Over the holiday I happened to watch two well-known full length cartoon shows, Finding Nemo and Frozen, with a two year old. I hadn’t seen either show before, though I knew a lot about them both.
All the commercialism aside (a lot!), both films were beautifully done, highly creative, and engaging. I was struck, though, by the very different world views that they each offered to the children (and adults) who saw them.
To me, Nemo felt a little bit cute but mostly dark and menacing. Its view of nature and humanity was not very hopeful. It scared me. The local two year old (who had already seen it once) was transfixed, but he spent the whole time in his mother’s lap, burying his face in her chest with one eye on the show. I found that I didn’t want to watch the whole movie, even to find out how it resolved the endless frightening problems, and I turned it off.
Even though Nemo has Ellen DeGeneres’ light and funny voice in it, her character was really ditzy and absent minded, not a good representative of women. Or fish. But an idea she had kind of led to the resolution of the plot line. Was this a deeply hidden message about intuition?? Everything she did felt totally accidental and out-of-control-dangerous to me, like just about everything in this movie.
The only other female of note (besides Nemo’s mother who gets dramatically eaten by a piranha in the first five minutes), was a little girl with a mean face, who all the other fish describe as a fish-killer. Nemo is supposed to become her new pet. She killed the last fish she received because she wouldn’t stop shaking the bag he was in. The whole story of the movie is about Nemo trying to escape this fate. If you are identifying at all with the little boy fish Nemo, all this is a worrisome set-up right from the start.
To be fair, there were some nice, slightly redeeming features, like Nemo’s “disability,” a stunted fin, which were handled with respect. But on the whole I thought Finding Nemo offered a threatening, victimizing, helpless-making world for children to try to imagine growing up in.
Nemo the movie is over 11 years old now. Frozen, made in 2013, was a really different experience altogether. I am hopeful that it represents a current and more evolved view of the resources available to humanity’s creative imagination.
Frozen felt light-filled, full of transformation and possibility. There were scary scenes in it, but where Finding Nemo was all about danger, Frozen made a case for change, redemption, love (especially between sisters), magic, understanding, and accepting and honoring your gifts.
My two year old companion in this movie critic business had also already seen Frozen. As I settled in to watch it, he was playing with his trucks (he is seriously crazed with truck mania). But he kept pausing his trucks to watch the movie. Over and over again I would catch sight of him standing in the middle of the room watching the widescreen TV, trucks in hand, eyes big, face open and radiant with the tiniest of smiles. He was in a kind of enchanted trance, totally engaged. I wanted this vision of the world for him to grow up in.
So much of who we become depends on how sensitive we are, and how sensitive our parents are. As we know, these sensitivities are not always matched up in families. What happens to us can have lasting effects. I remember so clearly going to see Bambi when I was a little girl. I loved anything about nature, so there was much to love in this movie, but when Bambi’s mother got hunted down and shot I went down on the floor under the seats crying in terror. I never forgot that. And I never understood why my parents laughed when they told other people that story about me watching Bambi. Maybe it was fond laughter? I just knew they were laughing at me.
I was so turned off by watching Finding Nemo that I finally went to several movie review internet sites run by parenting organizations, to see what others thought about it. I was not surprised to find a wide variety of responses. Here are three different takes, out of hundreds:
*… our impression (we have older kids now) was that Finding Nemo was way too scary for a G-rated movie marketed to young children. Time after time, the characters come ”this close” to being eaten by sharks (with close-ups of the huge, razor-sharp teeth), stuck in fish tank filters, stung to death by a mob of jelly fish, eaten by an evil-looking angler fish, devoured by hungry gulls… you get the picture. I know lots of young kids see this kind of stuff routinely in movies and cartoons, but I personally found it too bad that the directors felt the need to have so many scary suspenseful scenes.
Of course, there’s also the early scene where the mommy and eggs (except Nemo’s) get eaten. Finally, the dentist’s office is portrayed as a scary and painful place to be – not the impression I’d want to give my young kids. And the dentist’s daughter (the only female human in the show) is clearly sadistic. So overall, while the messages may be sweet and positive, the path was too scary for most kids under 6.
*I took my not quite 2 year old son who never sits still EVER and he absolutely loved it. He watched every minute and every once in a while he’d say with pure delight, ‘’FISH, MOMMA!”. He’s now interested in movies (and fish) and has been watching a few Disney ones. Now that I see them through his eyes, I realize how many villains and scary parts there are in the Disney movies. He actually asks me (in his own two-year old way) to skip past the scary parts. So anyway, I mention that so that you’d know that he recognizes scary when he sees it and he was never scared during Nemo. In fact, there are no villains at all. I thought it was quite nice. I loved it and he loved it. I’d give it a shot.
*We took our 5-year-old daughter to see Finding Nemo as her first movie theatre experience. As it turned out, she lasted 10 minutes and burst into hysterics and she was physically shaking in fear. We got out of there in a hurry. We know kids her age, and younger, who have seen Nemo without getting scared, but each kid is different. Also, a movie theatre is different than watching a video at home. A movie theatre is big, dark, and LOUD. The screen is larger than life. The sound is deafening. Also sometimes it’s the editing of a film that can be scary – our daughter was scared partly because of the content of just the first 10 minutes, and partly because there were lots of fast cuts during that time as well that startled her, as well as the music.
For me, it was heart-warming to see the wealth of spiritual and human wisdom in Frozen. Here are the singing trolls, who were portrayed as the wisdom-keepers of the land:
We’re only saying that love, of course, is powerful and strange
People make bad choices if they’re mad, or scared, or stressed
Throw a little love their way and you’ll bring out their best
True love brings out their best!
The characters in Frozen inhabit a tale that is about figuring out how to be brave while growing up. It is about how to let go of strategies that worked in your childhood to keep you safe, but now are limiting the truth of your life. It is about learning how to love by mending what is torn, learning the importance of knowing what you are feeling, letting those feelings be felt. It is about the genuine value of understanding and fostering your own special magic and gifts. It is about love for the land.
In the end, what benefits and strengthens each of us, benefits and strengthens all of us. Frozen cold hearts separate and diminish us and each other. Warmth comes from cherishing one another’s gifts and allowing truth to be known regardless of how hard it might be. We thaw each other, and then everything around us comes to life. Spring comes to the land.
This is the world I want my favorite two year old to grow up learning about. It is the world I want to live in too.
