By STACY MILBOUER
news@telegraph-nh.com
The lights went down in the theater and an audible click could be heard as the audience stopped talking, chewing and crumbling candy wrappers. The movie was about to begin and the audience was enthralled. After all, this was a top-grossing film at the box office when it opened last weekend and it’s been getting rave reviews since. And the trailers were irresistible.
The film opens with the scene of expectant parents literally floating off the ground in anticipation of the imminent birth of their first offspring.
They pick out names for their babies – it’s a multiple birth – voice their fears of becoming good parents and reminisce about the day they met. And then without warning the violence begins.
Their new home is invaded and the audience witnesses the bloody and violent death of the mother-to-be as well as all but one of her babies. Sound gruesome? Well, get this. The average age of the viewers crammed into the theater was 5. They were all there “Finding Nemo” and my 5-year-old son and I were among those searching.
All parents of small children can’t wait for the newest Disney film to open. After all, there isn’t much out there for kids 9 and under, right? And this has pretty much been true since I was a child in the days before VCRs, DVDs and HBO.
I have been renting out and taking my son to Disney films since he was 1.
And as delighted as I’ve been by “Tarzan,” “Lion King” and “Dinosaur,” I always left the movie feeling uneasy. I may have been humming “Hakuna Matata.” I may have raced to McDonald’s to buy a happy meal for the “Monsters Inc.” action figure. But I was also feeling creepy.
This weekend’s viewing of “Nemo” nailed it on the head. Barely 10 minutes into these animated features, a parent meets with a violent death often with their soon-to-be orphaned children watching. Tarzan’s hapless parents are slaughtered in a leopard attack. Simba’s father, Mufasa, is trampled to death by wildebeest and Aldar, the dinosaur star of “Dinosaur,” is the sole survivor of a T-Rex attack on a nest of dinosaur eggs. After putting up a brave fight for her young, the mother dinosaur is chased off by the predator, never to be seen again. We’re left to assume she died of mortal wounds.
Why this didn’t occur to me sooner, I don’t know. After all, who as a youngster wasn’t traumatized by “Bambi”? It wasn’t enough for Disney to off the cuddly doe’s mom by a vicious hunter, but first we had to see the mother and child frolicking in the sunlight, playing with butterflies and bonding like all get-out. If that were the only instance of parenticide, we could let it slide. Apparently, after Bambi’s success in 1942, Disney studios came upon a formula that worked. I mean, they didn’t even take the time to change the plot in 1981’s “The Fox and the Hound.” The baby fox’s mother was also done in by a rifle-wielding predator.
From what I can guess, the parent murders at the start of these films is a plot device to show that the lead characters – always children – grow up alone or with a single parent, despite the trauma of losing a parent so young and so needlessly.
This is not a bad message. Life sometimes does throw some nasty stuff our way when we’re young and it’s a good lesson to know that we can survive and perhaps thrive despite it all. In fact, among the group of children that viewed the movie with my son were children who had lost a parent to a senseless, violent death.
Do we have to see it again and again and again? I mean, for God’s sake, we went to see a fishy movie. There were 3-year-olds in the audience who couldn’t grab their mother’s arms tightly enough when they saw what fate Nemo’s mama met. “This is too scary,” said one little girl. “It’s too sad,” said another.
OK, the truth is not all Disney movies show a parent dying. With few exceptions, there is hardly a family around with two living parents and that often means having to fend for oneself – a la Lilo of “Lilo and Stitch,” Aladdin or Peter Pan (who had to resort to cajoling a little girl into becoming the surrogate mother for a whole island of motherless “Lost Boys”).
There’s also the Cinderella /Snow White/Quasimodo model when you’re stuck with some psycho stepparent who wants nothing more than to steal your money – youth – beauty, (you fill in the blank) and then kill you or lock you up forever. Nice stuff.
And then finally there are Disney’s single parents who tend to be geriatric or altogether clueless – Belle’s dad in “Beauty and the Beast,” Ariel’s pop, King Triton and Mrs. Jumbo in “Dumbo,” just to name a few.
And there’s Geppetto, who falls into a category all his own. He’s geriatric, clueless and, let’s face it, a tad creepy. I mean, he’s like 85 and decides he’s going to make a son out of wood – yuck.
I’m all for showing diversity in movies. Kids should know that there are single parents, old parents and yes, even dead parents.
But if life were really like a Disney movie, having a child would mean a certain death sentence and being a child would be one frightening prospect.
Give me “Daddy Day Care” or “Mrs. Doubtfire” any day. For as farfetched as it might seem that your father would cross dress to be close to you or that he’d start a nursery in the living room when he lost his job, it beats watching him be trampled by wildebeest.
news@telegraph-nh.com
The lights went down in the theater and an audible click could be heard as the audience stopped talking, chewing and crumbling candy wrappers. The movie was about to begin and the audience was enthralled. After all, this was a top-grossing film at the box office when it opened last weekend and it’s been getting rave reviews since. And the trailers were irresistible.
The film opens with the scene of expectant parents literally floating off the ground in anticipation of the imminent birth of their first offspring.
They pick out names for their babies – it’s a multiple birth – voice their fears of becoming good parents and reminisce about the day they met. And then without warning the violence begins.
Their new home is invaded and the audience witnesses the bloody and violent death of the mother-to-be as well as all but one of her babies. Sound gruesome? Well, get this. The average age of the viewers crammed into the theater was 5. They were all there “Finding Nemo” and my 5-year-old son and I were among those searching.
All parents of small children can’t wait for the newest Disney film to open. After all, there isn’t much out there for kids 9 and under, right? And this has pretty much been true since I was a child in the days before VCRs, DVDs and HBO.
I have been renting out and taking my son to Disney films since he was 1.
And as delighted as I’ve been by “Tarzan,” “Lion King” and “Dinosaur,” I always left the movie feeling uneasy. I may have been humming “Hakuna Matata.” I may have raced to McDonald’s to buy a happy meal for the “Monsters Inc.” action figure. But I was also feeling creepy.
This weekend’s viewing of “Nemo” nailed it on the head. Barely 10 minutes into these animated features, a parent meets with a violent death often with their soon-to-be orphaned children watching. Tarzan’s hapless parents are slaughtered in a leopard attack. Simba’s father, Mufasa, is trampled to death by wildebeest and Aldar, the dinosaur star of “Dinosaur,” is the sole survivor of a T-Rex attack on a nest of dinosaur eggs. After putting up a brave fight for her young, the mother dinosaur is chased off by the predator, never to be seen again. We’re left to assume she died of mortal wounds.
Why this didn’t occur to me sooner, I don’t know. After all, who as a youngster wasn’t traumatized by “Bambi”? It wasn’t enough for Disney to off the cuddly doe’s mom by a vicious hunter, but first we had to see the mother and child frolicking in the sunlight, playing with butterflies and bonding like all get-out. If that were the only instance of parenticide, we could let it slide. Apparently, after Bambi’s success in 1942, Disney studios came upon a formula that worked. I mean, they didn’t even take the time to change the plot in 1981’s “The Fox and the Hound.” The baby fox’s mother was also done in by a rifle-wielding predator.
From what I can guess, the parent murders at the start of these films is a plot device to show that the lead characters – always children – grow up alone or with a single parent, despite the trauma of losing a parent so young and so needlessly.
This is not a bad message. Life sometimes does throw some nasty stuff our way when we’re young and it’s a good lesson to know that we can survive and perhaps thrive despite it all. In fact, among the group of children that viewed the movie with my son were children who had lost a parent to a senseless, violent death.
Do we have to see it again and again and again? I mean, for God’s sake, we went to see a fishy movie. There were 3-year-olds in the audience who couldn’t grab their mother’s arms tightly enough when they saw what fate Nemo’s mama met. “This is too scary,” said one little girl. “It’s too sad,” said another.
OK, the truth is not all Disney movies show a parent dying. With few exceptions, there is hardly a family around with two living parents and that often means having to fend for oneself – a la Lilo of “Lilo and Stitch,” Aladdin or Peter Pan (who had to resort to cajoling a little girl into becoming the surrogate mother for a whole island of motherless “Lost Boys”).
There’s also the Cinderella /Snow White/Quasimodo model when you’re stuck with some psycho stepparent who wants nothing more than to steal your money – youth – beauty, (you fill in the blank) and then kill you or lock you up forever. Nice stuff.
And then finally there are Disney’s single parents who tend to be geriatric or altogether clueless – Belle’s dad in “Beauty and the Beast,” Ariel’s pop, King Triton and Mrs. Jumbo in “Dumbo,” just to name a few.
And there’s Geppetto, who falls into a category all his own. He’s geriatric, clueless and, let’s face it, a tad creepy. I mean, he’s like 85 and decides he’s going to make a son out of wood – yuck.
I’m all for showing diversity in movies. Kids should know that there are single parents, old parents and yes, even dead parents.
But if life were really like a Disney movie, having a child would mean a certain death sentence and being a child would be one frightening prospect.
Give me “Daddy Day Care” or “Mrs. Doubtfire” any day. For as farfetched as it might seem that your father would cross dress to be close to you or that he’d start a nursery in the living room when he lost his job, it beats watching him be trampled by wildebeest.
:brick:
