Scott Mendelson, writing at Women and Hollywood, spots an entirely fascinating trend: the tendency of movies to treat the death of characters’ fathers as much, much more significant than the death of movie mothers, even if both of a character’s parents are dead:

When Mufasa falls off a cliff at the halfway point of The Lion King, it’s a devastating moment for both Simba and the audience, since Mufasa is a full-blown supporting character who is basically the second-lead for the first third of the picture. Yet the countless dead mothers in prior and future Disney animated films (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Finding Nemo, etc.) merit at best a cameo in the prologue before being bumped off before the title card comes up (Bambi is the rare exception, where the doomed mother sticks around long enough to be mourned). Even The Princess and the Frog, another rare animated feature to spotlight a dead father and a living mother, makes a point to keep the deceased dad in the audience’s minds throughout the narrative, including a climactic flashback that concludes Tiana’s character arc.

The recently deceased mother of Super 8 merits a photo and a name, while the dad in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is played by a major star (Tom Hanks) who has a supporting role throughout the drama despite dying on 9/11 in the opening moments. Bruce Wayne loses both of his parents in Batman Begins, yet it is only his father (Linus Roache) who gets a real character to play and more than one or two lines. It is his father whom Bruce Wayne holds as a role model and his father who Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) and Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) constantly refer to when discussing Bruce’s actions and his moral worldview. Martha Wayne is played by Sara Stewart, but that’s all I could tell you about her.

I think that’s one of the reasons Brave feels so striking, something Lili Loofbourow lays out in a terrific essay about Brave and the need for a Disney princess who thoroughly vanquishes the ghosts and tropes of her predecessors:

I wonder, though, whether any of the foregoing critics who’ve tolerantly yawned at Pixar’s latest effort could name a Disney princess besides Mulan whose mother is alive, let alone named. And yet, in Brave, there is a live mother, named and all. And then a remarkably boring thing happens: this interloping mother who has no place in this ordinary, predictable princess story suddenly becomes central to it. She gets turned into something that keeps on getting misread as a monster, something her loving and well-meaning husband has dedicated his life to tracking down and killing for the sake of his own story, which is built around victory and revenge…for our hero, Merida, courage doesn’t achieve the victories we expect fictional bravery to produce. She doesn’t slay Mor-du. She’s no Mulan; her archery, despite her skill, is unhelpful. All this, in a story featuring a warrior princess, should make the mind boggle: Why would a studio create such a character in order to make her real crisis be her relationship with her mother?

The corollary to Disney’s—and animated movies more generally—dead mothers are the fathers and father figures who fill in for them. Rather than female mentors, or aunts, or grandmothers, or older cousins, women with dead mothers in animated movies often are often coached in strength and femininity by men. In Beauty and the Beast, Belle’s father fills the place of her absent mother as best he can, and when he is unable to protect her, her allies and companions in the Beast’s castle include a male clock, candlestick and teacup, matched by a motherly teacup and a feminine wardrobe who doesn’t speak. Cinderella treats male mice tenderly, and they are more personified, even if female mice help make her ballgown. In Anastasia, after Ana loses her family and her memory, it’s men who teach her how to be both an elite woman in general and a specific woman in particular. Animated orphans don’t lack for surrogate parents, but there’s a strain running through them that suggests men can teach women both how to be strong, and do just as good a job handling femininity as their absent mothers. Learning courage and the skills to implement it are hard, the kind of things that can only be imparted by a male master. But learning to dress well, be confident, present yourself like a lady, these are all apparently things that men can pick up on the side and pass along to a woman.

It’s one of the reasons I love Mulan so much—it’s one of the only movies where a heroine, after learning from a bunch of men in her military camp, gets to teach them something in return. Specifically, she gets to teach them that femininity, subtlety, and social blending, feminine values that are placed in contrast to brute force and direct confrontation, are enormously valuable, something Mulan has been able to repurpose from her training in how to be an acceptable bride, and something the men around her wouldn’t have just picked up intuitively thanks to their smart maleness:

It’s awesome to see women get molded into action stars and superheroes and unconventional Disney princesses. But once we’ve got a cadre trained up, once we’re used to the sight of action princesses, once Chloe Grace Moretz and Saoirse Ronan and Hailee Steinfeld are all grown up and acknowledged both as beautiful women and hugely credentialed action stars, can’t we let some of them live to pass their wisdom down to their daughters—and to their sons?

Jaclyn Friedman has a fascinating column in the Guardian about the fact that even empowered princesses don’t do as much for girls as ordinary-boys-turned-heroes do for boys:

The studio whose most iconic heroes include a toy cowboy, a rat, a fish, a boy scout, and a lonely trash compactor (all male-identified, of course), couldn’t figure out how to tell a story about a human girl without making her a princess. That’s the problem in a nutshell: if the sparkling minds at Pixar can’t imagine their way out of the princess paradigm, how can we expect girls to?

The past decade may have seen a welcome increase in on-screen female action heroes, but we’re still far from gender parity in the genre, and even when they’re not princesses, they’re nearly all trained assassins or Chosen Ones. Joseph Campbell wrote indelibly about the power of The Hero with a Thousand Faces – an ur-hero who’s living a mundane life when he’s faced with a challenge through which he can discover his greatness. It’s easy to see why this matters: everyman hero stories teach every boy that he can make himself great through his own actions, regardless of how dull or difficult the lot in life he’s been handed.

Princess stories – even Action Princess stories – inherently fail the Conrad test.

I do think there’s something really important about teaching girls that the gender norms laid out for them are add-ons, rather than restrictions. Leaching the meaning out of a word like “princess” is a task that has value. But if we’re ascribing strength to states that girls in the audience think don’t apply to them, if the lesson and Brave and other movies is that if your father hasn’t hooked you up with weaponry and training as a child that adventure is still out of site, then we’re winning one battle at the expense of another. I’m not entirely sure that’s the case—the little girls in the audience at the screening I attended didn’t seem to have trouble identifying with Merida. But there’s nothing wrong with empowering girls who aren’t princesses, in making the journey to heroism a little longer, but proving it can still be traveled no matter where in the process you start.

In the news that perhaps has made me happiest, Disney XD is apparently making a version of RoboCop for kids. It’s called Motor City, and involves a futuristic Detroit where an evil billionaire called Abraham Kane bought out the city went it went bankrupt and “banned all freedoms.” The characters will apparently descend from the floating city of Detroit (it is the future, after all) and regroup in old Detroit where they will be guided in the art of rebellion by the ghosts of Michael Moore and Eminem. I made that last bit up, but this does sound pretty rad.

Well, it’s Friday and this is pretty much the best thing ever:

One thing I’ve always found fascinating is how sexy Disney movies can get when the characters are animals rather than people. The can-can dancers in The Great Mouse Detective would be considered way over the line for children if they were human rather than anthropomorphized mice. And “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” from The Lion King is probably as close as the company’s animated children’s movies will ever get to an actual sex scene.

I really wanted to like this little documentary about Disney movies and masculinity, because it’s absolutely true that Disney movie men (unless they’re lions) are generally as stereotypical as Disney movie ladies:

But I think this documentary’s substantially off in its discussion of the messages male watchers get about female objectification, especially from the second Golden Age on. Beauty and the Beast makes incredibly clear that Gaston’s fixation on Belle is gross, has nothing to do with her inner person, and presents in a way that’s predatory. Beast, by contrast, gives Belle a library, hangs out with her, saves her from wolves, and has snowball fights with her. By the end of the movie, there is precisely zero doubt that Gaston as a person, and Gaston’s way of picking out a wife is disgusting and undesirable, and not to be emulated unless you want to get tossed off a roof.

Mulan is much subtler, but has essentially the same message. The wife-finding methodology of “A Girl Worth Fighting For” is essentially dismissed in favor of a norm where men and women work together, get to like each other as people, and then give the whole romance thing a shot. And, of course, the whole point of the “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” number the documentary cites is that the traits it describes aren’t actually specific to men — and that you can exhibit strength whether you’re rocking armor or a dress:

Now, it’s absolutely true that Disney movie characters tend to have essentially identical body types (again, unless they’re non-human, or aging superhero Bob Parr in The Incredibles) and to end in fights, which is basically a prerequisite for adventure movies. And while there are clever parodies of hypermasculine ideals, like the Toy Story movies, which emphasize collaboration and equal participation by the genders, robots, and adorable rubber aliens, it’s true that Disney movies don’t have an exceptionally wide aperture on masculinity. That’s not an uncommon problem, and at least Disney doesn’t insist that for women to do better, men have to lose out, as Bill Bennett does in a Fox News column this week. But the studio’s done a nice job of broadening the spectrum of emotions they include within their standard adventure stories. They could consider broadening the kinds of stories they tell — and as a result, the kinds of characters, men and women alike, they include in them — too.

The bridge is yours.

-It’s National Arts and Humanities Month!

-It’s official: Glee is watchable again.

-Best birthday present ever: a chance to see Beauty and the Beast on the big screen again.

-If we’re going to have a Mr. Ed remake, can Lil’ Sebastian play Mr. Ed?

-Also great birthday presents — great new Rihanna:

Reading Fables put me in a fairy-tale minded mood, so I finally sat down and caught up with both Tangled and The Frog Princess.

I thought Tangled was fine, if not entirely remarkable, particularly in its condemnation of beauty obsession. “I see a strong, confident, beautiful young lady,” coos the witch who’s kidnapped Rapunzel and given her an extreme case of Stockholm Syndrome. “Oh, you’re here too!” It’s interesting to see the idea that people will go through extreme things to make themselves beautiful externalized. Rather than subjecting herself to surgery or extreme dieting, the witch hurts someone else. And the ending’s interesting: in a sense, it’s a reverse of the pretty-ugly girl takes off her glasses and everything changes moment. In cutting off Rapunzel’s hair, Eugene frees her from the thing that makes her valued for her looks rather than herself. But he also eliminates a source of strength and adventure for her. Presumably, she doesn’t need hair that she can rappel down now that she’s living in a palace, but the end of the movie did strike me as domesticating our heroine a bit.

By contrast, Tiana in The Princess and the Frog wants something other than to get married, or to get a man, and she doesn’t have to give it up, even to the businessmen who tell her, “A little woman of your…background would have had her hands full trying to run a big business.” By the end of the movie, the worthless Prince Naveen’s been transformed and galvanized by the force of Tiana’s dream, not just for her restaurant, but for life. When she snaps at him that “the only way to get what you want in this world is through hard work…I’m not a princess, I’m a waitress,” it reads as honest, not like she’s a scold — being a handsome gadabout hasn’t worked out particularly well for him. And ultimately, they build the restaurant together.

Someday, I think we’ll see princesses without the prince as the prize that’s waiting at the finish line. If there was one part of The Help, I liked it was that Skeeter’s dreams are totally independent of her useless oil-drilling boyfriend and she doesn’t have a moment of doubt (in the movie) about which is more important. And it sounds like with Brave Pixar’s giving us a movie where the princes are even more of a distraction. I’m not saying we have to do away with love stories, but that doesn’t mean that falling in love is the only thing princesses can do. And until we get a long-overdue Dealing With Dragons adaptation, I’ll settle for this.

I’m all for big, expansive science fiction movies that put humans on other planets, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff in Meredith Woerner’s piece on Wall-E director Andrew Stanton’s hugely ambitious adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, now titled John Carter. But there’s one question that her set visit doesn’t answer. Is John Carter going to be a former Confederate soldier like he is in Burroughs’ original?

The Disney summary of the plot suggests he’s mustered out of an unnamed military conflict, and I wonder if they just might leave it vague. There’s obviously a strong connection between the Civil War and Westerns — the frontier gives folks a chance to refight lost wars. And while it could be convenient, from a plot perspective, to explain that a human who has ended up on a strange planet would be good at organizing an alien insurgency because he developed his skills in a specific, analogous conflict. But it’s probably better to make it almost any other conflict than the Civil War. The Confederacy doesn’t get retroactive points just because fighting in it helps someone achieve justice for another species down the road.