It’s no secret that Disney is hard on parents. To be a Disney protagonist you have to have lost one or both of your parents, and chances if you still have one of them alive they will be clueless and largely uninvolved in your life.
Now, I realize that this is as much a simplification made neccessary by the medium as anything; do you really need two parents in a cartoon when every character you include takes dozens of people to include? Not if one will do. The same goes for plot. Do you really need two parents interfering with the protagonists destiny? Not really. And we can’t have them too “with it”, either, or their heroic offspring would be locked in their room instead of out having death-defying adventures and generally saving the world.
I’m bringing this up because last night our family watched Disney’s “Tarzan” for the first time. Only two out of six parents survive the movie. One of the dead was a “blocking figure” father who provided the larger arc of Tarzan’s story: getting his “father” to accept him. And of course we can’t have him just accept him, it has to be on his death-bed. The on father that survived was of the largely-clueless and impotent variety who largely served as an excuse for Jane to be out in the jungle in the first place, and to give her permission to shack up with jungle-boy at the end. Jane’s mother was dead before the story even opens, and Tarzan’s birth parents were dead mere minutes into the movie.
I may be alone in this, but I really would have liked to have known more about Tarzan’s parents. How did they come to be on that ship? What happened to that ship in the first place? Who were they that they were able to build such a phenomenal house in such a short time? (I realize Disney takes liberties here.) His mother was perhaps the loveliest character ever drawn by Disney, if you ask me–and I’m a guy who fell hard for Belle. His father seems like the ultimate man–even from what little we saw of him it seems highly unlikely a jaguar could have taken him down.
They both deserved so much better than the Disney standard “death and dismemberment” program. Theirs was a story I would have liked to have known–and have had turn out differently.
You’re not alone with this, but it would have made it a completely different movie. I also find it interesting that in Peanuts, parents exist, they’re just not …relevant to what’s going on.
Is this a new movie or the old Tarzan with Phil Collins singing everything? It’s not just Disney. It’s every book and movie for kids. Harry potter, Percy Jackson, rangers apprentice, frodo, luke sky walker (grows up an orphan), Spider-Man, superman, etc etc etc. If you’re an orphan, you will probably do great things. If you have parents getting in your way, you are most likely doomed.
This is the old Phil Collins one. I went through a fairly long period in which I didn’t just automatically watch the next Disney money-maker every time one came out. I think about the only place I’ve seen the writer deal with parents other than killing them or completely ignoring them is Brandon Mull’s “The Candy Shop War”, where he comes up with a plausible reason (within the context of the story) for the parents just not caring what the kids are doing.
Wow. I am holding my kids back, I guess. I should hurry up and die.
Yup, dad DOES seem like quite the guy.
Is it like the cartoon the cat in the hat on PBS? When the kids want to go on an adventure with the cat they just holler at their mom and tell her where they’re going and she says, “okay!”
No, the wizard lady who opens a magical candy store uses some of her candy to essentially drug all the parents so they just don’t care.
Why do the parents need to be out of the picture?
Because any decent parents wouldn’t be letting ten-year-old kids run around in the middle of the night breaking into museums?
But older children’s books–I mean those written long ago don’t have imbecile parents and I find some of them wonderful. Take half magic, the whole Indian in the Cupboard series, Tuck Everlasting. The kids still have adventures
Exactly. There are plenty of ways of having parents alive and involved without ruining the adventure, but Disney and many others just hit the same tropes over and over again. At least Harry Potter’s dead parents were critical to the plot (or became so). Half the time Disney’s dead parents are not even acknowledged, let along explained. They just simply aren’t there. I’d call it laziness, but it’s become more like shorthand.