This month, over Father’s Day weekend, Disney releases Toy Story 3, the much-anticipated third installment in the groundbreaking Pixar series that made childhood icons of Woody the cowboy and Buzz Lightyear. Early buzz on the threequel suggests it is good if not brilliant, and I’m moderately enthused about seeing it; I might even wind up taking my family to see it on opening weekend. There is, though, something ironic about marking Father’s Day with an installment in an animated series revolving around a household headed by a single mother, with a boy named Andy (and his kid sister) growing up fatherless.
Pixar has given us two of the most sympathetic and well-developed father figures in recent family-film history: the widowed Marlin in Finding Nemo and the family-man Mr. Incredible in The Incredibles. In Ratatouille, on the other hand, the human protagonist and his father never knew one another, while the rat protagonist’s father is one of the movies’ most familiar paternal stereotypes, the old-school, reactionary authoritarian who regards his progeny’s unique aspirations with dismissive incomprehension (though, like many such fathers, he is redeemed by a third-act breakthrough).
Last year’s Pixar release, Up, featured an elderly widower, Carl Fredrickson, who becomes a surrogate father figure (or grandfather figure) to a young boy named Russell, who lives with his single mother and is initially in some denial about the neglect and unreliability of his absentee father, who is with another woman. Russell’s fond memories of trivial moments spent with his father, and his wishful anticipation of his father being there for him at special events when deep down he knows he won’t, is one of the most melancholy evocations of the absent father in any family film since E.T.
