separation. How funny would Home Alone (1990) have been if Kevin’s parents had died, or if his parents had deliberately left him alone? However, such permanent or willful parental absence is exactly the sort of situation that often confronts a child at the start of a Disney film.
We are driven, then, to this hypothesis: that the preferred premise for writers and animators who create these films is the destroyed or shattered family, and the characteristic problem confronting their young characters is the need to compensate for their irremediable lack of one or both of their parents.
Children and young people in Disney animated films employ two strategies to replace their absent or inadequate families. The first could be described as a reconciliation with nature: without nurturing support from parents, the young person turns to the natural world, to sympathetic and often anthropomorphic animals who can provide that support. Thus, after fleeing through a stormy forest, Snow White is surrounded by forest animals who comfort her. When the Blue Fairy brings Pinocchio to life, she appoints an insect named Jiminy Cricket to serve as his mentor and companion. Arthur of The Sword in the Stone, when he travels to London, is supervised by a talking owl. Mowgli of The Jungle Book is raised by wolves and later guided by a bear and a panther, just as Tarzan is raised by apes. Penny of The Rescuers is helped by two mice, Bernard and Miss Bianca, from the Rescue Aid Society. King Triton of The Little Mermaid at one time appoints the crab Sebastian to serve as his daughter’s guardian. Cody of The Rescuers Down Under bonds with a mighty mother eagle, and is later rescued by Bernard and Miss Bianca.9 (Other animals in Disney films also provide support, though they are admittedly more like friends than parents: Princess Aurora of Sleeping Beauty frolics with some forest animals; the girl in Oliver and Company turns to the kitten Oliver for companionship; Ariel, The Little Mermaid, has a flounder and seagull as her friends; Aladdin has a pet monkey, Abu, while Princess Jasmine has a protective pet tiger named Rajah; Pocahantas has a rambunctious pet raccoon; and Mulan is assisted by a small dragon.)
The other strategy is to seek out or find a surrogate parent—a friendly adult, typically a magical being who can provide the support and guidance of a parent. Snow White finds the Seven Dwarfs to protect her from the Queen, Pinocchio is adopted by the woodcutter Geppetto, and Cinderella finds a Fairy Godmother. Peter Pan enjoys the help of the adult Tinker Bell, who saves him from the scheme of Captain Hook. Aurora of Sleeping Beauty is raised by motherly fairies. Arthur of The Sword in the Stone is taken in by Merlin the Magician; Taran in The Black Cauldron finds a sorcerer to serve as a father figure; Aladdin stumbles upon a friendly genie to help him woo Princess Jasmine; and Pocahantas obtains advice and guidance from an ancient talking tree, Mother Willow.
All of these developments might serve as a transitional stage, a way to temporarily help children deal with an unpleasant situation until their normal family can be restored, or until a new normal family can be created. And the films where human characters are subordinate to animal characters—like The Rescuers, Oliver and Company, and The Rescuers Down Under—may move to this kind of conclusion: after being helped by Bernard and Miss Bianca, Penny is adopted by two loving parents; after the crisis provoked by her pet cat, the girl in Oliver and Company is reunited with her parents; and although Cody in The Rescuers Down Under is last seen as the triumphant master of his natural realm, riding the mighty eagle to America, we assume he will soon be reunited with his mother.
However, in other Disney animated films, something different happens: the children’s mentors do not give way to true parents and do not retain the role of surrogate parents. Instead there occurs a role reversal: while animals and magical adults first appear in parental roles, the children later assume parental roles, with the animals and adults recast as their children. In effect, children manage to construct their own families, with themselves as parents.
The pattern is twice enacted in the first Disney animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When they first appear, the forest animals comfort Snow White when she is sadly crying in the forest; but after she wakes up and becomes a little more cheerful, she takes charge of the animals and issues commands as they clean up the dwarfs’ cottage. Similarly, Snow White initially appeals to the dwarfs for protection against the Queen; then she begins to act like their mother—cooking their meals, scolding them to wash their hands before eating, and kissing them goodbye as they go off to work.
The ostensible child who functions as a parent is also seen in the second Disney animated film, Pinocchio. Although Jiminy is assigned to be Pinocchio’s conscience, the puppet-boy completely ignores him, never asks for advice, and goes where he pleases, leaving the cricket to literally and figuratively play the role of Pinocchio’s follower throughout the film. Pinocchio twice disobeys Geppetto by not going to school and instead joining Stromboli’s puppet show and visiting Pleasure Island. Even at the end of the film, when Pinocchio has apparently reformed, he is still willful and disobedient: without asking permission or explaining himself, he sets fire to Geppetto’s boat so as to provoke the whale Monstro to sneeze; and later, when the drowning Geppetto tells Pinocchio to leave him and save himself, the boy disobeys him and rescues the woodcutter. From the beginning to the end of the film, Pinocchio is completely in control of his own actions, and Jiminy Cricket and Geppetto are little more than his puppets.
Similar role reversals occur in other animated films. Despite their careful parenting, the fairies in Sleeping Beauty cannot prevent Aurora from falling in love with a handsome stranger. Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther of The Jungle Book are powerless to keep Mowgli from doing what he wants; Ariel does what she pleases, despite the advice of her aquatic friends; Aladdin soon learns how to manipulate and control his genie; and Pocahantas becomes an assertive voice for peace in her tribe. The most extreme case is The Sword in the Stone: when young Arthur announces that he is going to London against Merlin’s wishes, the magician angrily vanishes, abandoning his parental role and leaving Arthur completely in control of his own actions; the owl Archimedes tries to replace Merlin as tutor and guide but remains subordinate to Arthur; and Arthur then pulls the sword from the stone and becomes King of England—making himself the ultimate parental figure.
A variation of the pattern is seen in Cinderella and Peter Pan. Here, the child is first seen already in a position of dominance; that is, while Cinderella may have initially turned to the household animals to console her in her times of unhappiness, like Snow White, by the time the movie begins she has established herself as their parent, feeding, dressing, and fussing over them. Similarly, Peter Pan was no doubt a rather helpless figure when he first came to Neverland, but at the start of the film, he is the leader of the Lost Boys and master of Tinker Bell. In these films, the crucial action is a crisis which temporarily returns the child-parent to the status of a child, so that animals and magical beings must temporarily resume the role of parents: so when Cinderella is reduced to despair because she has no dress for the ball, the mice and birds come to her rescue by crafting a beautiful dress for her; and when Peter Pan naïvely opens the deadly present from Captain Hook, Tinker Bell rushes to save him, like a good mother. However, when the crisis passes, Cinderella and Peter Pan return to their parental roles; indeed, it is interesting that in the one major change from J. M. Barrie’s original story, the Disney version of Peter Pan has the Lost Boys stay behind with Peter in Neverland, so that he can remain a dominant parental figure.
Far from affirming “traditional family values,” then, these animated films directly argue against those values. Their message is that parents are not in fact an important element in childhood: children can prosper without true parents or effective parents; and when they encounter parent-like figures, they can learn how to dominate and control those potential surrogate parents. In effect, children in Disney animated films create their own families and make themselves the parents of those families.
Some may not accept that these classic and beloved films are a functional assault on American family values; but the true test of a model is how well it explains otherwise puzzling aspects of its subject. And we can employ this model to propose solutions to a few problems raised by the Disney animated films.
The
