Channel Frederator Blog

Mother’s Day is tomorrow, Sunday, May 11th here in the United States. I thought I’d do a post that shows off two examples of great animated Moms.

In “Dumbo”, Mrs. Jumbo (we never see Mr Jumbo) gets put into solitary confinement for defending her son at the circus (and destroying the circus tent in the process). Dumbo is sad because of his mother’s situation, so Timothy the Mouse takes him to see her. It’s a very powerful sequence, even without the music, but the soundtrack really drives home the mood of the piece.

That’s not the best Mom in animation though. That accolade would have to go to Elastic Girl/Mrs Incredible/Helen Parr from “The Incredibles”. Have a look at this sequence:

The set up of Helen Parr going from normal Mom stuff (like talking with Dash and Violet, and then dealing with the baby sitter on phone) to crisis management is very well done. When she pleads with Violet to help them out, trying to reassure and demand action at the same time, you get a real sense of her motherhood. Perhaps the most powerful thing she does in this sequence is also the fastest. When she leaps from the cockpit to shield her children from the blast, man! What a thing to show on screen! You hear stories in the news all the time of a mother protecting her children at all costs, throwing themselves into certain injury or peril so that their children will be saved. To see it happen, and build up over the sequence, intercut with Bob Parr’s reactions to hearing all of this happening is intense. After the explosion, Helen wakes up a few short seconds later, but you’ve got that initial “Oh my God, is she dead?” feeling when you see it for the first time. Her line “Brace yourselves!” isn’t a funny line in and of itself, but it gets a laugh. I think that’s because the audience is relieved that she’s OK. This is, in my opinion, one of the most powerful sequences in feature animation, and one of the strongest animated films.

Anyway, I Happy Mothers Day to all the moms reading the blog, and to all those kids out there, do something nice for your mom tomorrow. Now you can’t say you forgot!

-Floyd Bishop