notes from underground

I checked out the art book for Disney’s Mulan from the library the other week, mainly to study Hans Bacher and Chen-Yi Chang’s concept art for the film, but the book has proved to be a fairly fun read. One section explains Disney’s “dead parent syndrome”:

[Mulan's mother] creates a two-parent family for Mulan…the heroes of past Disney animated films were often orphaned or had only one parent. The explanation for this [is that a] tight storyline eliminates everything that is unnecessary. With two parents, unless they support the hero in different ways, they essentially perform the same story function. However, assigning different story functions to each parent can suggest a disagreement between them that may detract from the story’s focus. In addition…it doesn’t make [financial] sense to have two characters who do the same thing.

When I was growing up I would distress my mom by repeatedly making up stories in which the hero (usually an analogue for me) had a dad, but no mother. I should tell her I was just exercising economy of story; it was nothing personal!