Disney stopped being about romance and started being about trauma

In the past decade or so, Disney/Pixar movies have undergone a really interesting change.

Many (but not all¹) Disney/Pixar movies are about teenagers growing up, aimed at an audience aged between about three and about ten. Young adult coming-of-age novels are aimed at teenagers and are thematically about what it is like to be coming of age right now; increasingly, they’re aimed at adults and are thematically about reflecting on your own coming-of-age process. Disney/Pixar movies are about what you have to look forward to. They’re about what it’s going to be like to grow up.

I was in Disney’s target demographic during the Disney Renaissance (1989 to 1999). And the Disney Renaissance had a very particular view of what it meant to grow up: you meet a prince, fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after.

Renaissance-era Disney films epitomized what queer theorist Lee Edelman called “reproductive futurism.” I don’t agree with Edelman entirely about reproductive futurism: for one thing, as a parent and someone flirting with longtermism, I am generally in favor of reproductive futurism, while Edelman believes we should seek moments of jouissance and annihilation through embrace of the death drive. But I do think reproductive futurism is a useful concept to think with.

“Reproductive futurism” revolves around the idea of the Child. The Child is entirely imaginary, which means that it doesn’t possess any of the inconvenient traits had by actual children, those strange savage alien creatures: it is perfectly pure, perfectly innocent, perfectly sweet, perfectly adorable. When politicians say something is “for our sons and daughters” or call to “protect the children”, they invoke the Child.

Interestingly, Gavroche in the book is much more of an actual child and much less of a Child.

Reproductive futurism balances two things. On one hand, it is an infinite self-perpetuating cycle: we have children (or Children), who grow up and have children of their own, and so on for eternity. On the other hand, it is closely tied to goals and to hope. We will make a better world for our children than the one we grew up in. My child will have a better life than I did. I can’t live in utopia, but future generations will.

Disney Renaissance protagonists are never (to my recollection) shown having children; my guess is that that would make them parents, which the child audience would struggle to relate to. But, as the rhyme goes, “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage.” The target audience understands that Eric and Ariel aren’t going to become a DINK couple who go on three lavish vacations a year and are getting really into microbreweries. Growing up means separating from your parents, forming your own family, having children, and carrying the torch forward into the future.

And then everything changed.

The turning point, I think, is Tangled.

Rapunzel’s relationship with Eugene is a standard Disney romance. But Tangled gives an equal amount of narrative space to Rapunzel’s relationship with the person who raised her, Mother Gothel. Rapunzel learns that the outside world is full of trustworthy people who will treat her well, and that Mother Gothel had deliberately made her afraid of the world to keep her prisoner. The climactic moment is Rapunzel rejecting Mother Gothel and choosing to trust outsiders.

Contrast Tangled with, say, The Little Mermaid. King Triton mistreats Ariel-- disrespecting her interests and destroying her possessions-- because he’s afraid of the human world. But Triton’s mistreatment is basically a plot device to get Ariel to feel so desperate that it seems like a good idea to make a deal with Ursula and turn into a human. The parental conflict is resolved in perhaps thirty seconds at the end of the movie.

Tangled was the first in a trend. Coco, Turning Red, Elemental, Encanto, Moana, Frozen II, arguably Frozen I, the Descendants franchise, and probably a number of Disney and Pixar movies I haven’t seen aren’t primarily about falling in love—they’re about coming to terms with your parents.

In these films, the parents are dysfunctional in various ways. Moana’s father is so afraid of leaving the island that he risks the death of his entire people. The father in Elemental immigrated to Element City and founded his own convenience store—a store he wants his daughter to inherit, even though she dreams of becoming a glassmaker. The family in Encanto has a whole-ass human being hiding in the walls.

At the beginning of the movie, the protagonists are unhappy, but they don’t really understand why. Over the course of the film, they come to understand that the way their parents are treating them is wrong. They also come to understand that their parents aren’t all-powerful and all-knowing forces of nature: they’re people, with their own flaws, fears, and traumas. The protagonists separate from their parents, become independent, and learn to set the course of their own lives. When the protagonists have fully differentiated, they form a relationship with their parents as equals. Rapunzel entirely rejects Mother Gothel, but that’s unusual. Normally, the parents’ dysfunctional behavior is basically sympathetic, and the emotional climax of the movie is when the protagonist forgives them.

In short, these days, Disney/Pixar teaches that you become an adult when you come to terms with your shitty parents.

Like the movies of the Disney Renaissance, modern Disney/Pixar movies are deeply concerned with the family, but modern Disney/Pixar movies distinctly unconcerned with continuing the family forward to the future. It is primarily about making sense of the past. Disney-Renaissance-era stories look forward; modern stories look backward.

I can’t help but see this as tied to the decline of marriage and the fertility crisis. One of the most important facts about modern life in the Anglosphere is that we mostly can’t assume that adults are going to marry and have children. The infinitely self-perpetuating cycle of c/Children has turned out not to be so infinite or self-perpetuating after all.

I think you could make a case that this is about therapy culture: everyone has some kind of Childhood Trauma, and adulthood is about Recovering From Your Childhood Trauma. “We’re all so busy unpacking our emotionally incestuous mothers and parentifying fathers that we don’t have kids ourselves”, etc. But that’s not the vibe I get-- not least because therapy culture tends to support a much more hostile relationship to your shitty parents than Disney/Pixar movies do.

All parents are imperfect. When you become an adult, you realize that your parents are human beings. You figure out how to relate to them as an adult to another adult, rather than as an ignorant and powerless person to the entity that has complete control over every aspect of their life. These are genuinely near-universal parts of growing up, the way that getting married once was, the way that finding a job and forming your own household and realizing that no one else will fix the toilets are now.

The easy antiwoke narrative gets the causality backwards. Of course, as people are less likely to get married, marrying Prince Charming has less resonance as a signifier of adulthood. Of course, Disney/Pixar reach for a narrative that feels really universal. And no matter how much you aesthetically despise therapy as a way of accomplishing it, twenty-five-year-olds can’t healthily have the same relationship to their parents that five-year-olds do.

It’s interesting that Disney/Pixar chose reconciling with your parents, though. You could imagine that they’d pick finding a job: “follow your heart” and “pursue your dreams” are already popular themes in the Disney canon. “When you’re an adult, you have to rely on yourself; no one benevolent and powerful is coming to save you” seems like it would make for some interesting coming-of-age plots. You could even imagine a broader version of reproductive futurism that goes beyond having a literal child to making the world better for all future generations, whether or not your descendants are part of it. But, no, Disney went for parental reconciliation.²

I’m not sure what’s going on there. It might just be that their young audience understands parents, but is unclear on both jobs and personal responsibility. It might be that Disney is rejecting reproductive futurism (or is participating in a culture that rejects it), but doesn’t want to stop centering the family. You could even do some progress-studies thing where we as a culture are now past-obsessed and backward-looking and not going to build a rocket to Mars. I’m really not sure what’s going on here. But it is a noticeable trend, and I thought I’d point it out so people can talk about it.

1. The other common kind of Disney/Pixar movie is movies about the experience of being a parent. I can maybe talk more about those in a different post.

2. Of course, many Disney movies have some of these themes—Moana involves making the world better, for example—but it’s just a matter of emphasis and the emotional heart of the story.