Movies over Christmas - a question

[bookzombie]

For Christmas I bought pennski three animated movies: How to Train Your Dragon, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The Princess and the Frog and we watched them all over the Christmas week. We also went out to see Tron: Legacy.

On the films themselves, How to Train Your Dragon was easily the best: fun, funny, exciting and with good characters (I found out today it was made by the same filmaker as Lilo and Stitch, one of my favourite animated films of recent years, so maybe no great surprise I liked it.) I also enjoyed The Princess & the Frog a great deal, though with a few reservations. The worse of the batch was, by far, Cloudy...Meatballs. Apart from a couple of clever lines and in jokes this was just a mess. It got quite well reviewed and I'm at a loss to understand why. My expectations for Tron were set pretty low - I've always thought the first was overrated. It looked very pretty but the acting and script are both pretty appalling. That said, I quite enjoyed the sequel. It didn't really do anything very new but it didn't actively annoy me (although there is an entire other post on the issues with the facial animation).

But what is the question I mention, you ask?

Well, this is specifically for my American friends, and forgive me if it's something I've asked before:

What the hell is US cinema & TV's thing with father and son relationships? I can't count how many times this seems to be the main character driver (in an incredible number of animated films for one). It's a driver in Dragon, Meatballs and Tron. Even Princess is driven by a daughter trying to fulfil her father's ambitions.

It seems to me from what I've seen that there is something deep in the American national psyche here and I'd be fascinated to get ideas on why this might be. It's not a theme you tend to see as frequently in the UK (in the UK it is more frequently class, overtly or covertly, that is the common theme).

Any thoughts?

Comments

[phoebesmum.livejournal.com]

A major offender in this respect was Up, which everyone raved about, but from which the only message that I took away was "Mothers don't count".

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I have noted this several times on my LJ, and, surprisingly, some of the Americans on my flist denied it existed. It hits me over the head time and time again.

That said, my favourite animation of last year was Ponyo, though I have yet to see The Secret of Kells which is on my to-see list.

[maryread.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you asked! so I am not alone. I've seen this national psychological dynamic related to the whole "George Washington-Father of His Country" thing that started getting mythic play more than a century ago. I gather Britain was the Mother Country. Kind of distant, you could say.

You could speculate that the number of men who left inconvenient families behind to light out for the frontier, on a continuing basis, might have actually had an influence on the next generations. But we'd need to consult the sociologist historian on staff for some facts on that. Of course a boy who is thus abandoned is left at something of a loss for models of how fathering is properly done, and that can happen (and has) in any generation. Such traumas may work themselves down through families -- or not. The ideal of course is that he would then "send for the family" but sometimes (?) that didn't happen, and sometimes at such distances another family, er, jes' grewed. Informal divorce was far more prevalent on the frontier (it kind of ran in my own family) than the fifties' social construction of family would admit.

Once you start looking at American fathers in the media, it's everywhere. If you want to narrow it down a little, look at father images of black men in American media. Quick, someone write a dissertation.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. Very striking in apocalyptic stories like The Walking Dead and The Road. I wonder whether it's because long work hours and other pressures mean men don't get to spend so much time with their kids in the USA.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I think it's an 'American Dream' thing. The dads work/commute such long stupid hours with no holidays that they never get to spend any time with the kids that they are trying to earn all that money for.

This leads to poor father/son relationships.

That's my best guess, but can Americans tell me if I'm right?