Who's Your Daddy?

*edit, 6:09pm* I have moved Mulan from the "one parent" category to the "parent death" category.

Having noticed that I started this blog on a Disney kick, with Disney and Pixar's "Monster's Inc." on Wednesday and a discussion of the Beast's age yesterday, I decided to round off the week with one of my favorite rants - What does Disney have against parents?

To keep this simple, I'm going to limit the discussion to animation, although live-action Disney is not blameless in this rant. (After all, is there anything more screwed up than the family in "The Parent Trap"? What parents decide "I can't stand to be around you anymore, so let's each take a twin and never speak to the other child again"?! But I digress.)

Disney has something major against complete families. To illustrate this point, I found a list of all of Disney's theatrically released animated films and organized them into categories.

Films in which one or both parents die during the movie
Bambi
The Lion King
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Mulan
Tarzan
Brother Bear
The Princess and the Frog

Films in which a main character is an orphan
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
Oliver & Company
Dinosaur
The Emperor's New Groove
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo & Stitch
Meet the Robinsons
Tangled

Films in which a main character has one parent only
Pinocchio
Dumbo
The Aristocats
The Great Mouse Detective
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
Pocahontas
Treasure Planet
Chicken Little
Bolt

Films in which a main character has a step-parent
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Cinderella

Films in which the parents are conspicuously missing
Fantasia
Alice in Wonderland
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
Fantasia 2000
Home on the Range

Films in which a main character has two parents, but is kidnapped or raised elsewhere
Sleeping Beauty
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
Hercules

Films in which all main character have two parents who raise them
NONE

Not included in these lists are Pixar films, straight-to-video sequels, and a handful of films involving short stories featuring the Mickey Mouse crew...which I'll get to in a minute.

Now I'm certain some of these can (and will) be contested. Certainly there is overlap between categories. I will be happy to defend my categorizations for anybody who desires that. However, it remains clear that Disney films are overwhelmingly occupied by children who were raised without two parents. Now, this could simply be for plot purposes. A character who doesn't face adversity is often a boring one...and what adversity is more accessible to children than the absence of parents? Certainly, some Disney characters support this idea...for example, for Aladdin, Oliver, Hercules and Jim Hawkins their parentage is a primary motivator or catalyst in their stories.

However, that does not account for characters whose parentage is immaterial but still only seem to have one parent at most. Why can't Jasmine, Chicken Little or Pocahontas have mothers? Why remove Cinderella's father and replace her mother's spirit with a Fairy Godmother for that matter? To bring Pixar into it...why does Andy not have a father? It's not important, so why do it.

Further damning is the Mickey Mouse crew itself.

Again, with the classic group we have a huge bias against parents. First of all, over the entire long history of the group, Mickey and Minnie and Donald and Daisy have yet to get married...remaining couples without actual vows. Whatever...all of media is based on that pre-resolution couple's tension. Have Booth and Bones got together yet? I rest my case. More important are the kids.

First there's Maximilian Goof. Max appears in several cartoons, as well as the Goofy Movies. He is Goofy's son. The mother is missing. To my (sketchy) recollection, there was actually a sweet little cartoon featuring Goofy explaining his mother's death to a young, redhead Max, (known as Goofy Jr. at the time). Early cartoons featured a "Mrs. Goofy" but the assumption is that she passed away at some point.

Next are the nephew groups...Morty and Ferdie, Mickey's twin nephews, and Huey, Dewey and Louie, Donald Duck's triplet nephews.

I personally don't remember either group's parents...although further investigation has turned up some transient parental figures. Morty and Ferdie, the few times they appear, visit Mickey but make no mention of their parents. According to my research, Mickey has a sister...usually named "Amelia Fieldmouse" who may have a husband although he's never shown. Other nieces and nephews exist, but Morty and Ferdie are the only ones I remember. My point is that this sister is never mentioned unless Morty and Ferdie are present. Is Mickey's relationship with his sister that bad that he only talks to her when he wants his nephews to visit?

Huey, Dewey and Louie are even worse. They appear frequently in Disney, but never with their parents. (Research reveals a mom whose name changes much like Morty and Ferdie's, and either no father or a father in the hospital depending on the cartoon). They are often visiting their Uncle Donald (who, in the original "Donald's Nephews" is clearly NOT on good terms with his sister, whom he seems to be mad at). They also spend an extended time with their great uncle Scrooge McDuck in the Ducktales series. This says a lot about their mother, who seems to be on bad terms with both her brother and uncle and does not seem to mind spending great periods of time away from her hell-raising children.

All-in-all it paints a very sordid picture of Disney's idea of a family. Suddenly, "Lord of the Flies" doesn't seem so sensational.