New animated film "The Wild Robot" respects masculinity and femininity
A writer at the Federalist took a look at the new cartoon film The Wild Robot, which thankfully proves an example of a family film that doesn't tear down motherhood/fatherhood for the sake of Orwellian politics:
It'll remain to be seen if Disney, and any other studios that turned to belittling parents, will stop with that angle after cartoons like these, certainly if Wild Robot turns out to be a box office success. But for all we know, the answer may sadly be that no, Disney won't cease with the madness.
Parents don’t always know what to expect from Hollywood. Will the mother be absent? Will the father be inept and the butt of every joke? Will family life be depicted as darkly dysfunctional? Will it teach children to distrust their parents, or will it be warm and encouraging?If I'm correct, this cartoon is produced by Universal (and also Dreamworks, once owned by Steven Spielberg), and unlike Disney, they haven't been forcing their screenplays to adhere to standards hurtful to family values and such. Even so, it's a shame Pascal, who's got a record of ultra-leftist activism, is among the voice cast here. At least we don't have to see him on screen, as this would be a voice-only performance.
Moms and dads will have watched a little bit of everything ranging from Anna and Elsa’s loving if misguided parents, King Agnarr and Queen Iduna, in “Frozen” (2013) to Princess Merida’s dismal mother, Queen Elinor, in “Brave” (2012) to villainous, devouring mother figures like Rapunzel’s Mother Gothel in “Tangled” (2010). So, it’s particularly nice to find a film like “The Wild Robot” showing the wonders, virtues, and sacrifices of motherhood in a positive light.
It’s equally impressive to see a film that depicts its mother character growing into motherhood alongside the child as the child grows through adolescence into adulthood. Roz is not a static or two-dimensional character. Sanders deftly shows Roz’s sorrow at being rejected by the hatchling Brightbill (Kit Connor) when he eventually chooses to leave his “mother” for his own kind when the geese migrate. He does so even after Roz had taught him — with the help of Fink the fox (Pedro Pascal) and Thunderbolt the falcon (Ving Rhames) — how to eat, swim, and fly.
Along with presenting motherhood in a positive light, “The Wild Robot” also supports traditional gender roles and is not critical of traditional forms of masculinity or femininity. Also notable is a theme of pulling together as a community in the face of trouble and not indulging temptations to retreat from public life to go it alone in a kind of toxic hyper-individualism.
It'll remain to be seen if Disney, and any other studios that turned to belittling parents, will stop with that angle after cartoons like these, certainly if Wild Robot turns out to be a box office success. But for all we know, the answer may sadly be that no, Disney won't cease with the madness.
To be fair regarding the Tangled reference, that movie at least made sure her ACTUAL parents were decent people (genuinely decent, rather than well-meaning yet buffoonish) who actively were trying to find their daughter after Gothel abducted her. A far better example would have been Stefan from the Maleficent movie, who got a complete 180 and was made into an absolute monster just to make the Mistress of All Evil into a good guy by Woolverton's intentions.
As far as DreamWorks, it also was founded and run by Jeffrey Katzenberg (and BTW, he's a major part of the reason Disney's saddled with such baggage as well. In fact, the hiring of Linda Woolverton and how she tried to make Beauty and the Beast feminist as I had you write about earlier, and how that tied into Maleficent? Katzenberg was the reason she was hired into Disney in the first place. And that's not getting into how, even by Hollywood fundraising standards, he was notoriously forceful in pushing his left-wing politics, as you may recall with his blatantly shilling for Clinton and Biden, and the latter resulted in his downfall after a certain debate).
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eotness |
9:16 PM