Misaimed Fandom / Animated Films

• A Goofy Movie and its sequel An Extremely Goofy Movie have a number of fans who criticize the more sympathetic fat character, PJ, misrepresent him, dismiss him, or, at best, define him as "the fat guy" on the grounds of his weight. In the second movie, he explicitly states this is a cultural problem—YouTube comments for that very scene show this pattern. There are also a number of people who have missed the fact that PJ's general lack of confidence is because of child abuse— even though the movies (especially the first one) are not very subtle about it—claiming him to be yet another member of an annoying cliche of "fat guy with no confidence." He was designed to be a diametric opposite to his father Pete, an older fat character who's a Jerkass.
• The death of Tadashi Hamada in Big Hero 6 has received a ship-load of indignation from fans who would rather see him turn up alive in a future installment instead of embracing the film’s themes of dealing with loss and grief.
• Brave:
  • Fangirls still glorify and adore the super rebellious, feisty, self-centered pre-Character Development Merida of the start. You know, the one that the movie forces to grow up through hardships and learning instead of giving into her whims and portraying her as Flawless Head Bitch In Charge?
  • The flipside is that Elinor pre-transformation gets praised for being an awesome mother cursed with a Bratty Teenage Daughter. While a pretty good queen, Elinor has to learn to stop treating her daughter like a student and actually listen to her.
• In Pixar's Cars, the Delinquent Road Hazards, who were responsible for Lightning falling out of his transport truck, were meant to be a gang of dislikable street punks, to the point that the animators modeled them after tastelessly modified "ricer" cars. Strangely enough, the fandom completely fell in love with them, making enough fan art and fanfiction centering on them to impress even the most hardened Internet warrior.
• Cinderella has a misaimed hatedom. On top of the whole misconception that this was adapted from the Grimms brothers version and not the Charles Perrault version, many criticise Cinderella as being a weak willed character who waits for her prince to rescue her simply because she has to be rescued like a "Damsel in distress". Except it's established that the reason this happens is because, in the words of Walt Disney himself, "She went over and got him". This itself brings up all sorts of undesirable messages that apparently, Real Women Never Wear Dresses and you have to be physically powerful to be strong, traits that are traditionally associated with toxic masculinity.
• Finding Nemo: Despite spending two hours exposing how awful wild fish feel over being taken from their natural environment and put into a fish tank in a home, little children don't get the message and want their own pet clownfish as a result of this movie.
• Frozen (2013):
  • Elsa's song "Let It Go" is held up as a huge empowerment anthem as she casts off her old life and embraces her powers. That's not entirely wrong, but it's also not entirely right, either. It simplifies the meaning and overlooks the more complex context in which the song's sung (it did begin as a Villain Song after all). Elsa is remembering how to take joy in her powers instead of repressing them, but also trying to solve her problems by running away from them and shutting herself off from the world. The result is that she accidentally freezes the kingdom without realizing it, leaving her sister to fix things. It's not until the end that she learns how to deal with her magic in a healthy way. It's also gotten a misaimed backlash by people who realize that Elsa's decision is problematic but don't realize that the movie wants us to realize that as much as it wants us to sympathize with her and that Elsa learns a better way of dealing with her problems in the end.
  • "Love is an Open Door" manages both to have a similar problem and its opposite. Like "Let It Go," it's a complex moment showing an isolated and traumatized young woman making a flawed but sympathetic decision that's neither entirely right nor entirely wrong, but people tend to focus on one part.
    • The song is entirely one-sided, since Hans was faking from the start. However, there are a lot of people who use it unironically, usually by pairing it up with videos of their favorite couples.
    • There are also a lot of people who both praise and criticize it as being a mean-spirited attempt to parody earlier Disney movies and heroines, and the ones who criticize it point out that it seems Victim-Blaming and hypocritical of the writers in context of how most Disney movies actually go. The writers actually expected audiences to realize that most Disney movies don't have their romances progress that quickly. The movie also shows Anna not as a shallow parody, but as a three-dimensional and dynamic character finally making a connection after years of isolation but also rushing into a relationship and marriage due to her lonely upbringing and childhood of rejection. Throughout the film (and franchise), she gains a better understanding of what a healthy relationship looks like. She gets it wrong here, but gets it right later on.
  • Elsa and Anna's closeness resulted in the sisters being oft subjected to Incest Yay Shipping. This is despite one of the points of their relationship being to show there were other kinds of love than romantic and such platonic/familial love was just as important and powerful.
  • Frozen got a lot of praise and criticism in general for "mocking" previous Disney movies and heroines. While the film does deconstruct many tropes, it's not meant to mock other fairy tales. Co-director Chris Buck explained they simply wanted to "tell a classic Disney story" with well-rounded characters who were relatable and imperfect:
    Co-director Chris Buck: What Jen and I wanted to do with Frozen was tell a classic Disney story only with characters that weren’t up pedestals. I mean, if you really look at Anna and Elsa, they’re contemporary characters with flaws. These two sisters are just like the rest of us. So it’s this mix of Disney classic and the contemporary that I think audiences have really been responding to.
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame:
  • Judge Claude Frollo was often thought of as cool despite having much less reason to be thought of as such (and much more NOT to) than other Disney villains. Instead of being a muscular macho-man like Gaston or a sorcerer like Jafar, he is a genocidal self-righteous old religious fanatic with a sexual obsession with the woman he hates; an intent to subvert Evil Is Cool is somewhat apparent here, yet it apparently did not work either. Must've been the song. Or maybe it was because he was voiced by Tony Jay, the same voice actor who, in TaleSpin, turned Shere Khan from the Laughably Evil villain of The Jungle Book (1967) into a respectable and suave businessman.
  • Many fans shit on Esmeralda for choosing Phoebus over Quasimodo and try to justify themselves in how one of the aesops of the movie is that "looks don't matter", meaning that Esmeralda is being shallow for choosing the handsome Phoebus over the gonk Quasimodo. They conveniently don't mention how Phoebus got Esmeralda's attention not for being handsome, but for not falling in the Madonna-Whore Complex trap that Quasimodo and Frollo fell in: he likes Esmeralda for the person she is, without idealizing her to unrealistic levels (like Quasi) or thinking of her as a whore (like Frollo). They also conveniently forget that she truly falls for him only after seeing that his personality matched his good looks; namely after seeing him sacrifice his profitable career to save a family of people he didn't even know, just because it was the right thing to do. Plus, Esmeralda's significance to Quasimodo is supposed to be the fact that she is really the first person to treat him like a regular person, not a love interest.
• The Incredibles: A surprising number of fans think Syndrome was right in accusing Mr. Incredible of being biased against non-supers, even though his plan to supposedly elevate non-supers entails deliberately endangering the masses as he plays hero, to say nothing about the fact that Syndrome murdered dozens of other supers beforehand and gleefully shot down a plane with children aboard, all of which he did entirely out of spite.
• Kung Fu Panda: A good number of fans think of Tai Lung as a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, forgetting the little bit of his murderous temper tantrum when refused the Dragon Scroll in the first place.
• A lot of fans love how catchy the "Everything is Awesome" song from The LEGO Movie is, despite the scene making it obvious it's about mindless conformity under the rule of the villainous President Business. Emmet starts listening to it after seeing an ad, and goes on to follow everything other ads suggest (buy overpriced coffee, watch crappy TV, obey the construction instructions, and so on). It helps that the visuals of the entire Lego city are very impressive.
• Mulan:
  • Despite how the movie teaches viewers how wrong sexism is, among other stuff, a good number of Mulan's fans use the character to bash the other Disney Princesses for being "too girly" or not "strong enough". These fans often portray Mulan as some ultimate tomboy that hates all things girly (yeah, right) and looks down on the other princesses. Apparently, a female character can only be strong if she's an Action Girl, and who cares if she's mentally strong, kind, or has a positive outlook on life? Mulan herself would probably be disgusted if she knew how her fans bash the other Disney Princesses.
  • Other fans are repulsed at the fact that Mulan is shown in a dress for the Disney Princess merchandise - claiming she hated being dolled up. This isn't true; Mulan is shown liking the makeover she gets, before meeting the Matchmaker and starting to lock up. Her problem is not being sure she can live up to everyone's expectations.
  • And other fans interpret Mulan as a female-to-male transgender person, which often comes from Westerners trying to shoehorn modern gender roles and values in the story itself. More than one Chinese or Chinese-American fan has reacted rather angrily at this, seeing it as a misogynistic insult towards Chinese women.
    Chinese-American Tumblr user: "Fa Mulan is our heroine. She is my heroine, my inspiration throughout the years I was mistreated by my sexist paternal side of the family for being born a girl. The ‘proof’ that son preference was bullshit and I was worth something. (...) There have always been female fighters, female warriors in Chinese folklore and fiction. YOU DO NOT GET TO ERASE THEM. ESPECIALLY SINCE YOU AREN’T EVEN CHINESE. Do you not see how racist that is of you?"
  • Fans tend to paint Shang as a jerk for not instantly believing Mulan when the latter finds Shang and the army in the city to tell that the Huns are still alive and coming for the Emperor. While yes, this was a mistake on Shang's part, fans are forgetting the fact that Mulan (albeit with good intentions) deceived him and the other male soldiers about her gender since the day they met. This does make a good argument on why Shang was right to be mistrustful of Mulan, after the latter was exposed as a woman.
• The Princess and the Frog: A number of fans feel like Dr. Facilier and Lawrence should have gotten away with their "trick Lottie into marrying Lawrence in disguise then kill Big Daddy for his money" scheme completely from beginning to end. While Facilier and Lawrence do have sympathetic motivations and understandable reasons to feel bitter about their lot, these fans miss the fact that it is NOT okay to use magic to lie, cheat, steal, and murder one's way into money by destroying the lives of others—especially since Facilier on his part planned to steal the souls of every person in New Orleans (rich and poor; white and black) to his Friends On the Other Side to make the deal. These fans also forget that Facilier's and Lawrence's poor lot are at least partially their own fault. Yes, Facilier does have it hard being a poor black man living in the Jim Crow Era South. However, constantly screwing over his customers earned him such a bad reputation that everyone stays away from him, ruining his own chances of expanding his customer base. While Naveen is an insufferable and inconsiderate employer, most of Lawrence's problems stem from Lawrence being too much of an Extreme Doormat. The film makes it clear that while they both want money, power, and respect, what Facilier needed was to help other people so they'd want to help him in return, and Lawrence needed to learn to stand up for himself; not use magic to get money the easy way.
• Some kids who watch Teen Titans Go! To the Movies view the "Happy, Inspirational Song About Life" as being a genuinely uplifting example of a positive song, even though it is a parody of overly cheery songs, with most of lyrics being lines referencing just how happy it is.
• Turning Red: A few fans take the aesop of the movie as "rebel and be completely disobedient to your parents". The movie does say that kids won't ever be their true selves if they're constantly being a slave to their parents' viewpoints of them, but takes a negative stance on total rebellion. Mei makes some of her worst mistakes when she completely disregards her mother's advice out of hand and starts Calling the Old Man Out for any reason at all. Mei only gets back on the right track when she gets through her Character Development and pieces together that she should be Calling the Old Man Out when her mom is objecting to Mei doing ultimately harmless things, not for everything. In short, Mei's mom may be acting like a Jerkass at times, but that doesn't mean she's wrong about everything. The lesson is that kids need to learn what to call their parents out for, not just that their parents are always wrong.
  • There’s also many who view Mei’s red panda transformation as a metaphor for a girl’s first period or transition into womanhood. While the film did poke fun at the idea, it was never brought up again. The idea of the panda was meant to be Mei’s eccentric part of herself that she feels ashamed of because of her upbringing.
• WALL•E: While no one disagrees that AUTO is a villain, they frequently seem to see a lot more to his (lack of) personality then there actually is. Then again, this may just be because Evil Is Cool and as noted, no-one thinks he's a good guy. Technically, NONE of the robots ever do anything they're not supposed to do, not even AUTO. It's just that AUTO's orders come from a dead man centuries ago based on centuries-out-of-date information, but nonetheless the dead man outranks the captain.

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