Family-Unfriendly Aesop/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Family-Unfriendly Aesops in Film include:

Animation

  • The Land Before Time II seems to have the moral "If someone is from outside your culture, they're much dumber than you are, and have evil impulses that are almost certainly beyond their control."
    • To be fair, this ended up being addressed again in the 5th movie. In the 2nd movie, Chomper is a baby and really doesn't know any better. In the 5th, when they meet him again, he's grown up a bit and is able to control his impulses. He even says to Littlefoot, "You are what you are, and I am what I am. Nobody can change that. But we still can be friends, can't we?"
    • Not to mention that in the 5th movie once Littlefoot and his friends risk their lives for Chomper, the supposedly bloodthristy, monstrous Sharpteeth parents of Chomper have no trouble accepting prey creatures who just went to bat for their son.
  • In the sequels to An American Tail, trying repeatedly to start her own career makes Tanya either pushy, too distracted to help out around the house, and/or too blind to see her employer is plotting to kill and eat everyone she knows. In the end though, she did apparently learn her lesson.
  • The 2007 version of Beowulf diverges from the moral of its source material, essentially making the point that heroic stories are often lies told to cover up questionable or outright shitty behavior, and by the time you realize you shouldn't have told the story in the first place, you'll be too old and full of regret for it to make any difference.
  • The Incredibles points out that not everyone is special, and that if everyone were special, in reality no one would be. This is of course completely true, but rarely heard in Hollywood films aimed at kids.
    • Strangely, it comes to this conclusion by having someone who is special telling someone who is far more and uniquely special that he's not the right kind of special, thus creating a villain who can provide everyone in the world with the ability to be special but hates the protagonist's certain kind of special. That Aesop got all kinds of brittle. What could Syndrome have accomplished if he were nurtured and properly guided?
    • Speaking of Pixar movies, some of the more recent ones have also been perceived as family-unfriendly by viewers of more neo-conservative persuasions lately. When Cars 2 came out, with its very strongly anti-big-oil message, major conservative commentators ended up publicly claiming they would not take their children to Cars 2.
  • Ratatouille has a big one if you think about it. The main aesop is okay, it's the side-aesop given by Anton Ego that's disturbing. Basically it's that 'a person's review of art can never be considered art in of itself.' So, in other words, expressing your opinion on something else automatically makes it not art even if you put your heart and soul into it. This would include not only every single review in recorded history but also every single movie, TV show, book, and speech that ever commented on something else. So whenever someone mentions Citizen Kane your first response should be that it's not art because it expresses an opinion that the writer believed in...even though expressing yourself is the very definition of art.
  • The Polar Express has this. "If you don't blindly believe what others tell you, bad things happen to you (or good things don't happen either)."

Live-Action

  • Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End: Piracy is synonymous with liberty. "Freedom" means "I'm allowed to rape, steal, and murder." The government shouldn't protect people from violence, and criminals can do whatever they want and have a blast doing it. Kids, you might think pirates were awesome and a lot of fun, but just trust us; you would not have wanted to be a cabin boy in real life.
  • Teaching Mrs. Tingle tells us that you can do whatever you want to a teacher, at least if that teacher is "mean" (read: actually enforces the rules and won't let you goof off).
  • During the conclusion of 102 Dalmatians, a major character explicitly states, as an Aesop, "For people like Cruella, there are no second chances." Okay, sure she's obsessed with making a fur coat out of the pelts of adorable puppies, and she's nowhere near the first Disney villain to be irredeemably evil. But hearing it put so bluntly...
    • Made even more uncomfortable considering the film makes it pretty explicit that Cruella has an obsession with fur that is well within the boundaries of a mental illness. In fact, therapy had completely rid her of any of these impulses and had it not been for the chiming of Big Ben she would have remained a living saint.
  • Tyler Perry's Madea character advises a woman with an abusive husband to "throw a pot of hot grits in his face and then hit him with a frying pan." She reins in a young girl's bad behavior by repeatedly hitting her, and frequently suggests brutal methods of solving problems. Even outside of common self-defense, Madea's solutions are always violent.
  • Mr. Woodcock has a real whopper. The message seems to be "If your mom loves the man who abused you as a child, you should forgive him, and not carry a grudge."
  • According to Chungking Express the crazy Manic Pixie Dream Girl who likes to break into your apartment, rearrange your furniture and occasionally flood the place is not a creepy stalker who needs to see a therapist but actually the perfect woman. Well once she slaps on a stewardess uniform.
  • In Christmas with the Kranks, the main characters try to avoid traditional Christmas celebrations to save money. The neighborhood, however, insists that they conform with the rest of the neighborhood and participate against their will, since, by the Kranks' own admission, they're not Jewish. We're supposed to side with the neighbors and see the Kranks as selfish curmudgeons. The Aesop boils down to, "Conformity and commercialism are good."
    • The sad thing is they were originally aiming for a good moral like "Don't let the commercialization of Christmas discourage you from why you celebrate it"; instead, it became "Celebrate Christmas or your neighbors will torment you."
    • Another implied moral is that the only two acceptable belief systems for suburban Americans (at least in December) are Christianity and Judaism (the latter of which, apparently, will be only grudgingly tolerated), and anything else is morally wrong and will justify bullying and harassment.
  • The film Mad Money seems to have the moral that "federal crime pays, a lot; do it, especially if you're entitled because you're used to being rich, spent two weeks as a janitor, and decided it just wasn't for you."
  • Sugar and Spice has a high school cheerleader get knocked up by her boyfriend, so they decide to get married. The parents were totally supportive of their decision to get married, but when she added she was also going to have his baby their parents go insane, disown them, and both teens have to drop out. The girl is stressed because babies are expensive, but her husband isn't making enough at his minimum wage job and she has to stay at home to take care of the baby. Solution to financial troubles? Rob a bank!
  • Taken even further in the movie Catch That Kid. The 12-year old heroine's father is suddenly paralyzed and his only hope is an extremely expensive experimental procedure. Robbing the bank her mother designed the security system for and leading on the boys who like her to get them to be her accomplices are justified in the name of helping him.
  • In Raise Your Voice, Hilary Duff's dad won't let her go to music school and pursue her destiny, so she sneaks in with the help of a sympathetic aunt, who her dad is made to think she's staying with. This would be fine if the movie didn't go out of its way to justify this and insist that the Hilary Duff character, in her own words, "did what [she] had to do." Put another way, the message seems to be that the end justifies the means. The really weird part is how everyone in the movie acts as though she won't have a future if she doesn't go to music school that particular year. Her character is seventeen in the movie, but apparently it's impossible for her to wait a year until she's a legal adult and can do whatever she wants.
  • The little seen Walter Matthau-Robin Williams film The Survivors: Do what the professional killer says and everything will turn out all right. If you even think about trying to defend yourself, you will turn into a crazy survivalist.
  • The Devil Wears Prada begins by suggesting the very audacious Aesop that if you take a job you don't especially care for, occasionally prioritize it over events in your personal life, ignore your friends when they passive-aggressively criticize you about your job, start to sympathize with your coworkers whom you'd previously viewed with scorn, and, horrors, enjoy some of the perks associated with it, life might turn out okay. It even suggests that The Power of Love might not conquer all in the case of a casual relationship! However, it ends up reverting to the Broken Aesop that if you do any of those things, you are a bad bad person who is selling out on her deepest ideals.
  • Radio Flyer: Under absolutely no circumstances tell the police your stepdad's beating the shit out of your little brother, because they can't do anything. Especially don't tell your mom, because she's lonely and he's the only man she's got, and finding this out will make her sad.
  • Godzilla's Revenge has an ending moral of "beat up the bully and he'll respect you." But what warps it into the ultimate Family Unfriendly Aesop is the ending minute. Ichiro makes friends with the gang of bullies picking on him and goes around with them making mischief, including knocking a poor old painter off his ladder and spilling paint in his face. He goes off to possibly be a delinquent.
  • Hobgoblins has this coupled with Unfortunate Implications. The main character's girlfriend is a shrill shrew who insults him no matter what he does. Then the Hobgoblins' Lotus Eater Machine powers make her go to a local nightclub and strip. After breaking her free of the semi-Mind Control, she's loosened up and is a much nicer person. Or, as Crow T. Robot put it, "Amy wasn't fun until she became a slut!"
  • The Santa Clause series: When children don't get the toys they really really want for Christmas, they cease believing in Santa, become bitter and disillusioned, and have no sense of magic in their adult lives. It also has the Aesop that therapists are full of crap.
  • Grease features the extremely questionable Aesop of "change everything about yourself to be with the one you love."
    • A less harsh interpretation would be: "No matter how 'uncool' you think you are, you can become popular."
      • Which still relies on changing yourself to go with the crowd and arguably compromising your morals.
      • As well as taking up potentially dangerous habits, such as unprotected sex and smoking. Also, it does present the idea that "you can always become popular," but only on the condition that you change absolutely everything that made you unique or who you were.
  • The very premise of Final Destination. You Can't Fight Fate. Even if you see your own death coming a mile away. In fact, if you try to cheat death, it will spite you by torturing you, and then making your ultimate death as painful and violent as possible, or as hilarious as possible, in certain sequels.
    • As the sequels go on it becomes clear that death is giving the visions. So then a new Aesop that comes out is "Death is inevitable and when it's bored just likes to mess with your head first."
  • The moral of Pretty Woman: Prostitution is great. Eventually a rich john will take you away and marry you, and you will live happily ever after.
    • This movie essentially created its own trope: prostitutes are beautiful princesses waiting for a Prince Charming to redeem them.
  • Saving Private Ryan does this twice with the same character, "Steamboat Willie" (the unnamed German soldier they consider murdering). First, the Allied soldier who does not want to commit a war crime by killing a surrendering German is portrayed as a complete wimp, unable to fire his gun even as his friends and comrades are being killed. Second, if a squad doesn't murder POWs, they'll come back to kill.
    • Actually the proper aesop is that behaving decently doesn't for some odd reason mean people will behave decently toward you and tough break. But admittedly that is not what viewers will see.
  • Death Wish and many other movies with a Vigilante Man as a protagonist give a clear message that murder can be beneficial to society. Also, "playing by the rules" usually means "avoid shooting suspects," and any Cowboy Cop worth his salt never does that.
    • Cobra takes it further with the notion that policemen should always shoot first and never ask questions because all criminals, without exception, are Ax Crazy Nietzsche Wannabes who will constantly murder innocents For the Evulz until they're killed, and due process only allows them to get off scott-free.
  • F. W. Murnau's classic silent film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. If your husband attempts to drown you but then backs out at the last second, you should totally forgive him and not tell the police or anything. In fact, it will even breathe new life into your failing marriage.
  • The Dark Knight Saga argues through Rachel's letter and the ending that sometimes a deception is better than the truth.
    • Subverted in the next movie, where its quite plainly shown that if Alfred had been truthful with Bruce about Rachel's letter he could have saved the man years of pain.
    • Or that it's better to frame yourself for murder than to let people know an elected official wasn't really made of Incorruptible Pure Pureness.
    • In reality, the Batman franchise as a whole has a Family-Unfriendly Aesop: a single vigilante who is outside of the law, or any form of regulation aside from what he imposes on himself, going around beating people to a pulp is what people really need, because the police are too corrupt and incompetent to do anything right. Due process of the law is unnecessary. Especially if you're a rich white guy.
      • The Dark Knight Saga actually argues the opposite, that Harvey Dent will be the true savior of Gotham, that the citizens need the White Knight with his fairness and his prominent role in the legal system more than they need the Dark Knight. It states that a legal system, where criminals are brought to trial and jailed, is better than Batman's methods, but the system has been corrupted too much to do it. Batman does what he does only in absence of strong civil institutions, not because the superhero way is better, and he hopes that Dent can purge the system of its corruption and make Batman unnecessary.
  • In Ferris Bueller's Day Off, living life to the fullest means being willing to lie, cheat, and steal.
  • The Disney Channel's first TV Movie Brink! - Andy is part of a crew of rollerbladers who skate for fun and not for money. Then Andy's family hits financial trouble and Andy decides to get sponsored and join a team in order to help out his family. He is thoroughly outcast by his friends, even when he tells them about his situation. It isn't until he quits the team (which of course, is portrayed in a negative light) he is reunited with his friends. So apparently, it is completely unacceptable to do what you like and get paid for it, you're just a big sellout.
    • It gets worse. During one match, Andy's new teammates decide to sabotage one of his old friends. Andy himself has no idea what's going on until the match, and when he shouts a warning to his friend, she ignores him and gets injured. Andy's old teammates then proceed to disown him completely, even though he tried to warn her about the sabotage. So the moral becomes "if you try to warn someone that they're in danger and they ignore you, you're still responsible if they get hurt".
  • Jingle All the Way: When your child grows up to be a divorced drunk while his best friend is a billionaire, remember that his parents got him that one hot, over-hyped action figure that was all the rage during the holiday season and you didn't. Howard (Arnold's character) is shown to be a workaholic, neglectful parent who has continuously broken promises to his son and missed out on important events. His not getting the Turbo Man doll could just be seen as the straw that broke the camel's back.
  • The film version of Little Shop of Horrors seems to teach that murder is perfectly acceptable so long as things work out in the end.
  • When A Man Loves A Woman: If you're a mother with a drinking problem, you can be a complete bitch to your Henpecked Husband and your children and you'll always be forgiven for the shit you pull. Even if you're such a Lady Drunk that you slap your daughter around, go out drinking and leave your kids alone and drive drunk with the kids in the car, few will ever dare scold you, and your Love Martyr husband will end up "punished" for getting sick of her Jerkass behavior and not believing it when she swears that she won't do it again.

IMDB reviewer 1: A husband steadfastly loves his self-centered and obnoxious wife and suffers for it. That's what I saw played out in this movie in excruciating detail. What the scriptwriters wanted us to see was a heroic woman who singlehandedly conquers her problems while putting Mr. Nice Guy Husband in his proper place (kicked out of the house, separated from his children, and generally punished for "not listening deeply" enough).
IMDB reviewer 2: She drinks, slaps her kids, drives drunk with her kids in the car, completely forgets about her kids while she's out on drinking binges...and we're supposed to feel empathy with this character?

    • Simple solution: The movie's about the husband, not the wife. In fact, the screenwriter based the movie on his own experiences with his wife's alcoholism. Critics who have had experiences with alcoholism (Roger Ebert included) tended to praise the movie as a realistic depiction of the disease and its effects on the family rather than a simple drink-crash-recover formula.
  • The moral of The Screaming Skull, according to the folks of Mystery Science Theater 3000, is "Don't trust anyone. Ever."
    • "Well Mike, what I learned from today's movie (Hobgoblins) is that Daphne is a slut, and that Amy wasn't fun until she became a slut." "Well that's the fun message!"
  • Subverted with Wall Street; Gecko's "greed is good" speech was mistaken for the movie's Family-Unfriendly Aesop, but only by viewers who were missing the point; the point was simply to show that Gecko was an eloquent villain, but a villain nonetheless.
  • Home Alone: Kids, according to this movie, booby-trapping your house will make it safer. Also, if you see criminals, you should make fun of them and try to make them so angry that they want to kill you. (Chances are, even if you're a kid, you can see the problem with the previous sentence and the danger in following it.)
  • Mystery Team: Wacky vigilantism is the only way to solve a crime.
  • A 1930s film, The Big House, forces us to sympathize with hardened criminals. The audience is supposed to look up to Butch (Wallace Beery), a (mostly) unrepentant murderer and an all-around Jerkass, because he has a defiant and disobedient attitude while in prison. We're supposed to view him as "brave", but he rebels not for the sake of the underdog but simply for himself: he causes trouble for the warden (a generally reasonable man) just because he doesn't like the warden's rules. (Oh, and did I mention that the person Butch killed was a woman?) It only gets worse: Butch bullies a smaller inmate, treating him very unjustly; the smaller man is in jail for accidentally killing someone in a vehicular accident. Yet the bullied victim is made out to be the villain because he "rats" on Butch and the other inmates so that the warden will grant him an early release - never mind that the inmates are breaking the law even inside of the prison, secretly plotting an insurrection and planning to kill the guards with machine guns smuggled into the prison yard. Both the "rat" and Butch die in the carnage when the warden squelches the uprising, but Butch is given a heroic death. And then, just to make matters even worse, the warden at the end of the film praises one of the conspirators simply for having a change of heart and saving the guards' lives during the riot - and allows him to walk out of jail a free man! The moral seems to be that you should always adhere to the values of your particular subculture (even if that subculture is unjust), but when the opportunity arises to do something heroic, break your own subcultural code. Confusing.
  • Star Trek: Insurrection: The intended Aesop is that "Letting the desire for eternal youth consume you can turn you into a monster". But because the Son'a are so over the top and Unintentionally Sympathetic with their failure to artificially extend their lives, the Aesop seems more like "Growing old is icky, and turns you into an evil, repulsive, toxin-oozing monster with a garbage-bag face".
    • Lets not forget that they're 'evil' goal is...to help the Federation bring a medicine to countless worlds, saving untold lives and maybe even helping people like Geordi regain natural sight. And that's... terrible?
    • And the more conventional Aesop about the planet's rejuvenating powers: "Finders keepers, losers weepers".
  • Jane Elliot's "Bluest Eye" documentaries have skewed rather horribly in this direction. Elliott was the teacher who one day stuck her brown-eyed kids in collars and forbade them recess because blue-eyed kids were smarter—intending to demonstrate how easily racism took hold. One of the more recent films she's done, The Stolen Eye, is set in Australia. Really winning moments include the fun part where she dismisses the idea that blue-eyed Greeks could possibly be treated less well than blue-eyed Northern Europeans, the bit where she congratulates a Holocaust survivor on how lucky she is not to be visibly dark-skinned—and also, more topically, the many moments where she excruciatingly brow-beats people of Aboriginal descent into being cruel to the blue-eyed folk, actually forcing them to enact her disturbing Aesop of "Oh, everyone will be slighting and cruel to those who are degraded by authority figures. You should fear minorities, white people. Because they're waiting for their chance. They want to do this to you."
  • The Centron educational film "The Snob" might have turned out better if it didn't define "snob" as "student who studies harder than, and has different interests than, the majority." The so-called snob of the film is never seen actually shunning or looking down on her peers. She just doesn't want to participate because her interests are different. If anything, her peers are being snobs to her, saying nasty things about her behind her back and heaping shame on her for not being like them. The only time she shows any dislike for them at all is in response to this treatment. Thus, the message becomes "if your interests are different than the crowd's, then you must be a stuck-up jerk who looks down on them and any abuse they heap on your is totally justified. The only way not to be a snob is to CONFORM!"
  • It's not family-friendly anyways, but the basic moral for Drag Me to Hell is that you'd better be extremely generous and supply a person with an extension to their mortgage, otherwise, that person will curse you to Hell for it. Even if said person has failed enough times to not be trusted with a mortgage extension (failing to pay it off twice, at least).
    • Also, if you piss off a "gypsy", you will be smashed in the face with a curse. Because, y'know, the Roma aren't people, they're walking stereotypes. And somehow this is still an acceptable point of view; thanks a mint, Raimi.
  • The Director's Cut version of The Butterfly Effect: Everyone would be better off if you'd never been born.
  • In Other People's Money, the moral is that businesses exist to make money, and if a business is worth more shut down than running, someone's going to shut it down, no matter how noble, selfless or idealistic the CEO is.
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