Why Can’t Disney Let Biological Parents Be Evil?
Photo by Michael Marais on Unsplash
As a kid, my favorite Disney movie was the 1997 animated classic Hercules. It’s about the titular Greek hero (Tate Donovan) trying to prove his godhood so he can be reunited with his family in Mt. Olympus. However, he ultimately rejects his mantle so that he can stay with his love interest Megara (Susan Egan) back on Earth — in essence, repudiating the divinity of his biological family for a romantic partner he doesn’t even marry by the time the film comes to a close.
Even as a child, I remember being struck by how different this ending was from the normal Disney formula. We not only have a rejection, albeit a soft one, of the main character’s biological family but a positive portrayal of Hercules’s adoptive family. Amphitryon (Hal Holbrook) and Alcmene (Barbara Barrie) love their son until the end and are never depicted as anything but great parents. There is also Hercules’ trainer Philoctetes (Danny DeVito), who has a de facto familial role. “That’s Phil’s boy,” one character says of the hero Hercules.
If I had to sum up Disney in a single word, then that word would be family. When I look at the vast library of content they have produced over this last century, it’s overwhelmingly been devoted to stories glorifying this institution. It is a company that actively describes itself as a maker of “family entertainment.” We have hundreds of heartfelt tales of fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters, but rarely do we see loving stepmothers, step-fathers, adopted parents, and found family members given center stage.
When we step back and examine this larger trend, it’s hard not to see a bias towards biological parents in Disney’s utter reluctance to make them anything but good.
During the early years, the majority of the nonbiological parents in the Disney-verse were flat-out evil. We see this most prominently during the Golden (1937–1942) and Silver (1950–1959) eras of Disney, where wicked stepmothers dominated the Silver Screen. The Evil Queen (Lucille La Verne) from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) detests her step-daughter so much she tries to kill her. Cinderella’s step-mother Lady Tremaine (Eleanor Audley), treats her more like a servant than a daughter.
Birth moms were regularly absent during these eras, often dying off-screen or very early in the film (see Bambi, Cinderella, Snow White, etc.). This trend would continue into the Disney Renaissance (1989–1999), where characters such as Princess Jasmine (Linda Larkin) in Aladdin (1992) and Belle (Paige O’Hara) in Beauty and the Beast (1991) are likewise motherless. We would sometimes see mothers alongside their husbands, such as Mrs. Darling (Heather Angel) in Peter Pan or Fa Li (Freda Foh Shen) in Mulan (1998), but never as distinct people outside their roles as a wife, mother, or lingering memory.
Dead parents make some sense narratively. Orphaned children are a common story trope in media because they create tension and allow for children to see themselves as the protagonist without the messy interference of adults. It stands to reason that parents would be removed in a lot of children’s stories, but what doesn’t hold up to scrutiny is for that absence to be frequently gendered female. As Celeste Mora wrote in Bustle: “Disney’s legacy with parenthood is a mixed bag, and often it favors fatherhood over motherhood or guardianship of any kind.”
Left behind were often fathers, who, although sometimes clueless, distant, or even cruel, were never really bad. King Triton (Kenneth Mars) in The Little Mermaid (1989) may wreck Princess Ariel’s (Jodi Benson) treasures and whatchamacallits, but he’s ultimately supportive of her marriage to Prince Eric (Christopher Daniel Barnes) at the end of the film. The Sultan (Douglas Seale) in Aladdin is a clueless dote who lets his advisor Jafar (Jonathan Freeman) usurp way too much control over Agrabah, and yet he is also there for his daughter in the end. These eras were a time of missing mothers, wicked stepmothers, and okay fathers. It was a period in filmmaking that upheld patriarchal norms while simultaneously demonizing non-normative family structures.
It would take decades for the evil stepmother trope to be used less frequently, and it has truthfully never died. We would see a modern incarnation with Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy) in Tangled (2010), a witch who actively gaslit her adopted daughter into thinking the outside world was a dangerous place so that she would never leave. Regina Mills (Lana Parrilla), in the TV series Once Upon A Time (2011–2018), plays an updated version of the Evil Queen. Although she is eventually redeemed, her initial portrayal is of the cold, domineering stepmother we are so used to seeing in Disney films.
Even as the Wicked Stepmother trope diminished, biological parents remained at the center of most Disney families. We would occasionally observe exceptions to this rule, such as the adoptive parents in Hercules, the stepfather in Onward (2020), and arguably Grandmother Willow (Linda Hunt) in Pocahontas (1995), but these examples remained on the periphery of their respective films. Pocahontas still has her father, Chief Powhatan (Russell Means), and the entirety of the film Onward is about the main character reckoning with the loss of his biological father.
Nonbiological family members are very few and far between in these stories, which goes against many viewers' lived reality. This objection may sound obvious, but it bears noting that millions of families have children who are adopted or are in the care of non-immediate relatives like grandparents, aunts, or cousins. Millions more are stepchildren from other marriages. Some of these relationships are good — others are not — and we don’t really see Disney reflect that reality. They are a company that has a clear preference in their filmography for one type of family structure. Unlike evil stepmothers, biological parents are rarely portrayed as anything but good. With the notable exception of Queen Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer) in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), it's hard to find an evil birth mom or dad who comes anywhere close to Lady Tremaine or the Evil Queen.
If evilness is found somewhere on the family tree, it's almost always placed up a branch or two so that some psychological distancing can take place. Uncle Scar (Jeremy Irons) is the villain in The Lion King (1994). Grandfather Runeard (Jeremy Sisto) is the imperialist in Frozen II (2019). Grandfather Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is the mastermind in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). Seldom are the protagonist's biological parents ever bad — it's always the distant uncle, aunt, or grandparent.
Some biological parents, though, are bad. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that the number of maltreated children (e.g., children who endure physical, sexual, and emotional abuse or neglect) is roughly 9 per one thousand. Those are the numbers that the government catches. There are probably millions of parents that skirt that line of abuse who never get caught, and children need narratives that allow them to label that mistreatment as evil.
In fact, this unwillingness to portray biological parents as evil reeks of a discriminatory trend that not only is inaccurate but often undercuts the very stories Disney is trying to tell.
When we look at Disney’s filmography, this refusal to demonize biological parents can take their narratives to some unusual places. For example, the central conflict in Frozen II is about how Anna (Kristen Bell) and Elsa (Idina Menzel)’s grandfather, Runeard, exploited the magical land of Northuldra to benefit his kingdom of Arendelle. He constructed a dam that weakened the Northuldra people and allowed Arendelle to build their capital in the newly drained lowlands. The story makes it painfully clear that no one else in the royal family was aware of this sleight so that they can lay all the blame on the grandfather alone.
Imperialism, however, is hardly an activity that a single individual can do by themselves. You don’t secretly perpetuate war crimes without your larger population willfully choosing to ignore them, especially members of the royal family who benefit from said war crimes. This narrative would have been better served by reflecting that emotional reality and making Anna and Elsa’s parents less than perfect, especially since their actions are largely responsible for the first movie's problems.
One of the main reasons Elsa had so much baggage over her powers in the first film, Frozen (2013), was that her parents decided to lock her away as a child. She was not able to control those powers initially. So they focused on isolating her as they worked on a cure — a decree Elsa internalized even after their untimely deaths. In the words of the blog Lady Geek Girl: “Elsa’s and Anna’s parents don’t abuse their daughters because they want something from them; they abuse them because they want to protect them, and they believe that this seclusion is the best way to do that.”
Frozen II could have reflected on how that trauma — although guided from a place of love — was ultimately wrong. It would have been a chance to contemplate how sometimes loving parents do terrible things out of misguided concern, but the movie isn’t willing to live in that shade of gray. The scene we have with her parents in Frozen II is a memory of them committed to curing their daughter until the end.
Another recent example of being unable to demonize biological parents is the animated movie Coco (2017)— a tale of a boy named Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) as he finds himself in the Land of the Dead. Miguel has to race his way back to our world before being stuck in the Land of the Dead for good, and the only way to do that is to get a blessing from a deceased family member. A central tension is that Miguel’s great-great-grandmother, Mamá Imelda (Alanna Ubach), had a husband who walked out on his family to pursue his career as a musician, and she will not let Miguel leave the Land of the Dead until he renounces music for good.
Unable to give up on music, Miguel tries to track the spirit he believes is his great-great-grandfather, a talented musician named Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt). When the two of them finally meet, Ernesto talks about how leaving his hometown and family was difficult, but ultimately that he is happy he pursued his dreams. We are left with a complicated portrayal far too common in our day and age: a parent forced to grabble between being fulfilled and raising a child in a society that doesn’t make it easy to do either. Ernesto selfishly chooses to follow their dreams to get what they wanted in life and has accepted the costs.
This complicated and refreshing portrayal is undone, however, by the time we reach the final act. We learn that Miguel’s real relative, Héctor (Gael García Bernal), wanted to go back to his family, but he was killed by Ernesto, his former singing partner, who sought to take credit for the songs they wrote together. The more human depiction of a man doing something selfish and having to make peace with the fallout is swept aside by a simplified tale that values traditional family values above all else. “Family comes first,” Miguel says to his great-great-grandmother shortly after the truth of Héctor has been revealed.
Once you start looking for this bias, it’s hard not to see how Disney will go out of its way to contort the narrative to favor biological parents. Sometimes these pivots are not as subtle as in Coco and Frozen II and can be downright offensive. For example, the main protagonist in the most recent Star Wars trilogy, Rey (Daisy Ridley), has an entire subplot around her lineage, and its conclusion is infuriating.
We are led to believe in the second film, Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2015), that her parents were people of no importance. They left her on the planet of Jakku to be an indentured servant, and they never returned. Since that realization upset some people for reasons too many to cover here, this conclusion was retconned in the sequel, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), so that Rey had more influential parents. Her grandfather became Emperor Palpatine — the evil antagonist who ruled the galaxy in the previous trilogy of Star Wars movies.
Her parents, however, do not fall within that orbit of evil because that would violate the norm of biological parents always being good. Rey has an entire flashback scene inserted into the narrative where we are reassured that these characters — people the viewers have never met — loved her all along. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), her nemesis and eventual friend, tells Rey that her parents “sold you to protect you.” It’s a cringe-worthy line that tries to justify slavery just so the narrative doesn’t have to cast her parents in a negative light.
There may be countless directors and creators behind these various properties; however, it's evident that the Disney company has implicit norms that it is hesitant to deviate from — and the divinity of biological parents is one of them.
When we talk about these movies, it's important to note that we are not trying to disparage one film or director specifically, but criticizing a trend decades in the making. There is nothing wrong with portraying biological parents in a positive light — in the same way that there is nothing wrong with putting water or trees in a story. They are simply a component that can be used or not used.
It’s the absences across a filmography and industry that are bothersome. The problem is the willful decision to center biological parents above other family structures on top of a history of demonizing alternative ones. That is the issue here. There are so many different, valid family structures that deserved to be seen — families with adopted children, stepchildren, and caregivers such as grandparents, family friends, uncles, and so much more.
Additionally, there are a lot of shitty parents too. Many people had biological parents who didn’t treat them well, and those children (and adults) deserve to feel like others shared their upbringings. When you are a company that claims to make family entertainment and don’t attempt to show the diversity of what a family can be, you end up making countless people feel alone.
As paradoxical as it sounds, the quickest way to put a smile on some viewers' faces is for Disney to allow their parents to be evil.