Why Are All The Cartoon Mothers Dead - The Atlantic

19/05/2021 Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead?
- The Atlantic
Subscribe
CULTURE
Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead?
e dead-mother plot is a classic of children’s ction, but animated movies have
supplied a new twist: the fun father has taken her place.
SARAH BOXER JULY/AUGUST 2014 ISSUE
ZOHAR LAZAR
’ , . Nemo’s mother, eaten by a barracuda. Lilo’s mother,

killed in a car crash. Koda’s mother in Brother Bear, speared. Po’s mother in Kung Fu
Panda 2, done in by a power-crazed peacock. Ariel’s mother in the third Little
Mermaid, crushed by a pirate ship. Human baby’s mother in Ice Age, chased by a
saber-toothed tiger over a waterfall.
I used to take the Peter Pan bus between Washington, D.C., and New York City.
e ride was terrifying but the price was right, and you could count on watching a
movie on the screen mounted behind the driver’s seat. Mrs. Doubt re, e Man
Without a Face, that kind of thing. After a few trips, I noticed a curious pattern. All
the movies on board seemed somehow
Subscribe to feature
for less than $1children
per week lost or adrift, kids who
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/07/why-are-all-the-cartoon-mothers-dead/372270/ 1/11
19/05/2021 Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead? - The Atlantic
had metaphorically fallen out of their prams. Gee, I thought, Peter Pan Bus Lines
sure is keen to reinforce its brand identity. e mothers in the movies were either
gone or useless. And the father gures? To die for!
A decade after my Peter Pan years, I began watching a lot of animated children’s
movies, both new and old, with my son. e same pattern held, but with a deadly
twist. Either the mothers died onscreen, or they were mysteriously disposed of
before the movie began: Chicken Little, Aladdin, e Fox and the Hound,
Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, e Emperor’s New Groove, e Great Mouse
Detective, Ratatouille, Barnyard, Despicable Me, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,
and, this year, Mr. Peabody and Sherman. So many animated movies. Not a mother
in sight.
RECOMMENDED READING
An Ode to My Flip Phone
JAMES PARKER
e Story Behind Stacey Abrams’s Fiction Career

AYANA MATHIS
e Bleak Prescience of Richard Wright

IMANI PERRY
e cartoonist Alison Bechdel once issued a challenge to the lm industry with her
now-famous test: show me a movie with at least two women in it who talk to each
other about something besides a man. Here’s another challenge: show me an
animated kids’ movie that has a named mother in it who lives until the credits roll.
Guess what? Not many pass the test. And when I see a movie that does (Brave,
Coraline, A Bug’s Life, Antz, e Incredibles, e Lion King, Fantastic Mr. Fox), I have
to admit that I am shocked … and, well, just a tad wary.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. e dead-mother plot has a long and storied
Subscribe for less than $1 per week
history, going back past Bambi and Snow White, past the mystical motherless world
of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, past Dickens’s orphans, past Hans Christian
Andersen’s Little Mermaid, past the Brothers Grimm’s stepmothers, and past
Charles Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. As Marina Warner notes in her
book From the Beast to the Blonde, one of the rst Cinderella stories, that of Yeh-
hsien, comes from ninth-century China. e dead-mother plot is a xture of
ction, so deeply woven into our storytelling fabric that it seems impossible to
unravel or explain.
But some have tried. In Death and the Mother From Dickens to Freud: Victorian
Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (1998), Carolyn Dever, a professor of English,
noted that character development begins “in the space of the missing mother.” e
unfolding of plot and personality, she suggests, depends on the dead mother. In e
Uses of Enchantment (1976), Bruno Bettelheim, the child psychologist, saw the dead
mother as a psychological boon for kids:
e typical fairy-tale splitting of the mother into a good (usually dead) mother
and an evil stepmother … is not only a means of preserving an internal all-
good mother when the real mother is not all-good, but it also permits anger at
this bad “stepmother” without endangering the goodwill of the true mother.
You may notice that these thoughts about dead mothers share a notable feature:
they don’t bother at all with the dead mother herself, only with the person, force, or
thing that sweeps in and bene ts from her death. Bettelheim focuses on the child’s
internal sense of himself, Dever on subjectivity itself. Have we missed something
here? Indeed. I present door No. 3, the newest bene ciary of the dead mother: the
good father.
Take Finding Nemo (Disney/Pixar, 2003), the mother of all modern motherless
movies. Before the title sequence, Nemo’s mother, Coral, is eaten by a barracuda, so
Nemo’s father, Marlin, has to raise their kid alone. He starts out as an
overprotective, humorless wreck, but in the course of the movie he faces down
everything—whales, sharks, currents, surfer turtles, an amnesiac lady- sh, hungry
seagulls—to save Nemo from the clutches of the evil stepmother-in-waiting Darla,
a human monster-girl with hideous braces (vagina dentata, anyone?). us Marlin
not only replaces the dead mother but becomes the dependable yet adventurous
parent Nemo always wanted, one who can both hold him close and let him go. He
is protector and playmate, comforter and buddy, mother and father.
In the parlance of Helen Gurley Brown, he has it all! He’s not only the perfect
parent but a lovely catch, too. (Usually
Subscribe when
for less a widowed
than father is shown onscreen
$1 per week
mooning over his dead wife’s portrait or some other relic, it’s to establish not how
wonderful she was but rather how wonderful he is.) To quote Emily Yoffe in e
New York Times, writing about the perfection of the widowed father in Sleepless in
Seattle, “He is charming, wry, sensitive, successful, handsome, a great father, and,
most of all, he absolutely adores his wife. Oh, the perfect part? She’s dead.” Dad’s
magic depends on Mom’s death. Boohoo, and then yay!
In a striking number of animated kids’ movies of the past couple of decades

(coincidental with the resurgence of Disney and the rise of Pixar and
DreamWorks), the dead mother is replaced not by an evil stepmother but by a good
father. He may start out hypercritical (Chicken Little) or reluctant (Ice Age). He may
be a tyrant (e Little Mermaid) or a ne’er-do-well (Despicable Me). He may be of
the wrong species (Kung Fu Panda). He may even be the killer of the child’s mother
(Brother Bear). No matter how bad he starts out, though, he always ends up good.
He doesn’t just do the job, he’s fabulous at it. In Brother Bear (Disney, 2003) when
the orphaned Koda tries to engage the older Kenai as a father gure (not knowing
Kenai killed his mom), Kenai (who also doesn’t know) refuses: “ere is no ‘we,’
okay? I’m not taking you to any salmon run … Keep all that cuddly-bear stuff to a
minimum.” In the end, though, Kenai turns out to be quite the father gure. And
they both live happily ever after in a world without mothers.
So desperate are these kids’ movies to get rid of the mother that occasionally they
wind up in some pretty weird waters. Near the beginning of Ice Age, (Blue Sky/20th
Century Fox, 2002), the human mother jumps into a waterfall to save herself and
her infant, drags herself to shore, and holds on long enough to hand her child to a
woolly mammoth. To quote an online review by C. L. Hanson, “She has the
strength to push her baby up onto a rock and look sadly into the eyes of the
mammoth, imploring him to steady her baby with his trunk,” but—hold on—she
doesn’t have the strength to save herself? And by the way, if Manny the woolly
mammoth is such a stand-up guy, why doesn’t he “put his trunk around both of
them and save them both” rather than watching her oat downriver with a weary
sigh? Because, as the reviewer noted, “the only purpose of her life was to set up their
buddy adventure.” Her work is done. Time to dispose of the body.
Many movies don’t even bother with the mother; her death is simply assumed from
the outset. In Despicable Me (Universal/Illumination, 2010), three orphaned girls,
Margo, Edith, and Agnes, are adopted from an orphanage by Gru, a supervillain.
Gru adopts them not because he wants children but because he plans to use them
in his evil plot. He wants to shrink the moon and steal it. (Hey, wait, isn’t the moon
a symbol of female fertility?) But by the end of the movie, Gru discovers that his
girls are more dear to him than the moon itself. And, as if this delicious father-cake
needed some sticky icing, Gru gets to hear his own hypercritical mother—
remember, it was her negativity that turned him evil in the rst place!—admit that
Gru’s a better parent than she ever was. e supervillain becomes a superfather,
redeemer of all bad mothers.
Quite simply, mothers are killed in today’s kids’ movies so the fathers can take over.
(Of course, there are exceptions; in Lilo and Stitch, for instance, both of Lilo’s
parents die and it’s her big sister who becomes the surrogate parent.) e old fairy-
tale, family-romance movies that pitted poor motherless children against horrible
vengeful stepmothers are a thing of the past. Now plucky children and their plucky
fathers join forces to make their way in a motherless world. e orphan plot of yore
seems to have morphed, over the past decade, into the buddy plot of today. Roll
over, Freud: in a neat reversal of the Oedipus complex, the mother is killed so that
the children can have the father to themselves. Sure, women and girls may come
and go, even participate in the adventure, but mothers? Not allowed. And you
know what? It looks like fun!
 ,  hear your objection: So what? Hollywood has always been a
fantasyland. Or, to quote the cat in Bolt (Disney, 2008), a kids’ movie about a dog
who thinks he’s actually a superhero because he plays one on TV: “Look, genius …
It’s entertainment for people. It’s fake! Nothing you think is real is real!” Get over it.
It’s just a movie. Or, to quote the empowerment anthem from Frozen (in which
both parents die), “Let it go.”
Okay, I will. But rst, a brief dip into reality. Did you know that 67 percent of U.S.
households with kids are headed by married couples, 25 percent by single mothers,
and only 8 percent by single fathers (almost half of whom live with their partners)?
In other words, the fantasy of the fabulous single father that’s being served up in a
theater near you isn’t just any fantasy; it’s close to the opposite of reality. And so I
wonder: Why, when so many real families have mothers and no fathers, do so many
children’s movies present fathers as the only parents?
Is the unconscious goal of these motherless movies to paper over reality? Is it to

encourage more men to be maternal? To suggest that fathers would be better than
mothers if only they had the chance? To hint that the world would be better
without mothers? Or perhaps we’re just seeing a bad case of what the psychoanalyst
Karen Horney called “womb envy.” Or maybe an expression of the primal rage that
the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described as the infant’s “uncontrollable greedy

and destructive phantasies and impulses against his mother’s breasts.”
Consider Barnyard (Paramount/Nickelodeon, 2006), a deeply lame reworking of

the Lion King plot, in which the father bull, Ben, teaches his reckless, motherless,
goof-off son, Otis, how to be a man. (“A strong man stands up for himself; a
stronger man stands up for others.”) As pathetic as Barnyard is, there’s something
truly staggering in it. Whenever the bulls stand up on two hooves, they reveal pink
udders right where their male equipment should be—rubbery teats that resemble,
as Manohla Dargis described them in e New York Times, “chubby little ngers
waving toodle-oo.”
In the whacked-out, reality-denying world of animated movies, these chubby,

wiggly four- ngered udders, which appear on both females and males, are my
favorite counterfactuals, bar none. I love, love, love them. e rst time I laid eyes
on those honkers, my jaw dropped. Even Walt Disney himself, who cooked up pink
elephants on parade, never tried this. It was as if the comical leather phalluses of
ancient Greek theater had come back to life. As if the directors’ very ids were
plastered on the screen. Not only do Barnyard’s bulls have bizarre phallic teats, but
Otis rudely swings his out the window of a speeding stolen car while drinking a six-
pack of milk—yes, milk—and, as the police chase him, shouts, “Milk me!” Is he
saying what I think he’s saying? In a kids’ movie? Could udder envy be any more
naked?
When I nally shut my jaw, I realized that Barnyard isn’t the only kids’ movie with
a case of udder confusion. (In the third Ice Age, Sid the Sloth, while trying to feed
the three baby dinosaurs he’s adopted, starts to milk a musk ox before discovering
that it’s a guy—ack!) But as far as I know, the Barnyard scene is the most violent
instance; when the teated bull yells “Milk me!” it’s like he’s shouting at women
everywhere: “You think you’re so hot with your tits and your babies. Well, suck on
this! (And then die.)”
at’s how I see it, anyway, and I don’t think I’m alone.
In How to Read Donald Duck (1975), Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean American activist
and writer, and Armand Mattelart, a Belgian sociologist, discuss the insidiousness
of “the absence of woman as mother in Disney.” Rather than presenting any really
maternal gure, they say, Disney offers up only “the captive and ultimately frivolous
woman,” who lacks any tie to “the natural cycle of life itself ”—Cinderella, Sleeping
Beauty, Snow White. AndSubscribe
in the natural mother’s
for less place,
than $1 per they note, Disney erects a
week
“false mother Mickey,” a creature of “chivalrous generosity” and “fair play” whose
authority looks benign and cheery. e absence of a real mother thus makes way for
a new authority, a new “natural” order. e road to social repression, in other
words, is paved with Mickey Mouse.
In today’s movie fathers, there’s plenty of Mickey Mouse. ey’re magnanimous,

caring, and fun. And I imagine these animated fathers look great to most kids. But
let’s call a spade a spade. e ineluctable regularity of the dead-mother, fun-father
pattern is not just womb envy at work, and not just aggression against the breast;
it’s Mickey’s glove displacing the maternal teat. It’s misogyny made cute.
 ,  hear you objecting again. Perhaps you’re getting irritated. Perhaps
you like Pixar. Perhaps you’d like to remind me of some living mothers in a few
animated movies: Isn’t that a single mother raising two kids in Toy Story? (Yes, she’s
the one who keeps trying to give away the toys.) And isn’t that a mother at the end
of e Lego Movie? (Yes, she’s the one who cuts short the nascent father-son
bonding moment in the basement by announcing that supper is ready.)
What about Fiona, the ogre-princess in Shrek (DreamWorks, 2001)? She certainly
seems to be someone’s caricature of a feminist—tough, competent, belching
earthily with the boys. By Shrek the ird (2007), she’s pregnant. At her baby
shower, she makes all her beautiful, single friends—Snow White, Sleeping Beauty,
Cinderella, and Rapunzel—seem like spoiled, materialistic wimps. But when it
comes time for Fiona’s own father, a frog king, to pass down the crown, he offers it
not to her but to her ogre-husband, Shrek—who eventually turns it down because
he has “something much more important in mind.” (He’s going to be a father!)
at’s right: the male gallantly refuses all that power (sweet old Mickey) while the
female, who should have been next in line for the throne, isn’t asked, and doesn’t
complain.
Patriarchy is slyly served. We’ve been slipped a Mickey!
A similar thing happens in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009). When Ellie, a
sassy woolly mammoth, goes into labor, she’s stuck on a cliff and her man, Manny,
is off ghting predators. is leaves Diego, the saber-toothed tiger, to play birth
coach. At one puzzling point, Ellie, the very picture of strength, yells to Diego,
“You can do it! Push, push!” as if he were the one giving birth. He snaps back: “You
have no idea what I’m going through!” (He’s fending off vicious blue dinosaurs—
more work than childbirth, from the looks of it.)
It’s funny! e lmmakers, after all, don’t really think Diego is working harder than
Ellie. (Sexism always slides down better with a self-ironizing wink and giggle.) But
once the baby pops out, we get patriarchy in earnest: the father, Manny, fresh from
his own heroics, reenters the scene. Ellie hands him the baby, which he secures with
his trunk and declares “perfect.”
is cozy family scene reprises the original Ice Age, when Manny the woolly
mammoth saved the human baby—and not the mother—with his trunk. is
time, though, the mother is allowed to live. Why? Because she never upstaged the
buddy plot. Her death would have been, well, overkill.
    killing mothers, to a place where it no longer matters

whether they live or die? From the newest crop of kids’ animated movies, which are
mostly buddy movies—Planes, Turbo, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2,
Monsters University, Free Birds, e Lego Movie—it sure looks that way. It seems as if
we have entered, at least in movie theaters, a post-mother world.
In March, when I took my son to see Mr. Peabody and Sherman (DreamWorks,
2014), I suspected that we’d be watching a buddy movie, pure and simple, in which
the presence or absence of mothers was immaterial. I was wrong.
Apparently, it was nally time to blast mothers out of history. At the start of the
movie, Mr. Peabody—a dog, a Harvard graduate, a Nobel laureate, and the
inventor of Zumba, the st bump, and the  (pronounced “wayback”)
machine—says his dearest dream is to be a father. He adopts a human boy,
Sherman; vows “to be the best father”; and is wildly successful at it. (He uses the
 to teach his son history by introducing him to gures like Benjamin
Franklin, Vincent van Gogh, and William Shakespeare.)
e movie thus begins where other kids’ movies end, with the perfect father-son
relationship. Nothing can threaten them—except, alas, two gals, Ms. Grunion, an
ugly social worker (the evil-stepmother gure), who wants to tear dog and boy
apart, and Penny, a bratty girl who is jealous of Sherman’s knowledge and gets him
to take her on a trip in the . And there the adventure begins.
ey go to Leonardo’s Italy. (Why won’t the Mona Lisa smile?) ey go to ancient
Troy. (“Don’t even get me started about Oedipus. Let’s just say that you do not want
to be at his house over the holidays! It’s awkward.”) And they go to ancient Egypt,
where Penny herself is inserted into history. Tellingly, she’s not given the obvious,
powerful role—Cleopatra—but instead becomes the bride of King Tut, who’s
destined to die early. (Her reaction to learning this bit of history? Vintage Valley
Girl with a hint of gold digger: “Oh, trust me, I’ve thought it through. I’m getting
everything!”)
But the key moment comes at the end of the movie, when we get to see George
Washington muttering about changing the Declaration of Independence. I held my
breath. Would the Founding Father (yes, Father) correct one of the most famous,
glaring faults of the document? I listened for the magic words, and this is what I
heard: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men—and some dogs—are
created equal.” What?!?! (Insert spit take.) Given the chance to rewrite history, the
lmmakers give rights to some dogs? But not to the bitches (I mean to the women)?
Sure, it’s funny. Funny like udders on male cows. Funny sad. Funny infuriating.
Funny painful.
e power of the  to rewrite history, if only in fantasy, made me remember

why I like animation so much. Just as time travel imagines the way things might
have been, so does animation give the creator total omnipotence. With animation
you can suspend the laws of physics and the laws of society and the laws of reason
and the laws of biology and the laws of family. You can have a dog adopt a boy. You
can turn a rat into a French chef. You can make male cows with big pink udders.
You can change the Declaration of Independence. You can have a family in which
every member is a doggone superhero.
As the Soviet lm director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein wrote of Disney’s early
work, you can have “a family of octopuses on four legs, with a fth serving as a tail,
and a sixth—a trunk.” You can do anything. Eisenstein marveled, “How much
(imaginary!) divine omnipotence there is in this! What magic of reconstructing the
world according to one’s fantasy and will!”
And yet, in this medium where the creators have total control, we keep getting the
same damned world—a world without mothers. Is this really the dearest wish of
animation? Can mothers really be so threatening?
’    on a hopeful note, with a movie that passes my test with ying
colors—e Incredibles (Disney/Pixar, 2004), which happens to feature not only
three major female characters, including a great mother gure, Elastigirl (a k a
Helen Parr), who lives for the whole movie, but also a pretty credible father gure,
Mr. Incredible (a k a Bob Parr). Unlike just about every other movie dad, Mr.
Incredible is far from perfect. He daydreams during dinner. He is more interested
in getting back to hero-work (he has been forcibly retired, along with all the other
heroes) than in how his kids are doing
Subscribe at school.
for less than $1He
pereven
weeklies to his wife about
where he’s going and what he’s doing. He is super-angry. When his car door won’t
shut, he slams it so hard that the window shatters.
e hero of the movie isn’t Mr. Incredible, but the mother, who turns back into
Elastigirl, a really exible, sexy, and strong superhero, in order to save her husband.
(“Either he’s in trouble or he’s going to be!”) At one point during the rescue
mission, the plane that the mother is ying is hit by missiles and she and the kids
have to eject. e mother uses her elasticity to reach out and grab her children and
parachute them, with herself as the chute, to the ocean below. en she transforms
her body into a speedboat (her son, who has super-speed, is the motor) to reach the
shore. It’s a view of what animated movies could be—not another desperate
attempt to assert the inalienable rights of men, but an incredible world where
everyone has rights and powers, even the mothers.
I should point out that Elastigirl’s superpower— exibility, stretchiness, or what

Eisenstein, back in the 1940s, termed “plasmaticness”—happens to be the very
attribute he singled out as the most attractive imaginable in art, a universal sign of
the ability to assume any form. He found this elasticity not only in his beloved
Mickey Mouse but also in Lewis Carroll’s long-necked Alice, in the 18th-century
Japanese etchings of “the many-metred arms of geishas,” in the rubber-armed snake
dancers of New York’s black nightclubs, in Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, in Wilhelm
Busch’s Max und Moritz, and in the stretched noses of the Tengu. Elastigirl, then, is
not only a great character and a great mother, but the very picture of protoplasmic
freedom.
For some reason, though, what really sticks in my mind is not Elastigirl stretching
the limits of plasticity but rather a scene from Ratatouille (Disney/Pixar, 2007).
Colette, the sole female in the kitchen of Gusteau’s restaurant, is trying to teach the
basics of cooking to Linguini, the bumbling orphan boy who gets a job in Gusteau’s
kitchen only because his mother slept with the great chef before she (yes) died.
As Colette chops away frenetically at some celery stalks, she shouts: “You think
cooking is a cute job, eh? Like Mommy in the kitchen? Well, Mommy never had to
face the dinner rush, when the orders come ooding in … Every second counts—
and you cannot be Mommy!” Who is she shouting at? Linguini the lucky orphan?
Herself? Men in general? Men who want to have it all? Women who want to have it
all? Animators? Fathers? I really don’t know, but it’s a fantastic moment of pure
rage. And it sure rings true.

SARAH BOXER , a critic and cartoonist, is the author of two psychoanalytic comics, In the
Floyd Archives and Mother May I?, and one Shakespearean tragi-comic, Hamlet: Prince of
Pigs.

Why Are All The Cartoon Mothers Dead - The Atlantic

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Why Are All The Cartoon Mothers Dead - The Atlantic

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Why Are All The Cartoon Mothers Dead - The Atlantic

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

19/05/2021 Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead?

’ , . Nemo’s mother, eaten by a barracuda. Lilo’s mother,

e Story Behind Stacey Abrams’s Fiction Career

e Bleak Prescience of Richard Wright

In a striking number of animated kids’ movies of the past couple of decades

Is the unconscious goal of these motherless movies to paper over reality? Is it to

the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described as the infant’s “uncontrollable greedy

Consider Barnyard (Paramount/Nickelodeon, 2006), a deeply lame reworking of

In the whacked-out, reality-denying world of animated movies, these chubby,

In today’s movie fathers, there’s plenty of Mickey Mouse. ey’re magnanimous,

Patriarchy is slyly served. We’ve been slipped a Mickey!

    killing mothers, to a place where it no longer matters

e power of the  to rewrite history, if only in fantasy, made me remember

I should point out that Elastigirl’s superpower— exibility, stretchiness, or what

Subscribe for less than $1 per week

Subscribe for less than $1 per week

You might also like