The Mitchells vs. the Machines

[psocoptera]

The Mitchells vs. the Machines - cute animated movie on Netflix. The main characters in this are a dad and a daughter, which is entirely reasonable except that it meant it had the problem where dads are entire people who make mistakes and have backstories and have to grow as people, while moms Facilitate and Mediate and Support. But the daughter was gay so maybe she'll get to be a person when she grows up. Okay, that was unfair, I mean, the discomfort with portraying mothers as anything other than nurturing-and-competent probably would extend to queer moms too, if there were more/any of them in children's media. And dads so rarely *get* to be competent, like, kids-movie dads always have to struggle to dad, at least a bit, and none of that is an invalid story, but I just get so tired of being served the same character beats. (Onward, blargh.) I talked about this a little bit with the kids and Q was like "but she did a really major part at the end" (or something like that, I can't remember his exact words now) and, yes, that was fun, but it's not the same as having character moments where we get inside her head. Anyways, other than our entire gender culture needing to be disassembled and rebuilt, it was a fun movie, with some genuinely funny sequences.

(As a discussion question, though, what's the biggest mistake or questionable choice you've ever seen a mom make in a children's movie? Ok, it's obviously Steven Universe, which has tons of actual character complexity around both Steven's mom and White Diamond as ubermom. Although even there, Steven's mom's choices are driving a lot of the plot, but she doesn't actually get to be there to reckon with them, part of being a Mom Who Has Actually Made Mistakes is absence from the story. I might have to go with Valka never trying to go back to Hiccup in the HTTYD series, which I love so much, because maybe they were cornered into it by what they set up in the first movie, but it still sets her up to be the most interesting mom I ever saw on the kids-movie screen. Or, no, wait, Brave, the Queen in Brave totally gets an Actual Damn Arc even more than Valka does. Well, okay then, we had one, all the way back in 2012, I suppose I should stop complaining.)

Comments

[psocoptera]

I abandoned a long time ago my Gothel-POV Tangled fic in which Gothel discovers that you can't raise a kid for 18 years without developing some maternal feelings for it, realizes at the last possible minute that she's become an abusive monster, fakes her own death in the falling-out-the-window scene because it's the only way she can think of to get herself out of Rapunzel's life and set Rapunzel free, and then gets to have an "is there any way I could ever be back in her life or would that just necessarily do more harm" character arc. I'm sure I would have gotten some nasty comments - a sympathetic POV for an abusive mom? horrors - but, like, talk about interesting movie moms! There's so much *there*!

[psocoptera]

I want to talk about Helen Parr/Elastigirl here too, because on the one hand I'm not sure how much Elastigirl ever gets to grow - she certainly doesn't have as much of an arc as Bob does - and on the other hand she has more character depth than a lot of movie moms. And the plane scene, when she's code-switching between her mom persona and her action-hero persona, and then eventually merges them, that's such a fantastic scene, maybe my favorite from the movie. And I guess it's an interesting example of character growth despite always having to already be competent, because she's been competent in these two separate ways but gets to make the leap of combining them.

[glynhogen]

My respect for Brad Bird dropped so much when I discovered that scene existed for purposes of simplifying the narrative rather than highlighting Helen's historical and current competence.

[psocoptera]

Really? Well, the author is dead, so if Bird managed to make a better movie than he meant to, joke's on him, movie still is what it is. :)

[glynhogen]

You can read growth into the decision to publicly embrace imperfection: the Mitchell mom was obviously adept at embracing and nurturing her wacky/emotionally damaged/queer/autistic/robotic family in private, but by the end she was proudly sharing terrible pictures.

This is a stretch, and not so much "growth" as a character trait in service to stunt casting that may end up getting redubbed anyway.

(My personal biggest WTF moment was any parent's brain shorting out when they discovered their kid had said something uncomplimentary about them. I really did not like the guilt-trip angle they used. And of course the brother having Stereotypically Incompetent Heterosexual Male reactions to a kid who shares his interests.)

[psocoptera]

Yeah, the guilt trip thing was awkward, and yet I appreciated them trying to give Katie some kind of arc beyond just "she's obviously right, of course she's excited to get to go start her adult life, can everyone just get out of her way already", which I feel would have been *correct* and yet made her even more of a prop for the dad's emotional growth. :/

[belecrivain]

Immediately Home Alone comes to mind.

(Watching it over Sheena's and Janet's shoulders a while back, I was startled by how collectively nasty that family was to Kevin, and I wonder sometimes if standards of how people act towards each other has changed significantly and we don't really realize it until we watch early '80s movies -- obviously the treatment of drunk women in Pretty in Pink and Revenge of the Nerds, or the stereotyping-for-laughs in either, wouldn't fly today, but in the first part of Gremlins there's a woman who tortures the hero's dog, and this is regarded as unfortunate but not criminal, certainly nothing to make a big fuss over.

(This is not what you are looking for but Gremlins does give the most enjoyable fight sequence to the otherwise-not-particularly-effective-or-memorable mom character.)

[psocoptera]

Oh, interesting, I haven't seen Home Alone since I was a kid, or Gremlins since I was a teen, either. Does the Home Alone mom actually get an arc beyond "Kevin!! :O :O :( :( :("? I don't remember at all. But that is a terrific Movie Mom Mistake, for sure. (Gosh, I bet Q would love that movie, maybe enough that I don't want to show it to him...?)

Brave?

[vardibidian]

I think of Brave as being a story about the mom, but I haven't seen it, I think, since it came out in the theaters, so I may be remembering things that I wanted to be in the movie, not things that actually were in it.

Thanks,
-V.