It’s blase and unoriginal for parents to complain about Disney movies constantly killing off parents. But I’ve been seeing all these old films in a new light, watching them again as an adoptive parent with my children. There’s a new flavor coming through, always present but previously imperceptible to me. The themes and messages present in many of these child-oriented films have a different impact on an adopted child, different both in scale and in kind. Sometimes it’s makes a positive message more meaningful, and other times it makes the low notes more distressing.
The key point I want to emphasize is that a “negative adoption theme” and a “sad moment” in a movie are not necessarily the same thing.
I’m walking through the Disney movies I have personal familiarity with and re-evaluating them as an adoptive parent. Some of these I watched as a child, and some of them I’ve watched recently. Obviously others are going to be missing, as my experience is not all-encompassing. Did I leave out any big ones in your experience? Let me know comments!
Spoilers ahead if you care.
Cinderella
A loving single father dies in the exposition. Our soon-to-be princess is left in the care of a verbally abusive and neglectful stepmother. She lives in a house with two bullying step-siblings.
This is all sad in its own right. But there’s a subversive theme here for adoptive children that you’ll see crop up a few places in this list. It boils down to “man, Protagonist, your birth family was much better, doesn’t it suck that you lost them?” This is, to put it mildly, not the best message you want to put out there when you’re struggling every day to build attachment.
The distinction between “step child” and “adopted child” is blurry enough that we can trust kids to make the link. Cinderella is consistently treated like a second class citizen in her new family, and winds up befriending animals to combat her loneliness.
The Little Mermaid
I’m sure if I were bothered to search for it, I could dig up an explanation for what happened to Ariel’s mother. She is neither seen nor mentioned. But we see plenty of her father. Upon being defied, he turns violent, prompting her to run away from home.
And running away? That totally works out for her in the end. I want to drill in on this, because it comes up more tha once. Foster children are particularly at risk for running away from home. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019074091730720X
So, I get a little twitchy when I see “running away” as the solution to the character’s problems. And once you see it, it keeps rearing its head as a recurring theme.
Beauty and the Beast
Everybody’s favorite film about Stockholm Syndrome, it turns out, doesn’t have a lot to say about the subject of family.
Addendum: the live-action remake did find it necessary to tack on tragic parental loss backstories for both Belle and the Beast, so knock that version down a couple pegs.
Aladdin
What’s most striking about his parents is their absence. There’s only one brief mention of the fact that he is an orphan. The movie doesn’t touch on familial themes at all. I mean, the Sultan seems like a decent enough guy?
Given how the rest of this list goes, a complete lack of adoption themes is not the worst possible outcome. No news is good news if the rest of the news is fucking tragic.
The Lion King
Simba watches his own father die violently, and then is made to feel like it’s his fault by his murderous uncle. He copes with this loss by running away from home, which (again!) turns out just fine for him in the end.
No to all of this. And I say this knowing that it’s still my favorite Disney movie. Sometimes the truth hurts.
Frozen
Good lord, Disney. Both parents killed off, on-screen, before we even make it out of the exposition. Is that a record? It’s a shame, because eventually the story drives home the immense value that sisterhood can have. And again, the protagonist runs away from home in a state of emotional distress, which turns out fine.
Tangled
The protagonist is kidnapped from her birth family as a baby. Her kidnapper assumes the role of her mother, yet is verbally abusive and neglectful. The story revolves around reuniting Rapunzel with her birth family, but in the process she has to kill her aforementioned surrogate mother. Oh, and she ran away from home to do it.
Read the above paragraph from the point of view of an adoptive parent and try not to cringe. This would be one of the movies that falls into Venn diagram region of Not Overtly Tragic and Negative Adoption Themes. It’s far from the saddest Disney movie out there, but I can’t think of a worse one for a foster child.
The Princess and the Frog
Tiana’s father dies off-screen after a time-skip from the exposition. However, everybody seems to be coping healthily with it. The movie focuses primarily on internal development of the two protagonists.
This movie provides an illustrative example of how to handle loss, and family, just right. The story uses family as a motivation for self-improvement, not as a plot device to build tragedy.
Inside Out
This film is actually founded in some pretty real cognitive science behind emotional development, which is probably why it’s actually used as a resource in some forms of cognitive behavioral therapy. https://psmag.com/social-justice/a-conversation-with-psychologist-behind-inside-out
What I absolutely love is that, in this movie, running away is not the solution to the protagonist’s problems. It’s seen as a catastrophic failure. Something to avoid at all costs.
I give this one top marks even though ostensibly it isn’t even a movie about adoption, just for how gracefully it handles the theme of family and coping with loss.
Moana
Everything was going great. Both parents make it through to the end of the movie intact. A grandparent dies offscreen, but it is presented less as tragedy and more as part of a cycle using a reincarnation gimmick. So far so good.
But then, we get Maui opening up about his past, telling the story of how his parents didn’t want him, and so they threw him into the ocean.
So close, yet so far, Disney. Seriously, the one movie where both parents survive and you have to throw attempted infanticide out of left field.
Conclusions
I had to stop here because I realize I’ve embarked on a bit of a fool’s errand in that I haven’t seen every Disney movie ever made and don’t remember all of the ones I’ve seen well enough to comment on them. I will note that it’s interesting that what’s probably the saddest movie in the collection I’ve reviewed, The Lion King, isn’t the one with the worst adoption themes; that distinction goes to Tangled. Likewise, the most uplifting movie about familial bonds, Frozen, doesn’t have the best themes for adoption; that prize goes to Inside Out, which oddly enough isn’t a movie that even touches the idea of parental loss.
As always I’m curious what you, dear reader, think about the topic. Let me know in the comments.