, this year, Mr. The same pattern held, but with a deadly twist. And the father figures? To die for!Ī decade after my Peter Pan years, I began watching a lot of animated children’s movies, both new and old, with my son. The mothers in the movies were either gone or useless. Gee, I thought, Peter Pan Bus Lines sure is keen to reinforce its brand identity. All the movies on board seemed somehow to feature children lost or adrift, kids who had metaphorically fallen out of their prams.
After a few trips, I noticed a curious pattern. Doubtfire, The Man Without a Face, that kind of thing. The ride was terrifying but the price was right, and you could count on watching a movie on the screen mounted behind the driver’s seat. I used to take the Peter Pan bus between Washington, D.C., and New York City. Human baby’s mother in Ice Age, chased by a saber-toothed tiger over a waterfall.
Ariel’s mother in the third Little Mermaid, crushed by a pirate ship. Po’s mother in Kung Fu Panda 2, done in by a power-crazed peacock.
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