While critics and audiences everywhere are busy declaring Disney-Pixar's latest computer animated film \The Incredibles"" a modern classic, feasting their eyes upon its eye-popping spectacle and warming their hearts with its themes of white suburban family togetherness, I will be the first one to stand up and denounce Disney for not following through with the kind of children's fare it has been providing our country for decades. ""The Incredibles""' message of the family as a team is a distraction from the fact that this film is not following through on the real promise and function of a Disney children's movie: to provide children with harsh and traumatizing real life lessons.
Let's start with an example from the mother of all Disney kid flicks, ""The Lion King,"" We all know it, we all love it, but most importantly, we all learned from this movie that our parents won't live forever. And when they die, it will really suck. Sure, there's family togetherness in this movie, and I wouldn't want it any other way: The loving and nurturing relationship Mufasa has toward his cub Simba only makes it that much more traumatizing when the herd of wildebeests run him over. This is a real life lesson. And how about another Disney classic, like ""Bambi?"" His mother gets shot in the head for no real reason. Even more recent Disney-related fare, like the Pixar produced ""Finding Nemo,"" follows through with this time tested formula: Within the first five minutes the mom bites the dust, and then, if the kiddies haven't gotten the message by then, the father is separated from his child for almost the rest of the movie. Good. Disney is fulfilling an educative role by letting kids know that sometimes life sucks, because people, maybe even their parents, will die.
Of course, some might point out that ""The Incredibles"" has its fair share of trauma. The mother, Elastigirl, worries that the poppa, Mr. Incredible, is having an affair, and at one point, we even witness a family fight. And the fight is at the dinner table, of all places. Big deal. Ask Simba if he'd rather have Mufasa getting a little adulterous play on the side or Mufasa dead at the bottom of a canyon in Africa. We all know the answer to that one. Ask Bambi if he would trade watching a bullet go into his mom's head for a little tension at the dinner table. The Increibles' trauma pales in comparison to the eye-watering heartbreaks these masterworks include.
The lesson here is that Disney and Disney related movies have been far more traumatizing in the past, so why are they letting up now? Someone needs to tell kids what's what about life, because if I have a kid who starts asking me about why our family doesn't have superpowers, I'm going to be pissed. Then I'll show him Bambi and ask him why he can't just be glad that someone didn't shoot his mom just for prancing around the forest.
Disney used to provide a valuable service to our country by letting kids know the potential heartbreak that life can and will throw at them. Disney used to let kids know that the world was a place where your uncle and a hyena with Whoopi Goldberg's voice will probably kill your father. Disney used to let kids know that someone might put you into a dentist's fish tank and you'll not see your one surviving parent for a long time. Disney used to let kids know that the world is a place where a guy named Buzz in an astronaut costume might come along and teal your friends, and then the affections of the little boy who plays with you. Disney used to let kids know that they shouldn't get their expectations high, because the world is a place where something horrible and scarring can and will probably happen to you.
So while everyone sits watching ""The Incredibles"" for the third time, with their eyes wide as saucers and their mouths hardly closing because all of the laughing they are doing, I'll be sitting in the back of the theater with a scowl on my face and hoping that someone will do the good deed of scaring the real world into our American children.
