Fun Fathers, Dead Mothers

Fun Fathers Dead Mothers

I read an interesting article written by Sarah Boxer in the July/August 2014 edition of The Atlantic while waiting for one of many Dr. appts. this past summer. It was called “Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead?” Here’s a list of the missing-mother-movies she mentions in her article :

  • Brother Bear
  • Kung Fu Panda
  • Little Mermaid (the third one – did you know they had so many?)
  • Ice Age
  • Peter Pan
  • Chicken Little
  • The Fox and the Hound
  • Aladdin
  • Pocahontas
  • Beauty and the Beast
  • The Emperor’s New Groove
  • The Great Mouse Detective
  • Ratatoulille
  • Despicable Me
  • Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
  • Mr. Peabody and Sherman
  • Bambi
  • Snow White
  • Finding Nemo

Interesting Quotes From the Article

On the dead mother and the wonderful father:

Usually when a widowed father is shown onscreen 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 The 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!

On having fun—as long as the mom is gone:

The 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. The 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!

On 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?

And the author’s own answer to her question:

…let’s call a spade a spade. The ineluctable regularity of the dead-mother, fun-father pattern is...misogyny made cute.

On movies that DO have a mother:

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 The 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.)

She ends on a positive note by applauding the writers of The Incredibles which features three terrific female characters (including a mother who lives to the end of the movie) AND a normal, loving, but imperfect father figure. We rarely buy movies, but we bought this one, and it’s one of our family favorites.

So what do you think? Can you come up with other movies that are missing a strong mother? What about movies that are missing the father? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

A mother of nine, homemaker, business owner (Apple Valley Natural Soap), and most importantly, a Wemmick loved by the Woodcarver.

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20 thoughts on “Fun Fathers, Dead Mothers

  1. I had noticed this trend, though. I just chalked it up the fact that it’s really stinkin’ hard to get up to that kind of trouble with a Mama in the house. 😉

  2. I just read an article on why Disney doesn’t have mothers last week. It was much less sinister than what was suggested in this article and really quite heart wrenching. Walt Disney had a reason out of his own guilt. Look it up. It is interesting. The loss of a parent is often to draw on our emotions and make us instantly feel sympathetic to the main character. It is an odd world in children’s stories.

  3. We like the Princess and the Frog. The lead character has two supportive parents and then you find out that the encouraging father has died. The mother, more practical or perhaps hardened by widowhood, is not featured much but at least she doesn’t get totally pushed out of the film! There is a friend character with a fun permissive daddy who is whiny selfish and ends up with no prince!
    Just a side note, some feel this movie is rather feminist-y, I think it really speaks more about the rewards of hard work instead. :)

      • I loved Princess and the Frog – and I watched it as a twentysomething! It had good music and great humor that felt like the hedey of Disney in the 90s. Tiana’s parents are not noticeably absent; you can see their influence in her character, although they don’t have as much screen time they aren’t completely absent like other movies. And even though the friend is spoiled and silly, she has a good heart – I liked that they made her a friend of Tiana’s, rather than a bully. Some of the best laugh out loud moments came from Charlotte.

        Best of all, I liked that neither Tiana nor Naveen were painted as this perfect person – they both had to grow during the movie, and that made their relationship feel much more realistic. I think it’s a great movie for kids, with its lesson of a good work ethic taking you where you want to go.

  4. The other day we were watching Frozen for the 100th time and my DS9 commented “Why do they always get rid of the parents in these movies?” So we had a conversation about that. But yeah, maybe to cause us to be more sympathetic like one commenter suggested. Maybe to cause the children to grow up faster. Maybe to just allow to all the fun that the parents would condemn or stop. I don’t know. I do know that most of the time, as in most movies, it does not represent reality.

  5. I recall Pippi Longstocking had no mother and an often absent father. Oh how I loved watching her great adventures!

    • I read all the Pippi books when I was younger. My first grade teacher introduced us to Pippi and read her books every Friday for 30 minutes. It’s the only thing I remember about first grade. She sucked on cough drops while she read. Mrs. Hilla. She was ancient – and I loved her to pieces.

  6. Interesting…I’ve had to think back to my childhood since we don’t have many movies either. The Secret Garden, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, How to Train Your Dragon, The Man From Snowy River, the Indiana Jones series, The Sound of Music, The Little Princess, Casper, The Little Giants, Three Men and a Baby, Curly Sue, Jungle 2 Jungle, Robinhood Prince of Thieves, Dragonfly…all with dead mothers. “Full House” was one of my favorite TV shows. No mom. Forever Young, Forrest Gump and Spirit are the only movies I can think of with no fathers. In “A Perfect World” a young boy being raised by a single mother is kidnapped by a felon, who builds a relationship with and instills manhood in the feminized boy. The boy seems closer to his kidnapper than his mother by the end of the movie. Hmmmm. Maybe the idea is just to arouse sympathy for the subject right at the gate. If they don’t grab our emotions we won’t watch…if nothing else it’s peculiar how many mothers are missing!

  7. I noticed this trend many years ago, but I have a different “spin” on it.
    Instead of getting bothered by it, I see it as reinforcing just how important and powerful a mother’s role is and rejoice in that! No one is forcing us to watch those movies, or if we do watch something like that, I use it as a teaching opportunity. Hollywood can pretty much be counted on to be the opposite of Christianity, so what they celebrate, we know is the opposite of Christian reality.

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