Over the last few years talk about generational, complex and developmental traumas have entered the landscape more often than they have in the past. Alongside this dialogue Disney has been releasing films that explore these aspects in surprising ways. Granted, none of this is done with minute care to survivors, but the fact that these stories are being shared at all speaks to a kind of cultural awareness that is entering our lives all the more often. Of these stories, I would like to discuss Moana, Frozen, Coco and Encanto.
Moana
In Moana Te Ka, the angry deity that she must save her lands from, is “the villain” because she threatens the world around her, but she really is Te Fiti without its centre, its heart, which was stolen from her. Moana figures this out only near the end. Since Moana’s power allows her to guide the waters of the island, she could stand to fight with Te Ka, but she’s just as connected to the land around her as she is to the water. When she understands that what’s going on is, in trauma terms, a giant fight response to a kind of violation, she realizes all that she needs to do is let the island know she can have it back, to restore it to its former self and bring peace to the land.
Moana’s surprising revelation is that the heart of Te Ka is carrying a kind of rage about its violation. It is a land that is screaming about the things we don’t educate each other about enough: colonialism, genocide, eco-destruction, mass cultural violations. These kinds of things ensnare and destroy remote regions just as much as they do thriving, developing metropolises. Te Fiti’s stolen heart is a metaphor for all of these things, just as much as it can be a metaphor for violated women and what simply being heard or loved despite one’s traumas can help with.
Sadly, it’s much easier to imagine you can restore someone or something to its previous self by simply putting something back. In reality it’s far more complex and requires… well, a lot of therapy, whether that is something that aims to heal a land, people, culture or person. So perhaps we got the Disney ending here, because in reality it does not work this way, but at least Moana doesn’t fight her and Te Ka doesn’t kill Moana – instead they befriend one another and mutually gain something special.
Frozen
Frozen‘s main premise is that Elsa’s powers were “too much”. How many times as women have we felt this way in the world? That we must be ‘quiet’ and subdued, and any amount of power or respect is given with hesitation or refusal. In order to protect her sister and her family Elsa is locked away in her own home. She comes out occasionally, with gloves on her hands and asked to be incredibly poised and controlled. Right now I’m thinking of a royalty metaphor, considering all the news about Prince Harry and Meghan.
But anyway, to be locked away like this is incredibly traumatic for someone, especially a child. Not only is she meant to see herself as dangerous to others, but the reason it’s there to begin with is a kind of metaphor for what happens when a child can’t express herself. Her identity is a “problem”. And rather than nurture and love her, allow her to learn and feel safe, she’s kept away like some rabid deranged killer. This only traumatizes her further and allows her powers, which are governed by her feelings (may even BE her feelings) become more volatile through suppression and fear of them (or fear of emotion).
This whole movie is a metaphor for what happens when someone is asked to suppress themselves, whether that is in the form of sexuality, misogyny, trans-sexuality, etc. Whatever it is, it forms a core wound inside of the person that later needs to be addressed. And Elsa only frees herself from this fear of her own power when she leaves everyone behind and can be alone. A common thing for people with family trauma is this kind of preference for isolation.
Personally I think Elsa is a great example of what female children and later women go through, but I think it applies to children of all genders because the way society treats basic emotions, volatile or not, is really quite traumatizing.
Coco
In Coco we see a little boy, Miguel, who falls into the land of the dead during Day of the Dead celebrations looking at a picture of a man playing a guitar. Miguel is the young aspiring musician who is told over and over to abandon his dream and to stick to real things “that matter”, like their family’s shoe-making business. This creates a wound in Miguel, to be told he cannot do the one thing that he loves. We find out later that part of the reason for this is that a family member who was a musician, their great-grandfather “left the family”. Presumably to pursue music or another wife. They then banned musicians from the family, because of this deep pain of being abandoned by their patriarch.
We find out later that he was imprisoned and his music was stolen, that the famous musician that inspires Miguel is actually taking the music from his great-grandfather. And Coco, who is the great-grandmother, though now mute with age, is assumed to be just as practically minded as the rest of the family. In truth she’s still a romantic that loves her husband, had never banned music from her own heart.
So what happens to this family that has banned music, a metaphor for joy and pleasure, to take up the practical realities of life is a deafening of the potential of all of them, not just Miguel. Miguel ends up lucky to break the family “curse”, so to speak, but each of his older family members had already lived through this. You could think of music as symbolic here, to mean anything that is community-centric in healing, love, sharing, emotion-filled and pleasure-filled. To have this banned from your world would cause a lifetime of wounding in your perception of yourself – if you ever deserved the things you wanted, if you ever had any talent to begin with and if you should want things at all.
Encanto
One of my favourite films of last year, Encanto takes it up a notch with these previous stories in combining the kinds of traumatic leftovers Mirabel and the rest of her family are dealing with. On one hand we have Abuela’s generational trauma when Pedro dies and her plea to save her baby creates the village. Abuela develops a kind of strict perfectionism in the roles her daughters must perform, especially because their powers are so strong. This is really based off of the fear that if everyone doesn’t behave a certain way, that something horrible will befall the family, just like it did to Pedro. She may not even know that she’s re-enacting this fear over and over, that Pedro’s death haunts her and may feel like her fault.
This is a huge reason why Bruno gets outcast, as he forsees a prophecy that tells of the family’s downfall. Instead of trying to find out how this happens, Abuela blames Bruno, and eventually Mirabel, when a lot of the crumbling we see in the film is a result of Abuela herself and her inability to allow the variety of personalities and powers to flourish within her family and village. Abuela believes it is her responsibility to keep everyone safe, just as it is everyone’s responsibility to stay in line.
I feel like this can be a metaphor for a lot of things. Strict gender roles within many cultures still adheres to doing exactly what is expected of you or suffer huge societal consequences. As I type this, Iran is currently killing their protesters because a woman dared defy the law of hijabi wearing. In other parts of the world, abortion laws are being revoked, as are trans laws. And in many parts of the world homophobia is rampant. We can see these things as cultural policing. Truth is there are multiple traumas re-enacted onto a family member when they are rejected, policed and confined – one is the culture’s, and the other is within the family. That familial betrayal is often more painful, dangerous and damaging.
The result within the Madrigal family is that everyone else’s powers start to crumble just as the village does. It ends up being Mirabel, the only one without powers, who goes in search of what is happening and why. Mirabel wants to preserve the family, too, even though she’s often been left out and made to feel inferior, just like Bruno, and just like each magically-powered family member is made to feel like they could only do one thing and one thing perfectly. Mirabel’s insecurities braid themselves into her personality, you can see it in the awkward way she speaks and her self-doubting nature. Bruno simultaneously is a squashed kind of person, he is meek and uncertain of himself, stumbling over his words and hiding behind the walls like a rat. Literal and metaphorical walls, I would guess.
The ending is of course very Disney in how quickly resolutions happen. In reality, both Mirabel and Bruno would have a much harder time forgiving Abuela, considering the way her choices and behaviours affected their entire personality and lives. They may choose to not be in contact, or never forgive her, but in Encanto much is quickly resolved and songs are sung, to finalize our cultural notions of strong familial bonds as being somehow impenetrable. As trauma survivors, we often know that this is far from true.
Conclusion
And this concludes my piece on the generational and familial traumas within each of these stories. I hope you enjoyed my take, and that you’ll stick around for more of my writing. If you’re interested in reading some more thoughts on film, click here or check out the Home category at the top left for more options!
