Disney Hates Your Mother and Wants to Kill Her

Sonia Poulton, writing with warm aplomb for the DailyMail, a British newspaper, suggests that Walt Disney's guilt over his mother's death might have led him (and his faithful successors) to gleefully snuff parents in the company's movies.

What nerve! What cheek! What ... insight?

When you think about it, Disney does plug a lot of parents: Bambi, The Lion King, Finding Nemo. And, quite often, if the parents aren't dead, they're separated or one has run off and abandoned the child. Dumbo's father is a dead-beat Dad. In Toy Story, Andy's father is absent. In Hannah Montana, the dad is there, the mother not. Want more examples? Sonia has 'em in her article.

But Sonia goes a bit too far by concluding that Disney had a role in the 'demise of family values' (I think she meant decline of family values since there must be a teensy bit left, somewhere).

Here's a better explanation: Disney movies are for children. The earlier movies were based on fairy tales. The intent of many fairy tales, and much juvenile entertainment, is fear, good old-fashioned scary story-telling. What's more frightening to a child than the loss of one or both parents? Or, generally, the fear of being alone and having to make new friends to survive.

Don't blame Disney for the 'demise of family values'. Disney movies tend to feature sympathetic characters (human or animal) who have lost their families but spend the next cinematic hour fighting hard to get them back - or, if that's impossible, struggling to form or join a new family.

What are these characters fighting for if not the recovery of lost family values?