I think the Big Theories of fertility decline and therapy culture are kinda reacting to or reflecting the bare fact reflected in the films: the kinds of people making Disney films nowadays haven’t had kids as of yet, so their perspective of childhood is that of an adult processing their own.
I’d expect the people making Disney movies today are probably childless, and likely to remain so. “Haven’t had kids yet” places them in their 20’s to early 30’s, but I’d expect them to be older than that? And to be intense career strivers in a highly competitive creative field.
Another lens (caveat that I've watched these movies much fewer times than you have, and a few of them not at all):
Disney movies have always been about growing up and becoming your own person, in one way or another. This means learning to discern what you want as distinct from what your parents or caretakers want - sometimes because your caretakers are evil, sometimes because your parents are well-meaning but overprotective - and then pursuing it, and in the process figuring out how to relate to the divergence between your parents' preplanned map of your life and the actual territory.
Because the coming-of-age protagonists are mostly girls, for a long time the primary source of life map conflict was who the girl would marry; or, the path off the map that a girl could find was an unexpected romance.
But these are modern times. Girls have so many more life path options to disagree with their parents about, and so many more ways to escape planned lives. And so in modern Disney girl-coming-of-age movies, it's very common for the girl to escape her unwanted life map via non-romance activities - martial prowess, geographic exploration, actual work. I would actually put the beginning of this shift at Mulan - sure there's romance in Mulan, but I do not at all think Mulan is primarily *about* romance. It's about doing cool shit and building your own path.
Stories do need relationships, though, you can't *just* be doing cool shit without also making friends along the way. Sometimes this means you do cool shit like saving China and that earns you a romance. Other times you do cool shit like exploring the ocean and... don't find anyone particularly romanceable in the ocean... and so the main place where relationship development makes sense is with one's parents who had been not-enthused about the ocean exploration.
Admittedly this doesn't quite explain Tangled, which is basically *just* about the pure concept of disentangling (heh) from your family's expectations of you, rather than bundling that concept with a specific goal like "explore the ocean" or "save China" or, sort of, "marry this specific guy" (there *is* a specific guy but I agree he's not really the point). But nor does Tangled fully explain what comes after it - I do basically think Moana is more like Mulan than like Tangled.
Is lumping Disney and Pixar together productive? To my mind "parental anxiety" is THE Pixar theme, and romance and babies-ever-after is almost entirely a Disney thing. (Wall-E definitely foregrounds a romance, I guess, but they're robots, and also that's definitely an outlier in many many ways.) They've sort of merged into the same IP soup but that's IMO a recent development.
Some possible explanations no one's brought up yet:
1) Disney films started being made by people who internalized the feminist criticism of that "reproductive futurism" model and deliberately tried to subvert it.
2) Romance elements are very "girl"-coded, so dropping those made the films more boy-friendly and thus expanded market share. ("Tangled" being a pivot point is interesting because IIRC the film was explicitly titled "Tangled" rather than "Rapunzel" because Disney thought the former title would be more appealing to boys.)
3) Disney films stopped being adaptations of public-domain fairy tales, which usually have a bit of babies-ever-after baked into them, and started having original (and thus much more copyrightable) premises.
I think #3 is an underrated point. Once Disney started largely writing their own stories, they didn't stick to the old fairy tale formula moreso because it had been played out, and creative minds like to shift directions. Look at the Lion King; that was back in 1995 and revolves more around parental relationships than romance.
"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."
Why assume that this is the way causality works? Disney movies and the broader culture turning less natalist and then people having fewer kids seems like a fine theory to me. It's also possible that movie makers just react to what the audience wants. It's also possible that some third factor is causing both the decline in fertility and Disney movies to change.
It's far from obvious to me that the anti-woke theory that culture is the driving force here is wrong. It seems probably correct since I don't think there are any non-cultural explanations for the decline of marriage and fertility.
Fertility decline is of course a change in culture around having children, but that cultural change is downstream of technological and economic changes. I think the rise and fall of wokeness itself proves that if you try to ideologically capture media institutions to amplify your own voice and suppress all others, you can only push things so far before the masses get sick of your shit. Movies can change minds, but a movie that does not resonate somewhat with its existing audience will fail.
What about economics? For most of human history, children could start working almost as soon as they could walk, and the family or tribe would directly benefit from that labor. Today kids typically bring in no money at all until their teens, often even later, and they usually get to either spend the money right away or have it saved for when they're older, so their work doesn't enrich the parents. In the meantime, you have to feed and clothe them for eighteen years, longer if they fail to launch, and probably pay their college tuition. The best payoff you can hope for is that your kids will support you in 40 years when you're old, but there's no guarantee that they'll be able to do that, or that you'll even be on speaking terms. And those trends have only increased in the last few decades as there are fewer jobs available that can support a middle-class lifestyle and that a person can do without a college education.
I'd argue that the animated Beauty and the Beast is unenthusiastic at best about kids. Belle "wants much more than this provincial life," represented in part by the harried mom who need six eggs; she's repulsed by clueless and misogynistic Gaston's fantasy of raising "strapping boys like me" together. Maybe she feels differently about child-rearing once she obtains hundreds of servants in a literal castle, but she's way more visibly excited about reading all the books in its near-infinite library than we ever see her getting about motherhood or even marriage, which she and the Beast never discuss.
"All my life, you have told me that the world is a dark, cruel place. But now I see that the only thing dark and cruel about it is people like you!" predates Tangled by fourteen years.
"But, no, Disney went for parental reconciliation...I’m not sure what’s going on there."
Isn't this just that Disney likes a) unambiguous good guys and bad guys and b) happy endings? So if you present the parent as loving but misguided, the movie has to end with them realising what they were doing wrong and having a loving reconciliation at the end. A moral of "and then the parents realised they had been dicks, but it was too little too late, and their children never spoke to them again" would be heavily at odds with the themes Disney likes, and would also probably really upset the kids in the audience.
There's a reason that the evil "parent" in kids' stories is normally, on closer examination, an Evil Stepmother or a pair of Abusive Foster Parents like the Dursleys, after all.
I think it’s a bit unfair to count Elemental only under the “parent/child relationship” column and not the “traditional romance” column. It’s 50/50 the latter at least. Plus parental disapproval is maybe the most classic traditional romance plot point of all time!
Possibly the big thing going on is A) that a way bigger part of the audience are adults without children now, and B) parents today want their kids to understand them as flawed beings who love them very much, so they are excited to show their kids movies that say that.
Agree with all of this, but I also have to add that I believe many in Hollywood started to reject classic romance as it was seen as old-fashioned and corny. There is an element of fashion and trends in this change, too.
Super interesting, especially the relationship between fertility decline and shift towards parent-child relationships!
With a caveat that the only one of these films I've seen is Encanto, so I am entirely relying on your classification here, some randomly dis-ordered thoughts:
1) I'm not sure if trauma is the key lense here, I feel it IS the relationship, but a story needs conflict, so we get conflict. Modern mores don't allow for prodigal/wayward children returning home to forgiving parents narratives, so we only get the other way round.
2) as someone said already, romance is out of vogue; I'd add: especially het romance. Disney cannot make a homo/queer romance (yet?) so it's not centering romance.
3) modern parents kinda want to be seen as human and forgiven and truly loved as people, not just respected and dutifully "loved" in a parental role; this somewhat emotionally greedy demand might fuel this trend as it's parents who buy tickets, also related to a decline of role-identities and growth of "my true self" identities -- we find it unbearable not to be truly seen by people we have intimate relationships with, so as soon as it's viable and won't be framed as abusive/not-ideal parentification/friendification we want to pull the role veil off.
4) the rise of family movies as something genuinely enjoyed and not just endured by parents -- this again centers the parent/child relationship as parents expect the films to cater to their interests too.
Probably a combination of all the factors listed in the OP and comments....
I think the real reason is if the kids totally reject the parents the parents won't like the movie and will stop buying Disney movies. 'Reconcile with your screwed-up parents' they might accept out of guilt, 'go no-contact with them' they are really not going to like.
Sounds cynical but artists have always had patrons they had to please.
There are probably larger issues involving therapy culture and the therapists the writers went to, but I don't know nearly enough about changes in therapy culture to say.
I can't think of any Disney movie where the protagonist goes no-contact with a living parental figure who wasn't a straight-out villain, unless you count the wolves in The Jungle Book.
I don't disagree with any of the pieces here individually, I would just add on the casuality question, the "why the switch", is that there is a lot of business/economics behind this. Many movies today, especially Disney movies, are not going to generate most of their money from "the masses", instead from the devoted fans who engage in the ~media mix.
I think asking "what kind of movie to devoted fans resonate with" can get at these shifts as well - more introspective, more meta-aware, etc. A subset of people, not the people in aggregate, can often drive changes in the cultural "superstructure".
What's the relationship between this and the other huge change in Disney plots, the phasing out of villains? Of the movies starting with Tangled that you mentioned—and we could add Wreck-It Ralph and Wreck-It Ralph 2 (both of which are about Vanellope dealing with father figures: King Candy in the first one, Ralph in the second one); Brave; Big Hero Six (Callaghan as a surrogate father for Hiro), Strange Worlds even though no one saw it—Tangled is the only one that has an out-and-out villain who's identified as such from the beginning of the movie. The others either have surprise villains, villains who start out seeming good—as Frozen, Wreck-It-Ralph, Big Hero Six, and Coco do—or they have good parental/nurturing characters that have been made wild/bestial by their mistakes or someone else's (Brave, Moana, Turning Red, Wreck-It-Ralph 2), or else the risk is just nature falling apart as a representation of the family unit being out of whack (Encanto, Strange Worlds, Frozen II). Does the lack of true mustache-twirling villains spring from the same therapy well as the trauma plot? Is it based on protecting kids from the idea that anyone is evil? Does it go along with the lack of romance (after all, characters like Scar, Ursula, and Gaston are very sexually coded in one way or another)? I could see it playing out a lot of ways!
I don't think it's about protecting kids from the idea that anyone is evil, since the surprise villains are as evil as any classic Disney villain. If anything, you'd think kids would be more likely to be disturbed by the idea that someone you trusted could turn out to be evil.
I think the bigger issue is romance is out of vogue, in part because we can’t have traditional romance stories cuz woke, so there is a focus on other aspects. An older example is Finding Nemo which one of the biggest movies ever & it was primarily about a father son relationship. You can also point to Mulan, Aladdin, and Lion King for children’s ambivalent relationships to their parents/familial responsibilities
Finding Nemo is primarily about Marlin's arc! Nemo doesn't change much.
While Mulan and Aladdin both have ambivalent parents, the narrative weight these plots get is pretty low (similar to The Little Mermaid). Lion King has more of an emphasis on the parent/child relationship, although notably Mufasa is a good parent and Simba's arc is about living up to his legacy.
I think the Big Theories of fertility decline and therapy culture are kinda reacting to or reflecting the bare fact reflected in the films: the kinds of people making Disney films nowadays haven’t had kids as of yet, so their perspective of childhood is that of an adult processing their own.
I’d expect the people making Disney movies today are probably childless, and likely to remain so. “Haven’t had kids yet” places them in their 20’s to early 30’s, but I’d expect them to be older than that? And to be intense career strivers in a highly competitive creative field.
Another lens (caveat that I've watched these movies much fewer times than you have, and a few of them not at all):
Disney movies have always been about growing up and becoming your own person, in one way or another. This means learning to discern what you want as distinct from what your parents or caretakers want - sometimes because your caretakers are evil, sometimes because your parents are well-meaning but overprotective - and then pursuing it, and in the process figuring out how to relate to the divergence between your parents' preplanned map of your life and the actual territory.
Because the coming-of-age protagonists are mostly girls, for a long time the primary source of life map conflict was who the girl would marry; or, the path off the map that a girl could find was an unexpected romance.
But these are modern times. Girls have so many more life path options to disagree with their parents about, and so many more ways to escape planned lives. And so in modern Disney girl-coming-of-age movies, it's very common for the girl to escape her unwanted life map via non-romance activities - martial prowess, geographic exploration, actual work. I would actually put the beginning of this shift at Mulan - sure there's romance in Mulan, but I do not at all think Mulan is primarily *about* romance. It's about doing cool shit and building your own path.
Stories do need relationships, though, you can't *just* be doing cool shit without also making friends along the way. Sometimes this means you do cool shit like saving China and that earns you a romance. Other times you do cool shit like exploring the ocean and... don't find anyone particularly romanceable in the ocean... and so the main place where relationship development makes sense is with one's parents who had been not-enthused about the ocean exploration.
Admittedly this doesn't quite explain Tangled, which is basically *just* about the pure concept of disentangling (heh) from your family's expectations of you, rather than bundling that concept with a specific goal like "explore the ocean" or "save China" or, sort of, "marry this specific guy" (there *is* a specific guy but I agree he's not really the point). But nor does Tangled fully explain what comes after it - I do basically think Moana is more like Mulan than like Tangled.
Is lumping Disney and Pixar together productive? To my mind "parental anxiety" is THE Pixar theme, and romance and babies-ever-after is almost entirely a Disney thing. (Wall-E definitely foregrounds a romance, I guess, but they're robots, and also that's definitely an outlier in many many ways.) They've sort of merged into the same IP soup but that's IMO a recent development.
Some possible explanations no one's brought up yet:
1) Disney films started being made by people who internalized the feminist criticism of that "reproductive futurism" model and deliberately tried to subvert it.
2) Romance elements are very "girl"-coded, so dropping those made the films more boy-friendly and thus expanded market share. ("Tangled" being a pivot point is interesting because IIRC the film was explicitly titled "Tangled" rather than "Rapunzel" because Disney thought the former title would be more appealing to boys.)
3) Disney films stopped being adaptations of public-domain fairy tales, which usually have a bit of babies-ever-after baked into them, and started having original (and thus much more copyrightable) premises.
I think #3 is an underrated point. Once Disney started largely writing their own stories, they didn't stick to the old fairy tale formula moreso because it had been played out, and creative minds like to shift directions. Look at the Lion King; that was back in 1995 and revolves more around parental relationships than romance.
If only Lion King had really leaned into the "Baby's First Hamlet" shtick and had a lion version of The Murder of Gonzago...
"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."
Why assume that this is the way causality works? Disney movies and the broader culture turning less natalist and then people having fewer kids seems like a fine theory to me. It's also possible that movie makers just react to what the audience wants. It's also possible that some third factor is causing both the decline in fertility and Disney movies to change.
It's far from obvious to me that the anti-woke theory that culture is the driving force here is wrong. It seems probably correct since I don't think there are any non-cultural explanations for the decline of marriage and fertility.
I mean, the fertility and marriage rate were declining long before Tangled!
Looks like we were actually stable around 2.0 for twenty-five years until around 2010.
https://www.axios.com/2024/04/25/us-births-drop-2023
Seems consistent with blaming Tangled for everything that has gone wrong.
When put in context with other rich countries' birth rates, it becomes clearer that the trend started in the 60s and affected most high-income countries at about the same rate: https://www.edwardconard.com/macro-roundup/germanys-fertility-rate-fell-to-1-35-in-2023-joining-nine-eu-countries-including-spain-and-italy-that-fell-below-the-uns-ultra-low-threshold-of-1-4-in-2022/?view=detail
Fertility decline is of course a change in culture around having children, but that cultural change is downstream of technological and economic changes. I think the rise and fall of wokeness itself proves that if you try to ideologically capture media institutions to amplify your own voice and suppress all others, you can only push things so far before the masses get sick of your shit. Movies can change minds, but a movie that does not resonate somewhat with its existing audience will fail.
Non-cultural explanation of fertility decline:
Rising opportunity costs.
With more options for things to do with your time, the option of having and raising children declines in relative value
Fertility decline seems too global and widespread to be blamed on wokeness— at least of the specific flavor that emerged on 2010s US social media
Fertility literally declines across widely differing cultures whenever women get educated and birth control is available.
What about economics? For most of human history, children could start working almost as soon as they could walk, and the family or tribe would directly benefit from that labor. Today kids typically bring in no money at all until their teens, often even later, and they usually get to either spend the money right away or have it saved for when they're older, so their work doesn't enrich the parents. In the meantime, you have to feed and clothe them for eighteen years, longer if they fail to launch, and probably pay their college tuition. The best payoff you can hope for is that your kids will support you in 40 years when you're old, but there's no guarantee that they'll be able to do that, or that you'll even be on speaking terms. And those trends have only increased in the last few decades as there are fewer jobs available that can support a middle-class lifestyle and that a person can do without a college education.
I'd argue that the animated Beauty and the Beast is unenthusiastic at best about kids. Belle "wants much more than this provincial life," represented in part by the harried mom who need six eggs; she's repulsed by clueless and misogynistic Gaston's fantasy of raising "strapping boys like me" together. Maybe she feels differently about child-rearing once she obtains hundreds of servants in a literal castle, but she's way more visibly excited about reading all the books in its near-infinite library than we ever see her getting about motherhood or even marriage, which she and the Beast never discuss.
"All my life, you have told me that the world is a dark, cruel place. But now I see that the only thing dark and cruel about it is people like you!" predates Tangled by fourteen years.
"But, no, Disney went for parental reconciliation...I’m not sure what’s going on there."
Isn't this just that Disney likes a) unambiguous good guys and bad guys and b) happy endings? So if you present the parent as loving but misguided, the movie has to end with them realising what they were doing wrong and having a loving reconciliation at the end. A moral of "and then the parents realised they had been dicks, but it was too little too late, and their children never spoke to them again" would be heavily at odds with the themes Disney likes, and would also probably really upset the kids in the audience.
There's a reason that the evil "parent" in kids' stories is normally, on closer examination, an Evil Stepmother or a pair of Abusive Foster Parents like the Dursleys, after all.
I think it’s a bit unfair to count Elemental only under the “parent/child relationship” column and not the “traditional romance” column. It’s 50/50 the latter at least. Plus parental disapproval is maybe the most classic traditional romance plot point of all time!
Yeah, Elemental has both, but I think the core plot is the parent thing.
Possibly the big thing going on is A) that a way bigger part of the audience are adults without children now, and B) parents today want their kids to understand them as flawed beings who love them very much, so they are excited to show their kids movies that say that.
Agree with all of this, but I also have to add that I believe many in Hollywood started to reject classic romance as it was seen as old-fashioned and corny. There is an element of fashion and trends in this change, too.
Super interesting, especially the relationship between fertility decline and shift towards parent-child relationships!
With a caveat that the only one of these films I've seen is Encanto, so I am entirely relying on your classification here, some randomly dis-ordered thoughts:
1) I'm not sure if trauma is the key lense here, I feel it IS the relationship, but a story needs conflict, so we get conflict. Modern mores don't allow for prodigal/wayward children returning home to forgiving parents narratives, so we only get the other way round.
2) as someone said already, romance is out of vogue; I'd add: especially het romance. Disney cannot make a homo/queer romance (yet?) so it's not centering romance.
3) modern parents kinda want to be seen as human and forgiven and truly loved as people, not just respected and dutifully "loved" in a parental role; this somewhat emotionally greedy demand might fuel this trend as it's parents who buy tickets, also related to a decline of role-identities and growth of "my true self" identities -- we find it unbearable not to be truly seen by people we have intimate relationships with, so as soon as it's viable and won't be framed as abusive/not-ideal parentification/friendification we want to pull the role veil off.
4) the rise of family movies as something genuinely enjoyed and not just endured by parents -- this again centers the parent/child relationship as parents expect the films to cater to their interests too.
Probably a combination of all the factors listed in the OP and comments....
Ariel and Eric do have a daughter in a direct to video sequel. She is a human girl who wants to be a mermaid.
I think the real reason is if the kids totally reject the parents the parents won't like the movie and will stop buying Disney movies. 'Reconcile with your screwed-up parents' they might accept out of guilt, 'go no-contact with them' they are really not going to like.
Sounds cynical but artists have always had patrons they had to please.
There are probably larger issues involving therapy culture and the therapists the writers went to, but I don't know nearly enough about changes in therapy culture to say.
I can't think of any Disney movie where the protagonist goes no-contact with a living parental figure who wasn't a straight-out villain, unless you count the wolves in The Jungle Book.
I don't disagree with any of the pieces here individually, I would just add on the casuality question, the "why the switch", is that there is a lot of business/economics behind this. Many movies today, especially Disney movies, are not going to generate most of their money from "the masses", instead from the devoted fans who engage in the ~media mix.
I think asking "what kind of movie to devoted fans resonate with" can get at these shifts as well - more introspective, more meta-aware, etc. A subset of people, not the people in aggregate, can often drive changes in the cultural "superstructure".
What's the relationship between this and the other huge change in Disney plots, the phasing out of villains? Of the movies starting with Tangled that you mentioned—and we could add Wreck-It Ralph and Wreck-It Ralph 2 (both of which are about Vanellope dealing with father figures: King Candy in the first one, Ralph in the second one); Brave; Big Hero Six (Callaghan as a surrogate father for Hiro), Strange Worlds even though no one saw it—Tangled is the only one that has an out-and-out villain who's identified as such from the beginning of the movie. The others either have surprise villains, villains who start out seeming good—as Frozen, Wreck-It-Ralph, Big Hero Six, and Coco do—or they have good parental/nurturing characters that have been made wild/bestial by their mistakes or someone else's (Brave, Moana, Turning Red, Wreck-It-Ralph 2), or else the risk is just nature falling apart as a representation of the family unit being out of whack (Encanto, Strange Worlds, Frozen II). Does the lack of true mustache-twirling villains spring from the same therapy well as the trauma plot? Is it based on protecting kids from the idea that anyone is evil? Does it go along with the lack of romance (after all, characters like Scar, Ursula, and Gaston are very sexually coded in one way or another)? I could see it playing out a lot of ways!
I don't think it's about protecting kids from the idea that anyone is evil, since the surprise villains are as evil as any classic Disney villain. If anything, you'd think kids would be more likely to be disturbed by the idea that someone you trusted could turn out to be evil.
Though the surprise villains seem like a transitional stage on the way to no villains at all, which is where we got to.
I think the bigger issue is romance is out of vogue, in part because we can’t have traditional romance stories cuz woke, so there is a focus on other aspects. An older example is Finding Nemo which one of the biggest movies ever & it was primarily about a father son relationship. You can also point to Mulan, Aladdin, and Lion King for children’s ambivalent relationships to their parents/familial responsibilities
Finding Nemo is primarily about Marlin's arc! Nemo doesn't change much.
While Mulan and Aladdin both have ambivalent parents, the narrative weight these plots get is pretty low (similar to The Little Mermaid). Lion King has more of an emphasis on the parent/child relationship, although notably Mufasa is a good parent and Simba's arc is about living up to his legacy.