lessons from disney movies

i was at the right age when disney movies started getting good again. i was 8 years old when i saw the little mermaid in theaters. or maybe 7. either way, it made a big impact on me. our family would go every summer to see the new disney movie for years, and my child mind learned a few lessons from these movies. since then, i've read a lot of negative things about disney movies, about what they teach to young children and it makes me a little sad. i learned some positive things from disney movies.
1. things are always better if you talk to your parents. i learned this from "the little mermaid." when ariel relies on herself or her friends, she ends up naked on a beach with no voice (and apparently no way to write?). when someone finally has the brilliant idea to have the sea king come help make things right and everything is out in the open, she emerges gloriously from the shallows in a sparkly dress. way better.
from "beauty and the beast" i learned a couple things:
2. sometimes good-looking guys are big jerks. i mean this is obvious. who was the real beast? gaston should have been locked up somewhere for what he did to belle and her father.
3. cool girls read a lot. the only person in the town who understood or appreciated belle besides her father was the bookseller. everyone else didn't think it was important or useful to read, apparently.
4. true love means someone else's life is more important to you than your own. there was a real relationship in "beauty and the beast." the beast became more selfless as his love for belle grew, and that's why it worked.
5. you'd save yourself a lot of trouble by keeping your promises. think about it. if aladdin had freed the genie when it was time to make his third wish, jafar wouldn't have been able to mess everything up.
6. when you have something important to say, just come out with it. he could have told jasmine on their flying carpet date that yes, he was the boy from the market and he was pretending to be a prince and he had a magic lamp and a genie. tension at least shared. she took it pretty well after he saved her from the hourglass at the end, and the fact that he used a wish from a genie in a magic lamp to come impress her is pretty cute. i want to see that movie, where jasmine is in on it.
7. you can't hide from who you are and your responsibilities forever. "lion king" has a lot of parallels to our journey here on the earth. we make mistakes and run away from them, do something distracting to make ourselves feel better, but eventually it catches up to us. and the only choice is to go back and make it right. and hey, it might solve the drought problem. :) one of our mantras when i was a kid was "remember who you are." my dad used to say that to us as we left the house, long before "lion king" came out. "lion king" may be one of the few items of popular culture where the protagonist comes around to the idea that it's better to follow the rules and find your place in the system rather than abandon it altogether. and maybe it would have come out that scar was behind it all if simba had run to his mother and told her everything that happened instead of running away to the desert. she would have figured it out and possibly banished him (scar). not that he wouldn't have schemed again and again, but still. it's amazing to me how they got satan's techniques so well: it's your fault, so you're not worthy to go home again, and your mother won't love you anymore. they're obvious lies, unless your own mind is already accusing you.

those were the big ones from my formative years. later on i wasn't so impressionable and the movies were less good--pocahontas, hercules, home on the range? "mulan" i still love, and it's all about being awesome, saving your father's life by risking your own, and finding out that you are able to take down an army by being smart. so that's obvious.

to be fair, here are some lasting subliminal lessons i also learned from disney movies:
1. at 16, i will be very grown-up and possibly marriageable.
2. at 16, i will (or must) have a waist too tiny to fit necessary organs; flowing hair down to my waist; thin, long legs; thin, beautiful arms; and a beautiful voice.
3. at 16, my first date will be magical, and with the man i'm going to marry.
4. my goodness will have the power to change any manner of boy into the kind of man i would marry.

that's a lot of pressure for my 16th birthday! i was a smidge disappointed when i turned 16 and i still had acne and my arms and legs and waist stayed the same (my hair was flowing but not down to my waist), but i still managed to date a little and marry someone who was already the kind of man i wanted to marry. i think i even eschewed most of these erroneous ideas by the time i left high school. my first date was not magical, i can't give up any organs for the sake of a tiny waist, and none of the boys i knew when i was 16 were mormon, so i had no real future plans for any of them. that didn't stop me from choosing unwisely for a boyfriend my freshman year of college, probably still holding onto the idea that my goodness would somehow cause the guy to change from immature to mature and from life-sucking to life-affirming, but luckily i was too boring or something anyway. :) but at least i had a baseline, and the difference was obvious when i met my husband.

in conclusion, i still love disney movies. i love the magic and the beauty and the fun. i love getting caught up in the fantasy for a while, and now i even keep my feet firmly planted on the ground when i do (i kind of don't think men ever get all swoony over women. but it's fun to imagine!). i think we have to be aware of the subconscious messages we get from all of the things we take into our brains, but there are lessons to be learned. stories can spawn great discussions about life and how things really work vs. how they play out in the story or how the protagonist perceives reality (my mother is really good at finding good lessons from questionable media. "wouldn't her life have been better if she'd had the gospel? she wouldn't have gone to that party in the first place!" we like to rewrite stories so the protagonist already has the morals he or she gains by making bad decisions in the first 20 minutes of a film. they usually last about 5 minutes in our versions. bo-ring!). sometimes characters in media actually start spouting truth, like family is really important, and there is true love in places other than romantic relationships, and "soul mates" really come down to choice and hard work, and i love it.