Meet the Robinsons: Adoption Debate
The adoption community is in an uproar over the new Disney flick, "Meet the Robinsons." This morning, I was forwarded a press release from Vicki Peterson of Wide Horizons for Children, warning parents not to take their kids to this movie.
The advertising for this animated feature makes it sound like a great movie for any young child, but this is misleading. ...The movie is filled with extraordinarily inappropriate messages about adoption. The basic story is about an adorable baby whose birthmother leaves him on the doorstep of an orphanage. Portrayed as loving, sweet, extremely smart and overly appealing, he spends the next 12 years of his life wanting a family and being turned down by one family after another. In all, more than 100 couples refuse to adopt him. One scene shows a prospective dad losing interest in adoption because this very smart little boy is more interested in science than sports. The prospective parents leave the disappointed child in an angry huff when he accidentally splatters them with some food from his science project. This is supposed to be funny.
Since no one else wants him, the child invents a time machine in order to go back in time to find his birth mother. The "bad guy" in his time travel journey turns out to be his best buddy from childhood, once his orphanage roommate. Now an emotional wreck resulting from being left behind when the orphanage was closed and shut down, the once-cute orphan is now mean and devious. Another chuckle. Various monsters attack the child as continues his birth mother search. You get the picture!"
The funny thing is, I had just taken my kids (one who had been adopted, the other had not) to see the movie and came to a different conclusion entirely. What the letter writer leaves out from her description is how the story unfolds and what the larger message of the movie is.
The boy spends a while searching for his birth mom until he realizes that he needs to "move forward" and when he does, he finds parents who accept him for who he is. I had a wonderful conversation with my kids about how we all have sad, unfortunate experiences in our lives, and we can either choose to dwell on them (and make ourselves miserable), or we can move on and forward.
To my mind, the sugary sweet stories with the Barney-like morals (we're all friends, we're all winners, etc) do more disservice because kids are having thoughts like, "Wow, I don't think everyone's my friend, I must be a bad person." Stories that tap into the dark fantasies lurking around the unconsciousness, whether they're the Grimm's fairy tales or Meet the Robinsons, give kids an opportunity to work out these fears safely.
Interestingly, the director of this film is an adult adoptee. In an interview, he explained why this story "spoke" to him.
"As a child my parents were very open about the adoption. They told me very early on that I was adopted and said if I wanted to contact my parents that they would support me in that and they would be there with me to do that.... There was no doubt in my mind that when I hit 18 I was going to do that. Then one day I woke up and said…hey, I'm 24, I could have done that all these years ago. So why hadn't I? The realization was that that really didn't matter. The reason why I had lost track of that idea was that I was more concerned with my life right then and where I wanted to go with my career and I had a great loving family that I was adopted into. The past would not have changed any of that. And that's how the film's theme evolved, the ‘keep moving forward' idea. It came from thinking about my feelings and my experiences over the years. So that's how that came about."
Stumble It!
posted by pam at 9:59 AM
1 Comments:
Many adoptive parents objected to this movie. I haven't seen it yet.
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