Posted on 11/29/2004 7:05:36 AM PST by Pikamax
So, how are 'The Incredibles' like your family? By Barbara F. Meltz, Globe Staff | November 25, 2004
Walking to and from school after she saw the movie ''The Incredibles," 11-year-old Sarah Wanger of Newton decided to try walking fast. Really fast. Sometimes she even ran.
''I was surprised," she says. ''I can run faster than I think."
Sarah wasn't pretending to be Dash, the son in the animated Pixar movie whose superpower enables him to run super fast, but he certainly was her inspiration. ''The movie made me think not to be down on yourself. Real kids don't have superpowers, but if you believe in yourself you might be able to do things you didn't think you could do," she says.
That's not the only message Sarah took from the movie. She and her friends have been talking about Violet, Dash's teenage sister, whose ability to make herself invisible protects not only her brother, but even super strong dad, Bob Parr, aka Mr. Incredible, and mom, Helen, who has magical elastic limbs.
''Violet was more self-confident after she saw how important she could be to her family," Sarah says. ''We've been talking about how we could be sort of like that."
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Great movie, I would've seen it even without my kid.
And if you are looking for a message out of it, I think the importance of "family" is definitely one of them.
And unlike most crappy Disney movies, its a WHOLE, normal, non-wrecked family - mom, dad, kids.
Little Mermaid - no mom. Aladdin - orphan. Beauty & Beast - no mom. Lion King - Dad dies. Pocahontas - (can't remember, but don't think there was a mom involved. Learned most of life's lessons from a tree, though). Mulan - parents? Don't remember. Hercules - bastard offpring of a lusty god, offloaded to be raised by someone not his father. Lilo & Stitch - parents dead. I'm sure I'm missing a few, but the point's been made.
The one-parent syndrome in animation is entirely due to budget. Every character added to a traditionally animated movie adds another animation team and tons of expenses. So, the solution has always been economy; having one parent when the story does not absolutely call for two.
Heck, with "Lilo & Stitch", the animators saved tens of thousands of dollars just by giving Lilo's swimsuit one stripe instead of three. Just think what an entirely new character would cost!
In computer animation, this is less of an issue, and clearly in this case two parents were required.
Took my four boys to see this over the Tgiving holidays (17, 15, 13, and 3). We ALL loved it; just a terrific movie. It was pretty intense.......especially for the three year old, but he's used to such things having so many siblings in their teens and twenties :).
Highly recommend the flick to all. A great ride.
Hatchet, A Little Princess, Tom Sawyer, Anne of Green Gables, The Wizard of Oz, The Prince and the Pauper, The Island of the Blue Dolphin, The Secret Garden, The Boxcar Children, The Black Stallion. Also, not in school, but extremely popular are Harry Potter and The series of Unfortunate Events books. In both, the parents are dead.
I think it's just been a formula for children's lit. for a long time.
Yeah, I know its not a Disney movie. I was comparing it (good movie) to Disney movies (crappy movies).
So the Seven Dwarfs really blew out Disney's budget in 1937? What would it be today? Snow White and a Couple of Dwarfs? Snow White and the Dwarf (voiced by Eddie Murphy of course)?
There is a huge difference between source material with established characters and new tales with new casts. There is a mother and father in "101 Dalmations" because the book dictated it. When the staff has the freedom to fall back on a single parent or guardian, it usually does so.
This decision is based on economics rather than a social agenda. In traditional animation, each character is assigned a team of animators, who are responsible for creating the look, behaviors, and movement of their character (a senior team might get, say, Mulan, while a junior team gets a Chinese soldier sidekick). Each team adds hundreds of thousands of dollars to the budget, so whenever a creative team can cut a character or consolidate two characters into one, it will. Two parents are a necessity for real children, but redundant in animation unless the plot or source material requires both.
And in fact, many cartoons do have two parents, including "Lady and the Tramp", "Peter Pan", and "101 Dalmations". Others, such as "Snow White" and "Cinderella", never had two parents to begin with.
"Snow White" was the first feature-length cartoon ever, and rules of any sort do not apply to it.
For kids there is a strong and lasting message in the movie beyond the all the "feel just super nifty about your self" psychobabble that the globe drones on and on about. And that simple message is:
There are real monsters in this world. Ordinary men but with evil intent. And they are not like the bad guys manufactured by Hollywood.
They will KILL YOU.
Children, innocent, the weak, or timid are not off limits to terrorists and other true monsters. And you will someday be tasked to confront them. And your life and the life of those you love will depend heavily on your response.
That's not entirely true. Traditional stories often feature an orphan. This doesn't always reduce the number of characters. Most fairy tails involve bad stepparents or missing parents. Disney didn't invent that. Even in Lord of the Rings the parents of major characters are dead, missing, evil, or disabled by a spell. So parentless children are the rule rather than the exception in stories.
Which is why I said that "others, such as 'Snow White' and 'Cinderella', never had two parents to begin with." The "One Parent" rule applies primarly to properties in which the writers are free, more or less, to invent their own cast ("Beauty and the Beast" must have a Belle and a cursed prince, but the supporting cast is up to the writers).
As you point out, source material (especially fairy tales) often feature non-nuclear families, and animated adaptations reflect this.
To get away from Disney a bit, Miyazaki (a Japanese animator Pixar has close ties to) also favors one- (or none) guardian tales (his "Spirited Away" is unusual in having both parents), but that just seems to be his preference in creating character arcs in which the heroine grows in self-reliance by being thrust out on her own ("Kiki's Delivery Service", "Nausicaa", and "Laputa" are three examples). Interestingly, Miyazaki and Pixar are said to be in talks to unite a Miyazaki story and character design with Pixar's computer animation. This may be one of the first post-Disney projects, if Miyazaki's health and energy hold up.
Miyazaki is my favorite filmmaker. His stories follow the orphan theme indirectly. Kiki has to leave home and make it on her own. The girl in Spirited Away has to rescue her bewitched parents. The kids in Island in the Sky have no parents.
This is not done for economy. It is just the way the "standard story" works.
I'm Sorry. I was just being sarcastic. I'm sure you are correct.
This is not done for economy. It is just the way the "standard story" works.
I said that, yes. Miyazaki's case is different. He is a force of nature who does things his way (almost) without regard to cost, because his films make loads of money. He's one man with the power to sway an entire film-making process his way.
In the case of Disney, this isn't a point of debate but fact: cutting down to a single guardian is economics, period. It was true in the '40s, and it's especially true now in the era of control freak Eisner and his penny-pinching ways.
Miyazaki's case is also different because anime features are made differently than American animated features. The team structure favored by Disney, which drives its budgeting, is not standard in Japanese animation companies. (It is true, however, in any animated project, that each character adds cost; the reason the cool little Byte character disappeared halfway through "Tron" is that its budget ran out.)
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