What does Disney really have to do with this. 10 of these are simply animations of earlier stories or fables.
Bambi: Mother died in the fire
Snow White: Mother died. Evil Stepmother - prior story Cinderella: Mother died. Evil Stepmother - prior story
Pinocchio: No mother - prior story
Sleeping beauty: No mother -prior story
Peter Pan: No mother -prior story
The Jungle Book: No mother -prior story
The Sword and the Stone: No mother
The Rescuers: No mother
Beauty and the Beast: No mother -prior story
The Little Mermaid: No mother - prior story
Aladdin: No mother -prior story
Hunchback of Notre Dame: No mother - prior story
Tarzan: Mother killed. -prior story
Lilo and Stitch: No mother
Actually according to this site Bambi was based on a previous story. Not one known over here but there was one.
And I tell you she was shot! Bambi’s mother didn’t die in the fire. That happened much later when Bambi was a young buck and she died when he was a fawn.
Yes, but there are plenty of stories that don’t have dead moms and Disney doesn’t pick them. Sleeping Beauty is the best treatment so far for a mother in a classically animated story by Disney that I have seen. And as someone who hopes to be an actual mother, not only a mother figure I am very interested in what happens to the actual mothers.
And after what they did to Hercules, I won’t trust them with any of my time.
Treasure Planet had quite a powerful mother character in it. No father character though, the mother was on her own. The boy does get a father figure through the course of the movie, though.
“And no root beer or potato chips! My child will be raised on heathful milk and organic vegetables, and will entertain him or herself with the works of the immortal Shakespeare!”
Two of the stories mentioned - Cinderella and Snow White - are about mistreatment at the hands of an evil stepmother. I think they send a clear message that there can be no replacement for a mother’s love and care - that doesn’t seem to be an anti-mother message to me.
Hmmmmm something interesting came up as I was reading some of the replies…
Where the maternal mother was replace:
If she were an animated human, she was was replaced by the evil Step Mother…still not a positive light for motherly roles.
If she were animated by an animal, she was shown in a better and positive role, very very motherly.
Which brings up something…notice how all the positive mother roles in disney films are animated by animals…and the negative mother roles are depicted by humans, she’s either dead, gonna die, has little role, doesn’t exist or evil.
Toy Story is probably the only Disney movie which doesn’t fit any of the patterns (maybe Sleeping Beauty too).
Maybe someone from Disney will catch on to this and create a character with a strong and positive depiction of a motherly, someone who is human and not depicted by an animal…oops, they did, didn’t they…Treasure Planet (even though I haven’t seen it yet).
On another note, I have yet to see…Lady and the Tramp…any mothers in that one?
Though she is not central to the story there is a mother. Lady is adopted by a couple, who have a baby. It’s when they go away and leave the baby and Lady with the single Aunt (who is an old maid with cats) that problems ensue. At the end everything is fine again of course and the mother is there with her baby and Lady is now a mother herself.
Another note: Is Disney anti-cat? Every instance of a cat I can think of is evil, except of course The Lion King. But there is an evil cat there (Scar).
Lady and the Tramp: Siamese duo who torment Lady
Cinderella: the cat who torments the mice
Tarzan: the Jaguar
The Jungle Book: Kahn
Mother of a 4 year old who until recently felt the need to watch Bambi thrice a day since the age of 2 checking in.
Bambi was born in the spring, and spends the summer and winter with his mother. The following spring, Bambi’s mother gets shot by hunters. Bambi’s father finds him in the woods as he is forlornly wandering around saying “Mother? Mother!?” and rescues him. Bambi’s father does not die in the fire. At the end of the movie, when Bambi’s and Faline’s twins are born, the last shot we see is Bambi and his father silhouetted against the sky on the same high ridge Bambi’s father stood on at the beginning of the movie. Bambi’s father then turns and walks off, symbolizing that Bambi is now officially the Prince of the Forest.
Cinderella is my daughter’s new fixation. Let me know if there’s any obscure points anyone wants cleared up on that one.
FWIW, in early treatments for Disney’s Aladdin the mother was a featured character – she even had a song. Aladdin went through several major rewrites, though, and the mother was eventually cut. I don’t know why, but I think it had more to do with tightening the story and making both Aladdin and Jasmine more active and interesting characters than hatred of mothers.
In the original story Aladdin’s mother is around primarily to act as a go-between to help arrange the marriage between Aladdin and the princess. This is culturally/historically accurate, but the folks at Disney rightly figured that modern audiences would rather see the hero and heroine work things out for themselves. And if the mother isn’t arranging the marriage, she doesn’t have much to do in the story. It also takes a lot of time and manpower to animate a single character for a Disney film, so they probably figured it was more trouble than it was worth to have a mom hanging around who didn’t do anything. This probably at least partially explains the small/absent role many parents play in animated films.
The reason is that these storys are about child or childlike figures having daring adventurs. And there is no way you mother would let you do these things! The only way my mother would let me; run away and live with miners, leave school and become a jackass, fly to neverland, go live in the jungle and be raised by wolves or apes IS OVER HER DEAD BODY!
In Peter Pan WENDY is the mother.
In Sleeping Beauty the three fairies are the mother.
In Pinocchio the Blue Fairy is the mother.
In the Jungle Book Baghera is the mother to Baloos father. Also he is taken to a village to live with human parents.
In The Sword and the Stone, who the heck watches this movie.
IN Hunchback the mother is killed.
Actually the fact that the mother is killed places great value on the mother as her death usually leads the main character to the adversity that they must overcome. If the mother were alive there would be no problem and therefore no movie.
Well, we’ve made six years without Disney in our house so far, even with schoolfriends and cousins being exposed to it, so it’s not totally unrealistic.
A previous poster mentioned that there were no parents mentioned in The Black Cauldron, which was, of course, based on the Lloyd Alexander book of the same name. The main character in the series is an orphan raised by a wizard, and the heroine is also an orphan, whose mother died when the heroine was a baby, no father mentioned. So Disney didn’t just leave it out because they hate mothers. Of course, “based on” is used rather loosely in this instance, since the book was a Newberry winner (and I highly recommend it) and the movie was…I’m not sure what it was, but I’ve spent years trying to forget I ever saw it, and I’m not about to subject myself to the memory now, my grip on sanity is shaky enough as it is.
