In Song of the South, Johnny’s parents are separated, but get back together when Johnny is nearly killed by a bull.
In other threads like this I’ve also heard it theorized that since the movies are about kids then why include parents at all since they’re unimportant to the story and would only have a handful of lines anyway.
Which makes sense to me.
This subject always reminds me of a scene in a Beverly Cleary book. In Mitch and Amy, Amy is playing Little House on the Prairie with a friend. Here’s a quote from the book (page 35 in my edition): “The first rule in any game of pretend was to get rid of the parents as soon as possible. Have them die of pneumonia, let Indians shoot them with bows and arrows, but get rid of them.” Disney movies are styled on standard children’s stories and in order to put the kids front and center, you have to “get rid” of the adults. So, the stories are set up so the action takes place away from the parents. Although Aurora in Sleeping Beauty has parents, she’s raised away from them, thereby ‘getting rid of them.’ In Peter Pan, the children have parents, but the action in the story takes place in Neverland with the parents miles and miles away. And so on.
A dead parent is one less cast member Disney has to pay.
Repeating, it’s a common motif in children’s stories. The stories are about how the children cope on their own. I mean, what fun would it be to say, “So Jack traded the cow for a handful of beans and brought them home, his mother cooked them for his father who ate them and farted” If they parents are around, they would solve the child’s problems, or help the child solve the problems, and the story wouldn’t be about heroism and self-reliance and growing up. So parents are either absent or dead, in most cases.
Most fairy tales and folk tales have missing parents, or use step-parents (since it’s scary to kids if the real parents are mean, but reality is that parents ARE sometimes mean, so the folk tales cloak this in the guise of step-parents.)
But if you want to pick on Disney, misstee’s wonderful list omits the duck family – Donald has nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie; he has uncles like Scrooge McDuck and cousins like Gladstone Gander, but none of the ducks have parents. Of course, we know the specific reason there – the comics didn’t want to imply that anyone had sex.
And I echo bup, Disney inherited most of those stories. What was he going to do, have Peter Pan’s real parents discover him on the island? Not have Tarzan raised by apes? Have Snow White run away from her loving mother and devoted father to hide in the woods and live with dwarves? It’s not just Disney’s doing.
As further evidence, and following bup’s expansion to Harry Potter and Dorothy Gale:
- Batman’s parents are murdered in front of him when he’s young
- Superman’s parents die in the explosion of Krypton
- Spider-Man, I’m not sure what happened to his parents, but he was living with an aunt and uncle, so presumably no parents, and the uncle got killed, initiating his crime-fighting career.
It’s children’s stories in general.
Yes and then they choose to come back to their parents.
Yeah, but Disney stories are fictional.