Is the ‘Mars Needs Moms’ Movie Living Supremacist? What about Disney?
‘Mars Needs Moms’ was a beloved children’s book that was adapted into a spectacularly poorly received animated film, released earlier this year in March. You may not have heard of the movie, and odds are you certainly did not see it; no one at the ZRC has either, although our Cultural Historian Andrew Leal was well-aware of the movie in his other professional capacity and was able to provide extensive background on the movie for this post (thanks Andrew!)
I’ve actually read the original book by Berkeley Breathed and I have to say, ‘Who thought this would be a good idea for a children’s book?’. Essentially a guilt trip masked as a parable (which, to be fair, is a classic fairy tale trope), ‘Mars Needs Moms’ suggests the karmic punishment for typical and natural momentary lapses in appreciation of a child for their parent could be their gruesome death by asphyxiation on an alien world.
Really. Read it for yourself sometime.
The movie retained at least some of that premise but ditched the art style for Robert Zemeckis’ creepier-than-it-was-meant-to-be motion capture animation. What can I say, it worked in ‘Beowulf’. (My favorite of his motion-capture films, ‘Monster House’, used a more traditional ‘cartoonish’ look.) The combination of creepy plastic people and a story about parent abduction apparently turned people off, and the movie, which cost 150 million dollars to make, eventually lost $111 million or so.
This has been a rather large amount of backstory without Zombies, hasn’t it? Well, ok. Here’s the relevance for the ZRC: a certain someone amongst our legion of Twitter followers actually *had* seen this film, and informed us that it contained some rather severely Anti-Zombie dialogue, and that further, a clip of this was available on Youtube. In effect, Disney was showcasing hate speech in a childrens’ movie… hate speech against the Differently Animated.
I was shocked; Disney was doing this? The same Disney that released ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’, a movie populated by friendly and sympathetic Undead characters?
Well, yes. Yes they did:
‘Mom, nobody LIKES Zombies, they’re an abomination. I’m committed to their annihilation!’
Yes, this is an actual line from an actual film marketed at children. Mercifully few saw it, but still, this is plainly an outrage. I’m beginning to wonder if Disney has decided to embrace an openly Anti-Zombie position. It would add new intrigue to their decision to acquire prominent Anti-Zombie comic book publisher Marvel, now wouldn’t it?
There’s something I’ll have to look into..
In the meantime based on our reader report and this first hand evidence the ZRC can award ‘Mars Needs Moms’ a provisional Living Supremacist rating for glorifying the desire to destroy an entire population based merely on its Vitality status.
Genocidal hate has no place in a children’s film. For shame.
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