The Horrifying Reason Disney Animated Characters Don’t Have Mothers

As we celebrate Mother’s Day this weekend, it’s time to look back at some of the Disney moms. But there’s a problem: many early Disney Animation movies don’t have mothers. Which leads to a question: Why?

If you think about it, quite a few Disney Animated characters don’t have mothers without any explanation. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Pinocchio (1940), neither of the main characters has a mom. And those are Disney’s first two animated films.

Credit: Disney

And then there’s Bambi (1942). We don’t need to talk about what happened to Bambi’s mom unless you want to cry.

Even as Disney hit its stride in the 1950s, no mothers remained. Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953) all lacked mothers.

So, what was going on with mothers in Disney movies? Don Hahn, who was the executive producer of Maleficent (2014) and worked on The Lion King (1994) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), has a theory.

One reason is practical because the movies are 80 or 90 minutes long, and Disney films are about growing up. They’re about that day in your life when you have to accept responsibility. It’s much quicker to have characters grow when you bump off their parents. 

But there is a more sinister reason. Walt Disney thought that he had accidentally killed his mother.

Credit: Disney

After the success of Steamboat Willie and just before Snow White, Walt and his brother, Roy, bought their parents a house in Los Angeles. In his book, How to be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life,  Hahn says that the furnace started to leak a year after his parents moved into the house. Walt sent a few of his studio guys over to fix it.

Something went wrong, and the furnace spilled out noxious gasses all night. When the housekeeper arrived in the morning, Walt’s mother was dead.

Hahn wrote;

He never would talk about it, nobody ever does. He never spoke about that time because he personally felt responsible because he had become so successful that he said ‘let me by you a house.’ It’s every kid’s dream to buy their parents a house and just through a strange freak of nature, the studio workers didn’t know what they were doing.

For the rest of his life, Walt Disney felt haunted by the loss and believed he had personally contributed to his mother’s death. Perhaps subconsciously, that contributed to Disney’s animated films’ lack of on-screen mothers.

Founder of the Walt Disney Company, Walt Disney / Credit: Disney

Related: Walt Disney’s Housekeeper Died with an Amazing Secret. 

This trend continued into later Disney Animated movies as well. Disney princesses Ariel from The Little Mermaid (1989), Pocahontas (1995), and Elsa and Anna from Frozen (2013), whose parents were killed, were all missing a mother figure. The Jungle Book, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Robin Hood, and the Great Mouse Detective all had motherless characters.

Even the Disney animated movies with mothers had something missing. Rapunzel in Tangled (2010) had Mother Gothel, not exactly the ideal parent figure. Even in Finding Nemo (2003), Nemo’s mother died early in the film.

What any good animated movie shows us is that we all need a parental figure, especially a mother. So, be thankful for the mother you have and call her today, she misses you.

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone.