peculiar and conspicuous absence of mothers in these films. This is crucial, for while fathers were once traditionally allowed to periodically leave the home or be absent for extended periods, the established role of the mother was to always be at home, nurturing the children and keeping the family functioning as a unit. Thus, removing the mother rather than the father—the usual preference in the films—is the strongest device for attacking the family. Yet these films rarely lack a strong female figure. However, a key transformation occurs: the mother figure is recast as a powerful villainess.
The transformation is transparent in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella, where the evil woman is a step-mother, not a true mother, but other films have domineering, malevolent women who are less obviously mothers in disguise—the Red Queen of Alice in Wonderland, the fairy Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, Madame Mim in The Sword in the Stone, Madame Medusa in The Rescuers, and Ursula in The Little Mermaid. Watching boys and girls without mothers struggling to free themselves from the evil machinations of powerful older women, we witness an enactment of children struggling to free themselves from their families, as personified by the figures who most strongly hold those families together, the mothers. In contrast, early Disney films featured relatively few male villains, with the prominent exceptions of Stromboli and the Coachman in Pinocchio and Captain Hook in Peter Pan, who in that film, as in the play, is a version of the children’s father, Mr. Darling (on stage, the same actor plays both roles, and in the Disney film, Hans Conreid provided the voice for both roles).
Yet an odd shift has occurred in recent Disney animated films, which also poses a problem: except for The Little Mermaid, these films focus on powerful male villains, warped transformations of the father figure: the Horned King in The Black Cauldron, Bill Sykes in Oliver and Company, McHeath in The Rescuers Down Under, Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, the Grand Vizier of Aladdin, the English colonialist of Pocahantas, Frollo of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hades in Hercules (1997),10 and the Hun Shan Yu in Mulan. Having relied on villainous women in previous films, why has the Walt Disney company suddenly shifted, in the last ten years, to an emphasis on villainous men?
Our answer is this: in recent times, the idealized image of the family has radically changed. Modern fathers are not supposed to be distant or absent, leaving mothers to care for and unite the family; instead, fathers are supposed to be intimately involved in all aspects of family life, participating as an equal in nurturing children and maintaining the family. So, at the very moment when the father has assumed a new prominence as an avatar of practicing family values, Disney animated films give new prominence to the evil, domineering male villain. This cannot be coincidental; rather, it must represent a recognition that a modern attack on family values must focus on the father as well as on the mother.
Our model may also offer some insight regarding what must be regarded as the strangest and most problematic of the Disney animated films, Alice in Wonderland. Based on a popular children’s classic, the film featured, as most critics would agree, many colorful and entertaining characters, some brilliantly creative animation, and a soundtrack filled with memorable songs. Thus, Alice in Wonderland should have been highly successful. However, it is widely viewed as Disney’s most spectacular failure: it was one of the few animated features that lost money on its initial release, the first such film to be shown on television (as early as 1954), and one of the few films that was never re-released to theaters. The question we must ask is: what’s wrong with this movie?
While other explanations have been offered, our model provides an answer: overly constrained by very familiar source material, Disney writers and animators could not make Alice in Wonderland fit the pattern of the family-creating, self-parenting child, so the film lacked appeal both to its creators and to its audiences.
At the start of the film, we see Alice as a young girl who wishes to follow in the footsteps of other Disney children. The first song she sings, “In a World of My Own,” may be the purest expression of the impulse that drives these independent youths:
Cats and rabbits
Would reside in fancy little houses
And be dressed in shoes and fancy trousers
In a world of my own.
All the flowers
Would have very extra-special powers;
I would sit and talk to them for hours
When I’m lonely in a world of my own....
I would listen to a babbling brook
And hear a song that I could understand.
I keep hoping it could be that way,
because my world would be a Wonderland.11
Like other Disney children, Alice is ready to abandon her family, at least temporarily, to establish rapport with anthropomorphic animals (and even plants) and to make herself a parent in her own world.
Unfortunately, Alice cannot accomplish these goals. She tries to establish sympathetic contact with the natural world, but the animals she encounters—the White Rabbit, the talking flowers, the caterpillar, and the Cheshire Cat—are either hostile or enigmatic. She encounters adults who might serve as surrogate parents—Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Mad Hatter, and the Red Queen—but these people are also unhelpful and sometimes maddening. Unable to dominate these animals or magical adults, or even to connect with them, Alice cannot begin to construct her own family with herself as a parent; and, late in the film, at a time when other Disney children have established themselves as the centers of their own families, we see Alice sitting alone in the forest, crying her heart out, in a scene not found in Carroll’s books which is an exact analogue to the forest scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As she cries, various baffling creatures surround her and cry sympathetic tears. But, as was not the case with Snow White, the creatures do not approach her, and Alice cannot parent them. Instead, they vanish, and she must travel by herself to another unsettling adventure. Unable to commune with or control her Wonderland, Alice must ultimately retreat, returning to her old life under the guidance of her older sister and finding, reassuringly, that her Wonderland was only a dream.
The odd thing is that Alice in Wonderland is also the one Disney film that offers a traditional message: “there’s no place like home.” To stay happy, Alice must remain at home, in what we presume is a normal family; if she goes away from home, she will only get in trouble, find no worthwhile friends, and feel lost and confused. This is, presumably, the messages that parents would want their children to hear; and it is surprising to find it only in a Disney movie that most critics and viewers despise.
Throughout the twentieth century, children have become more independent and more rebellious in dealing with their parents, and one posited explanation has always been the baleful influence of disreputable literature. There have been vigorous crusades to keep children away from pulp magazines, comic books, violent cartoons, and video games, all seen as causes of undesirable childhood or adolescent behavior. And during all these periods of alarm, Disney animated films were cast as wholesome, desirable alternatives to these despised examples of children’s subliterature. We suggest here that these films have in fact conveyed a subversive message of their own; and parents who insist upon blaming outside influences for their children’s bad conduct now have a new, and surprising, candidate for their concern and condemnation.12
6. In revisiting this essay, originally written in 1993 and updated in 1999, we have elected to avoid discussion of the Disney animated films of the last decade, which have increasingly featured computer-generated
