The wonderful world of Disney? Only if you relish the idea of mothers and fathers being slaughtered at the turn of every cinematic corner. The most celebrated and beloved films of all times! Delightful, enchanting and touching! The beauty of nature and the miracle of life!
Let's take a polite peek at the individual cases, shall we:
The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Quasimodo's mother is hurled onto the ground by the evil Frollo, her head smashed against the cathedral steps. Dead as a door nail.
The Lion King: Simba's father, Mufasa, is dropped from a cliff by his sadistic brother, Uncle Scar, whereby he plummets to the ground and is violently crushed by a herd of stampeding antelope.
Bambi: Need I say more? The most famous butchery of a mommy in film history.
Propagator of patricide and matricide, good old Oedipus Disney's films are littered with a plethora of missing or dead parents:
Peter Pan is parentless. Free of mom and dad, he is so completely unburdened, so liberated from the horrors of parents that he can actually fly.
Mowgli's parents in The Jungle Book are out of the picture as well. Their disappearance is not even addressed. Were they devoured by tigers, picked over by vultures? Were their bones left to bleach in the brilliant sun (with Mowgli-- years later, as a toddler-- making a toy of his mother's left leg bone)? Mowgli was adopted and reared by animals, because-- as we all know-- being raised by jungle creatures is far more intriguing and adventurous than having to put up with drab, domesticated parents.
Poor old big-eared Dumbo was fatherless as well. Did Mr. Pachyderm pack up his trunk (pardon me) and waddle off with some younger, slimmer elephant? Or did the missus turf him out of the cage for partaking in one too many rolls in the hay?
And what of Ariel's mother in The Little Mermaid? Did she too yearn for human life and swap her fins for legs, deserting her family for the hedonistic pleasures on land?
In Snow White, did Mr. and Mrs. White abandon their sugar-voiced daughter, unable to stomach her adorable cartoonish inflections. Or did that dastardly bunch of dim-witted dwarfs viciously murder the couple so the princess would be left helpless in their grimy hands?
Then there is Cinderella. If only her wicked stepmother and her ugly sisters hadn't tossed that electric hair dryer into her parents' Jacuzzi while they were sharing a romantic candle-lit bath. "Cinderelly. Cinderelly. You've no parents, Cinderelly!"
Pocahontas is motherless. Yes, she has a father, Chief Powhatan yet she seems to have received most of her guidance and wisdom from Grandmother Willow, a tree. Even a tree beats out a parent, hands down.
While putting together my list of films for this analysis, I asked my four year old daughter if Pocahontas had a mother.
"Yes," was her immediate reply.
"Are you sure?" I asked, skeptically.
"Yes, she had a mother and a father. They died."
Of course, only the mother is missing from the family unit,
but-- conditioned by the Disney milieu-- my daughter automatically assumed both parents had been bumped off.
With responses such as these, I can’t help but get a little worried. No other alternative than to begin fearing for my life as I envision clans of zombie children plodding across the land while clutching butcher knives in their tiny hands. Reciting a lethargic version of the mouseketeer tune, they numbly spell out the words, chanting: “G-E-T... T-H-E... F-O-L-K-S.”
Aladdin-- Dead mother. Dead-beat dad.
Bedknobs and Broomsticks-- Three orphan children
Iron Will-- Father drowns.
James and the Giant Peach-- Parents gored by rhino.
Beauty and the Beast-- Belle minus mother.
The Rescuers-- Parents sadly unrescued.
The Rescuers Down Under-- Father six feet down under.
Disney-- in defence of their plot lines-- might argue that all the tragedy was merely lifted from other sources. After all, fairy tales have a long history of gruesome activities.
One might propose that the boys at Disney are merely in the recycling business, stealing ideas from famous authors, giving them a puritan polish, transforming them into their high art Classics and basking in the creative limelight of their glorious deeds. A tragedy in itself.
Why do those Mickey-mouse-eared executives refuse to give an author top billing? They should practice what they preach, be honest and virtuous enough to emblazon across the silver screen (while the opening music trumpets triumphantly): "Disney's cotton-candy bastardized adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book". Or "Disney's convoluted glossed-over misrepresentation of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame."
Anyway, that's a different story entirely.
Yes, they may counter, but doesn't everything turn out cherry in the end? Doesn't life go on with every one of God's miraculous creatures living happily ever after? Well, in that case, then this is the line of reasoning those wicked folks at Disney are peddling: "Don't worry about your parents being murdered, things'll be alright in the end, so pick up the phone kiddies and dial 1-800-KIL-FOLKS, Ask for Butcher Boy Walt. He'll scribble down your order and send over a few fresh-off-the-assembly-line square-jawed Disney Mounties to perform the evil deed.
I can picture the good old boys at Disney, gathered around
an oval table, rubbing their palms together while plotting the demise of yet another adult.
"Keep those offspring happy," a marketing whiz-kid pipes up, tossing an axe at one of the countless faces of loving mothers and fathers pinned on the mahogany walls. Adjourning the meeting, the clown-footed hate-mongers clomp outside to burn effigy's of mom and dad, to the climactic cheers of the young ones gathered in wait.
Bump off the parents and let the adventures begin. Or in the case of films featuring living parents, such as Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, reduce the folks to the size of helpless bugs and break out the party snacks.
Children everywhere will cheer: "Yahoo! Yahoo! The parents are dead. The parents are dead. Now I can stay up all night eating cookies and watching Disney flicks!"
The #1 family film of the year! But where's the family?
An earlier version of this article appeared in The Globe & Mail
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