me_irl

I think the point is that the emotions of the family trauma are more focused on.

• Snow White in the movie seems like just this kid who this lady really wants to murder. You don’t really see much indicating that she’s been through a rough childhood till that point.
• Cinderella does go deeper into more prolonged torture, but it doesn’t feel like they are family at all. She’s not being gaslit by family members she wants to trust, she’s literally just a slave to these assholes who stole her house.
• Sleeping beauty is more about forbidden love than generational trauma. Both of the dads seem pretty alright if a bit short tempered lol (I need to watch the movie again just for that fight)

This is in contrast to

• Brave focuses on the misunderstanding and miscommunication between parents and children where both can cause each other significant pain/stress without noticing and then those emotions can lead to rash actions damaging relationships
• Moana is similar to brave but also with more added stress of trying to discover who you are when you’ve been repressing that part of yourself due to family pressure
• Frozen is much more focused on that latter emotion but also shows miscommunication between loved ones leading to significant problems neither wanted to cause

Point is there’s a difference between saying something traumatizing happened and focusing on the effects of that traumatic experience. I mean look, half the Disney characters have dead parents so there’s trauma there but that’s not the same as making that trauma a main focus of the story.

Aladdin and Jasmine have dead parents but the film focuses on their desires for “freedom”. Whereas, in Treasure Planet, it shows Jim growing up with an absent father and how that has affected both him and his mother. It also shows him growing fond of a surrogate father figure which becomes a source of internal conflict because that surrogate father figure has significant flaws. The former movie has family trauma; the latter is about family trauma.