Disney, You're Finally Seeing Moms Too

Disney, You’re Finally Seeing Moms Too
4/13/2022 by Elline Lipkin




I have to hand it to Disney and Pixar. Two recent films, Encanto and Turning Red, not only feature entirely female main characters of color but offer re-scripting for both its teenage and adult leads. A throughline of both films is how perfectionism is as damaging to adult women as it is to teenage girls and how the legacy of intergenerational trauma, evinced through matrilineal control, hurts everyone. Early on in Encanto, the main character, 15-year-old Mirabel sings, “Let’s be clear, Abuela runs the show” and indeed the elder, widowed young with baby triplets, rules with an iron fist. Evidence is everywhere how much pressure everyone is under—epitomized during Mirabel’s sister Luisa’s solo, “Surface Pressure,” which comes bursting out of her after she’s asked why her eye is constantly twitching. Mirabel’s Aunt Pepa (whose ‘gift’ is controlling the weather) is seen anxiously stroking her hair with a pained expression in an attempt to self-soothe so that clouds above her head will dissipate and not cause rain in the village.

What quickly becomes clear is how Abuela’s constant refrain, “Think of the family!”—an edict to use their gifts in service of others—is fraying everyone’s nerves. Early in the film, Mirabel’s sister Isabella is seen walking with arm in arm with Abuela who tells her, like a monarch explaining her duty to be a marriage pawn, how becoming engaged to her approved suitor Mariano will create a perfect annexing of their families. She smiles, but when things reach a breaking point (literally and otherwise), she reveals she never wanted to marry him anyway, but was doing it ‘for the family’—a big admission, especially since her cousin Dolores’s super-sonic ears picked up that that Mariano wants five babies.

The subjugation of women’s desires under the rule of an imperious matriarch is mirrored in Turning Red, in this case more through the suppression of anger or otherwise ‘unfeminine’ behavior—including pushback to a mother. The main character Meilin “Mei” breaks with this tradition. That a teenage girl is the family member brave enough to reverse a pattern of repression is strikingly similar in both films and a bold statement, particularly as they bring their mothers around, or rather out from under, behaviors that hurt their generation yet they replicate.

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While the story line of Turning Red is different, Pixar is on a parallel mission. A radical move comes early on through the openness of Ming, Mei’s mother, assuming (within the first 15 minutes of the film) that she’s gotten her first period, then unapologetically bringing her pads at school. Yet, I can’t but hear the title as a reference to anger. So much of the film is about ‘letting the panda out,’ interpreted as metaphorically un-yoking from the stereotypical ‘good girl’ behavior Ming is locked into: perfect grades, coming straight home from school, obedience to her parents, to duty, to caring for their family’s temple. When Mei finally stands up to her mother (when they are both in panda form), she taunts her by gyrating in a series of dance moves and backing her (panda) butt up into her mom’s face—the offense of which is so great her mother backs away from the mere vision. “Unleashing the panda” is presented to Mei as an adolescent rite all the women in their family go through followed by a ceremony with the expected outcome of containment. Ming’s mother instructs her that her granddaughter Mei “needs a strong hand” before her ceremony to not “let her out of your sight.” The familial investment in Mei’s return to ‘normalcy,’ which means repression of strong emotion and restoration of conformity, is palpable, which is why her later refusal comes as a generational shock.

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Both films have had their share of criticism, more so Turning Red, with critiques that its characters have been “too narrow.” But with a range of female body types in both films, and teenage girls who fight for and claim their agency in radical ways, they also offer new freedom to their mothers, grandmothers and extended family by rescripting gendered expectations.

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https://msmagazine.com/2022/04/13/disney-moms-encanto-pixar-turning-red/