Instill Us With Your Daddy Issues

I babysit a lot, which means that, to keep the little turds quiet for an hour and a half, I mostly just pop in a movie for them. Of course I could do something like play games with them, but that requires effort and also I'm lazy and movies are sort of educational, right?

So after watching a good amount of children's animated films, I've kind of noticed that too many of them have characters who have, like, daddy issues (or pretty much just problems with their parent(s), but let's call those problems daddy issues because I've already got it in the title). These cause the film's main characters to go to extreme lengths of rebellion.

This one boy I babysit absolutely loves Despicable Me. He watches it about every time I go there and then will make me replay it again and again. I mean, whatever. It's a cute movie. The main character, a super-villain named Gru, has these little flash-backs to when he was younger and how his mom wouldn't pay any attention to him (mommy issues?). Because of his mother's lack of affection, Gru goes takes extreme measures to try and impress her, like attempting to steal “da moooooon”, which isn't very safe at all.

In Shrek, the princess Fiona's parents literally lock her up in some far away palace for years. There's definitely something wrong with that. To get back at them, she marries an ogre. I mean, you can't possibly believe that Fiona married Shrek for love. That thing is hideous. The marriage was obviously some crazy ploy to get back at her parents.

You already know how I feel about Brave. It still fits into this category, though. As Merida's mother's reigns pull tighter around her, she lashes out and goes into a dark forest alone and then just waltzes into a witch's cave. Like, so safe.

Now to some actual daddy issues: Hiccup, a smart, lonely, wimpy guy who only wants his dad's approval. To get it, though, he has to capture an extremely dangerous dragon. Well, he ends up deciding to raise it instead (okay?). (BTW this is about How to Train Your Dragon)

In the 2008 film Kung Fu Panda, Po becomes the chosen kung fu warrior and is told to defeat this crazy ass tiger that just escaped from prison. All of this after his father, who completely doesn't understand Po, tries to get him to take over the family business of selling noodles.

And lastly, Finding Nemo. You know the story. Nemo, a clownfish set on being independent, breaks away from his father's tight hold and touches the butt, then gets kidnapped by some scuba divers.

I don't know if these filmmakers are trying to instill some privy message about how, no matter how much you hate your parents and how they treat you now, as long as you fight back and screw something up really badly, it'll all turn out okay. Maybe this is why our generation is so effed up.