Orphan monsters and kids' fears

For the last week or so, Helena Iara has been suffering from nightmares.  She wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, and in the morning, when she relaxes enough to talk about the night, she tells us that a monster has been chasing her.  I suppose that the experience is relatively normal, if disturbing to bother her and us, but the solution that she and Rita have developed is interesting: as they talked about the monster, the have invented a son for him.  The son is little and cute, will play with Helena... and then, as her friend, will intervene with the monster on her behalf.  Almost two years ago, when Helena was afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, inventing Lobinho (the little good wolf) served the same purpose; Lobinho is Helena's imaginary friend even today.

What does any of this have to do with media criticism for children?  Many children fear monsters, and some movies have addressed the issue very well: Monsters Inc, for instance, tries to show kids that "Monsters are people too," and if you get close enough to them, they turn out to be good and kind.  Helena's solution to the monster problem forced me to notice something, though: Sully and Mike Wazowski have no family.  Yes, in Monsters University we discover that Sully's father was a famous scarer, but we never see Sully with his family.  The most important relationships they have in the University are with other student and frat brothers; in Monsters Inc, their important relationships are with co-workers.

As we think about other children's movies, we see that most of the main characters are alone in the world.  In Annie or Despicable Me, the children are explicitly orphans.  In Up, Carl is a widower and Russell tormented by the lack of care by his absent father.  A Bug's Life, Shrek, At Home on the Range, Open Season... in all of these films, the most important relationships are those that the characters choose, not the ones that they have been given by birth.  Even as we look at more traditional movies, we see many, many children without families: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Pinocchio...  Clearly, this rule is not universal: Bambi and Dumbo involve close family relationships, and Finding Nemo is all about the attempt to reconstruct family (I could note, however, in all of these cases, that the protagonists are children of single parents).

Helena swings her cousin Fernando.

Bruno Bettleheim and other critics of fairy tales have reflected well on the fears of children, how they both desire independence and fear being alone, without mother and father.  Certainly, those issues play a role in the choice to make children's movies about orphans.  I wonder, though, if it doesn't also say something about American individualism.  Helena lives between two worlds, between the fragmented family of the American educated middle class, and the intense nuclear and extended family of Brazil.  For her, solutions are often familiar (in the etymological sense): the Big Bad Wolf and the nightmare monster are both redeemed by their children.

When I look at Helena's relationship with her extended family, this perspective makes sense: she has a dozen uncles and aunts who form an active part of her life; she loves playing with her many, many cousins.  Family is a resource and a pleasure.  I don't see that in American children I know: they may love their grandparents and get excited about an uncle's visit, but these events seem unusual, something out of the normal.  They are not going to save you from a monster.  And that break in the extended family has an impact in children's movies, and finds its way into the evil "mother" in Tangled and the solitude of the robots on Wall-E.  Though Helena has enjoyed watching those movies, from her perspective, there is something missing in them.