You Can Do Anything: Must Every Kids’ Movie Reinforce the Cult of Self-Esteem?
Encouraging kids is fine, but films like Planes and Turbo take their messages to an extreme. Parents should turn to 1969’s A Boy Named Charlie Brown for a reality check.
For all the chatter about the formulaic sameness of Hollywood movies, no genre in recent years has been more thematically rigid than the computer-animated children’s movie. These films have been infected with what might be called the magic-feather syndrome. As with the titular character in Walt Disney’s 1943 animated feature Dumbo, these movies revolve around anthropomorphized outcasts who must overcome the restrictions of their societies or even species to realize their impossible dreams. Almost uniformly, the protagonists’ primary liability, such as Dumbo’s giant ears, eventually turns into their greatest strength.
But first the characters must relinquish the crutch of the magic feather—or, more generally, surmount their biggest fears—and believe that their greatness comes from within.
xamples from the past decade abound: a fat panda hopes to become a Kung Fu master (Kung Fu Panda); a sewer-dwelling rat dreams of becoming a French chef (Ratatouille); an 8-bit villain yearns to be a video-game hero (Wreck-It Ralph); an unscary monster pursues a career as a top-notch scarer (Monsters University). In the past month alone, two films with identical, paint-by-numbers plots—Turbo and Planes—have been released by separate studios, underlining the extent to which the magic-feather syndrome has infiltrated children’s entertainment.
In DreamWorks’ Turbo, the eponymous protagonist, a common garden snail, toils in a tomato patch during the day and dreams of racing glory at night. His older brother Chet, a safety supervisor in the snail colony, has little patience for his sibling’s fantasies. “The sooner you accept the miserableness of your existence, the happier you’ll be,” Chet advises. “Dreamers eventually have to wake up.”
Shortly thereafter, Turbo accidentally ingests large quantities of nitrous oxide and somehow gains exceptional racing capabilities. Through complicated plot machinations that involve a taco stand in Van Nuys, a quintet of sassy racing snails, and an arrogant French-Canadian racecar driver, Turbo qualifies for the Indianapolis 500. After a rocky start, Turbo surges to the lead in the last lap only to suffer a terrible crash that obstructs the other drivers and neutralizes Turbo’s racing powers. Mere feet from the finish line, Turbo withdraws into his shell, uncertain that he has the inner strength to succeed. Now fully invested in his brother’s quest, Chet yells at him: “It is in you! It’s always been in you! … My little brother never gives up. That’s the best thing about you.” Newly inspired, Turbo inches across the finish line, fulfilling his self-actualizing journey and proving that one needn’t be human nor drive a car to win the country’s most prestigious auto race.
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Perhaps the best counterpoint—and the best example of just how much things have changed—can be found in Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts. In the comic strip, Schulz ridiculed the notion that individuals are likely to succeed merely because they believe in themselves. Every year Charlie Brown convinces himself that he is finally going to kick Lucy’s football, and each time she snatches it away at the last second. In a 1968 interview with Psychology Today, Schulz implied that his characters pick on Charlie Brown because he is too much of a dreamer: “I think they are justified sometimes in their treatment of him. Charlie Brown is too vulnerable. He is full of hope and misdirected faith.” Failure, unrequited love, and self-doubt are the norms in Peanuts, and nowhere is this better represented than in Schulz’s first feature-length film, A Boy Named Charlie Brown.
