A good analysis of Disney movies, which capture something I realized a long time ago, that Disney movies usually all have a common theme of child disobedience to their parents.
“When viewing Disney movies in which characters disobey their parents, children will most likely be unable to connect the act disobedience with the impact it has on the family, or any other negative aspect; instead, a child will view the disobedience very unrealistically, in the manner Disney presents it - adventurous and fun, always with positive outcomes.”
https://therhetoricofdisney.weebly.com/disobedience.html
Decades ago a friend of mine pointed this out about films generally. It’s not just DIsney. Because young people go (or used to anyway) to movies, many films portray the young as better and wiser than their elders. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, War Games, the Goonies, E.T., Footloose, and many others exhibit this basic theme. None were made by DIsney.
In almost every Disney movie ever, the kids are missing one or both parents to begin with. Bambi, Nemo, Cinderella, Snow White, Lion King, Beauty and Beast, Jungle Book, etc.
Other than MAYBE The Little Mermaid (and that’s more of a gray area, as Ariel had to clean up her act big time by the ending of the movie), and maybe Aladdin (mostly on Jasmine’s end. Aladdin himself doesn’t count since he was explicitly an orphan so he didn’t have any parent TO disobey), definitely Pocahontas (Mulan’s more in the gray area, as Mulan mostly went to war in her father’s stead to save him from becoming a Red Shirt, and not because her father was incompetent, but because he previously suffered an injury that would make him a liability in combat), I don’t really recall Disney actually promoting disobedience as a good thing, especially towards their parents.
Certainly the classics didn’t deal with disobedience by any stretch (Snow White was very obedient to her stepmother, and if anything, it took the huntsman warning her of her stepmom’s infanticidal intentions to Snow for her to even ATTEMPT to flee the premises. Cinderella was obedient to her stepfamily, and her not going to the ball was thanks to the stepmom being a jerk, and Aurora doesn’t disobey her adopted family either, even going back to her castle DESPITE promising to meet that man in the woods, and clearly wasn’t happy about the whole situation. Bambi I don’t recall him disobeying anyone, and Mowgli had to REALLY get saved a few times, so I fail to see how that promoted disobedience, plus he was an orphan so he couldn’t disobey any parents). If anything, Disney PROMOTED child obedience to parents.
Besides, as another user pointed out, plenty of Hollywood movies that weren’t even CONNECTED to Disney at the time promoted child disobedience in a FAR more blatant manner. Like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (though to be fair, that movie at least depicted the public school system in a bad light and also had a condemnation towards communism as well, so it’s all good).