My Kid's Surprise Favorites on Disney+: TURNING RED and CRUELLA

My daughter turned 11 this year and considered herself too old for Disney / Pixar movies anymore — until Turning Red came out. Not only did she ask to see it, she wanted to watch it so badly that I did something I have never done in my whole life... I paid for a monthly streaming subscription! 

I've gone my whole adult life with "Subzero TV" (not paying for anything, not cable, not even Netflix or another streaming service), content to watch free movies and shows on YouTube and PBS and cable channel websites and free streaming apps with ads in them and Hoopla and Kanopy using my library card and, well, other people's TVs, and my own vintage DVD collection. But this year, I had a good enough reason to plug in my credit card number and buy one month of a paid service, because my daughter wanted to see an adorable and taboo-busting new Pixar film, and I could buy that experience for her at $8, less than the price of a movie theater ticket, along with a whole month of unlimited movie-watching that her dad and I might enjoy too.

And we sure did! Turning Red did not disappoint, and my daughter discovered another surprise favorite in Cruella.

This surprised me because I was expecting that we'd be more dazzled by Encanto than we were, and because Cruella is ridiculously long for an audience that has spent the pandemic developing an addiction to reels of 5-second funny cat videos. But Cruella offers a nonstop fun ride! Its most obvious critique, that it makes little sense as a backstory to the original Disney villain character, has no relevance to my daughter, who has never seen 101 Dalmatians. 

So we were able to enjoy it at face value, as the wild and stylish adventures of a hilariously badass ratbag Cinderella figure crafting her own punk rock ball gowns to a riotous soundtrack of high-energy '60s and '70s bangers. As an author of fairy tale retellings that restore the wildly chaotic flavors of pre-Victorian traditions, I appreciate the truly down-to-earth, semi-feral "grubby girl" who redesigns herself from scraps and opportunities stolen from the oppressive wealthy. It was a trip to see a gritty, OG heroine like that (very similar to my titular character in Leirah and the Wild Man, whom I have described as an aspiring princess who has trouble keeping her shoes on and pooping indoors) portrayed in a slick, high-budget Disney production. Riot grrrl power!

Turning Red takes its viewers on a more emotionally complex coming-of-age journey, though its silly humor keeps it light and fun to watch. Like Cruella (and Encanto), it deals with generational trauma passed down from mothers to daughters. But Cruella and Mei of Turning Red have completely different mommy issues. Cruella's mother is a purely evil "psycho" incapable of empathy even for her own child, but Mei's mother loves Mei obsessively to the point of smothering. Cruella suffers neglect and coldness, while Mei burns within the squeeze of a too-tight embrace. Cruella's mother discards her at birth, hoping that she will die (like a bad mother in an old fairy tale, before the Grimm brothers rewrote all evil biological mothers as evil stepmothers) while Mei's mother forces too much attention and idealism onto her daughter. There's no contest which mother I'd rather have, but Mei has a trickier problem to solve. She doesn't have a simple villain to vanquish but a tangled knot of valuable relationships and emotions to heal.

One thing I love about Turning Red is the complexity of Mei's mother Ming. The beginning of the movie portrays Ming as impossibly, clownishly ridiculous, a clear exaggeration of the familiar figure of an out-of-touch, embarrassing mother. She is cringe personified. She makes Mei want to burn up with shame and die, but we understand that she doesn't mean to. Her good intentions pave a highway to adolescent hell in a familiar mother-daughter tragic dynamic that is blown up to comic proportions.

And yet, later in the film, Ming's all-consuming love and concern for Mei bleed through so poignantly that her voice, performed by Sandra Oh, brought real tears to my eyes. I was able to laugh at Ming's absurdity and weep for her genuine maternal love.

My daughter, like most creative and perceptive children, despises anything preachy or condescending or moralizing packaged as entertainment, but she identified and appreciated the messages in this movie about self-acceptance, period shame, and parental anxieties about puberty. I was relieved that she was comfortable and enthusiastic about sharing the movie with me (she doesn't think I'm Ming, whew!), and it led to some enlightening conversations about uncomfortable vibes she has picked up from other kids and older relatives around topics like menstruation and girls' adolescence in general. These conversations opened the door to more conversations that seem to have reduced her own personal anxieties about growing up and increased her self-confidence and pride in her own feminist values.

Um, thanks, Pixar!

Now about Encanto. The hype was huge, and I have ugly cried through several Disney / Pixar movies that came out during my daughter's childhood, so I was expecting an emotional roller-coaster ride. What my whole family and I perceived, instead, was a visually magnificent but largely static diagram of classic post-traumatic family dynamics. Instead of a moving story, we were presented with a series of monologues in song format, explaining which dysfunction each family member symbolizes. The characters don't interact with each other very much or in complex ways, and the problem, its origin revealed in flashbacks and magical symbols, is resolved via symbolic gestures rather than in an emotionally resonant way. The film felt cryptic to me, a lot of tell and little show — besides the showing of visual metaphors for concepts being verbally described.

Encanto seems more like a teaching tool than a work of art, albeit a good one with a lot of artistry involved in its creation. I was confused and didn't quite get its widespread appeal until I got curious about exactly who loved this movie, and why. 

I found two important audiences who adore Encanto for good reasons: therapists and neurodivergent people, especially on the autism spectrum. Therapists love it for its clear, engaging utility as a model of family dysfunction, one that isn't too hokey or condescending but is accessible for children as well as adults. That makes sense! And some neurodivergent people I know are big fans because Encanto decodes for them, in high-definition splendor set to catchy showtunes, dynamics they have trouble following in stories told through subtle and complex emotional cues.

Oh! I realized, This movie wasn't designed for me! And that's wonderful. Writer Douglas Laman points out that Encanto doesn't just work on an intellectual level for autistic viewers; the main character, Mirabel, demonstrates what it feels like to be autistic within a neurotypical family. Whether the film's creators intended that or not, it's magical! I appreciate Encanto's value to groups of people who don't include me, and I also appreciate having learned something unexpected from watching it and reading about it. The movie, like its main character Mirabel, did not fulfill my initial expectations, but it turned out to have an important purpose and value that I had not considered.

So Encanto did turn out to function as more of a teaching tool for me and my family than as our preferred style of entertainment or emotional artistic expression, but it is a very good teaching tool in a number of ways I hadn't imagined.

Fortunately, my daughter doesn't interpret all movies as teaching tools, or else I might feel like the hilariously frothy nutbars in a tizzy about kids being "indoctrinated" into rebelling against their parents' conservative social morals by Disney movies. So far, my daughter has not even once threatened to skin a single puppy, and she has never identified as a literal animal and demanded a litter box to use. (Though a school district near me is actually fighting at board meetings about whether that is, indeed, happening to our kids!) 

What I learned from watching all three of these movies with my daughter is that the kids are all right... and they've cottoned on to the limitations of their parents and grandparents, so we'd better stay on our toes and keep up! If we're lucky, they'll turn out smarter, stronger, and more sensitive than we ever could be, and if we're luckier, they'll appreciate all we've done to launch them into a brighter future than anything we could have imagined for them.