Broken Aesop / Animated Films

• The Adventures of the American Rabbit: The Big Bad's henchmen are a biker gang called The Jackals, who are... jackals. Several times during the movie, characters mention that no one should assume all jackals are evil just because of the actions of a few bad apples. All well and good, except that there are no good jackals in the movie — the only ones seen are the ones in the biker gang, who are working for the main villain.
• Arthur and the Invisibles: Malthazard's heinousness comes from him trying to steal Selenia's Sacred First Kiss and marry her along with it, as she has consented to neither. That doesn't stop her from forcibly kissing Arthur to make sure Malthazard can't have her powers without explaining the ramifications of this decision to him or asking if he consented to be married to her. Making matters worse, Arthur's only ten years old and therefore would not be able to consent to marriage in most countries.
• Back to the Outback: The main moral of the story is that you shouldn't unfairly judge others for being ugly and that ugliness is not inherently indicative of being bad (and that beauty isn't inherently indicative of "goodness" either). However, the message falls a little short when you consider that all of the main characters, the ones who are supposed to be "ugly," are really not that ugly. In fact, they look no less adorable than Pretty Boy the koala. Despite their real-world counterparts looking anything but.
• Barbie as the Island Princess: The main message is that you should marry for love, not wealth or status. At the end of the movie the King and Queen finally accept that their son loves Ro, and give their blessing to the marriage despite Ro not being a princess. Seconds later it's revealed that Ro is the lost princess of another kingdom, who everyone presumed had drowned in a storm as a child. So the movie cancels out its own moral in the space of two minutes.
• Beauty and the Beast's moral "Don't be deceived by appearances, for beauty is found within" is undermined by Monsieur D'Arque, the asylum master. The film's Love Interest and Big Bad—the Beast and Gaston, respectively—effectively deconstruct tropes commonly associated with their respective antithesis; the Beast looks Obviously Evil while Gaston looks like a Prince Charming, but their personalities sharply contrast with their appearances, especially after Beast is inspired to change his ways by Belle's kindness towards him. However, Monsieur D'Arque takes the Obviously Evil trope and plays it completely straight, as he looks like a walking corpse, has red eyes, and loves Gaston's manipulative plot to have Maurice thrown in the asylum unless Belle agrees to marry him, precisely because of how despicable it is.
• BIONICLE:
  • Bionicle: The Legend Reborn is about the power of unity, honor and purpose to defeat the invading Skrall and Bone Hunter army, Mata Nui even spells this out during the final battle. Yet, the main reason the villains are so tough is because they're former rivals who put aside their differences and united, meaning unity is not the virtue of just the heroes. They also do fight for a purpose, as they have even stronger forces tormenting them, though this is only mentioned in the novelization. The good guys aren't all honorable either, using illusions and exploiting weaknesses. The Skrall leader Tuma is declared a cheater for knocking Mata Nui down when he wasn't ready, but Mata Nui is cheered when he does the same, smashing Tuma's already wounded back as he's distracted. As the villains are about to finish off the heroes, Mata Nui intervenes and uses the special powers he's given to his friends to blast away the Skrall and Bone Hunter army. The importance of unity does somewhat hold true, but the movie doesn't actually show this as after an army of good guys show up marching into battle, they disappear from the rest of the scene and Mata Nui's team are left to fight alone. So in the end the good guys win because they're sneaky and they happen to have god-level magic, not so much because of unity, purpose and honor.
  • Bionicle 3: Web of Shadows ends with the message that destiny isn't written in stone and we have to choose our own path. Yet the franchise was founded on the exact opposite message. Vakama loses his way and joins the villains for selfish reasons, rejecting his duty and foretold destiny of being the savior of his people. Him accepting his fate is what leads him back to the path of good. Thus the message is more that destiny is written in stone but the way there isn't, and straying from the path is bad. The film offers other, better presented aesops: trusting a good leader out of choice is better than following a tyrant out of fear, selflessly pursuing the greater good is better than subjugating others to your own desire, taming and taking advantage of your primal urges is better than letting them control you, and disagreeing with your leaders is okay as long as you keep working toward a common goal instead of being petty. It's just the final message that's out of tune with the rest of the film.
• The Book of Life subverts it — the kids decide to free the animals about to be butchered. Then it looks like Manolo will use his bullfighting skills with the big nasty hog... but he does not, because the truth is that Manolo does NOT want to be a bullfighter.
• Care Bears: Share Bear Shines opens with Oopsy needing to be rescued because he went to a dangerous place all alone. The other bears, including Share, admonish him for this, but not too long after that, Share goes off on her own, without telling anyone, to help a baby star get to Glitter City, where she's never been before and only has a vague idea of how to get there. The fact that she did exactly what she told Oopsy not to do is never brought up, not even when the others find her.
• The Drawn Together Movie: The Movie has a moral that defeats its own purpose. Near the end of the movie, the protagonists decide that they don't want a point and that "offensive" humor shouldn't need moral justification. The problem is that this kind of humor only works if it's worked into a moral so there is something to mock, or if it's portrayed with good jest. Yet virtually every joke is made as offensively grotesque as possible, and is either drawn out, mean-spirited, or both. The movie does everything possible, including necrophilia, to prove why we would not want to see creators make "offensive" comedy for no reason. In addition to this, the moral is a paradox in its own existence, since it's doing the very thing it's preaching against. Sure, there might be some justification for an message about why heavy-handed morals are bad, and it's likely supposed to be ironic, but it sure doesn't do a good job indicating so. On top of this, the movie constantly rips on South Park for supposedly being nothing but crude humor with lazily tacked-on morals added to justify it; Shallow Parody aside, that would pretty accurately describe this very movie's own situation.
• Delgo is an anti-war story. Two civilizations learn that they shouldn't fight each other... and then they team up to fight the armies of trolls, goblins and other monsters. Moreover, the fact that the monsters are Always Chaotic Evil severely undermines the anti-bigotry message.
• The Emoji Movie has enough Aesop breakage to get its own page.
• FernGully has an environmental aesop. Too bad, then, that the bad guys polluting and destroying the rainforest are stopped by the fairies living in it. So the aesop becomes less "help the rainforest, it can't help itself" and more "don't worry about it, the fairies can take care of themselves". Another issue with the fairies is that they're in the movie just to add an element of human interest to the story. The first problem with this is that it's implying that actual rainforests, where such creatures do not exist, aren't worth the attention of conservation. What's worse, though, is that the fairies live in a society based upon human ideals, which doesn't gel with the film's intended aesop that Humans Are Cthulhu. Oh, and they made the villainous force of pollution so damn cool (and voiced by Tim Curry) that it’s more likely that you’ll end up rooting for him to win instead of the fairies.
• Hotel Transylvania 2: The driving tension is that Dracula wants his Half-Human Hybrid grandson, Dennis, to be a vampire instead of a human. He spends the whole movie trying to bring out his vampiric side, including a Die or Fly situation, is forced to defend the mixed-species family to his Fantastic Racist father, and is just about to accept Dennis for how he truly is...when Dennis turns out to be a vampire anyway.
• How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World: The Viking chief Hiccup and his dragon Toothless ultimately decide that dragons and Vikings should be separate for their safety, and the dragons can return when humans "deserve" them. This is meant to be a hard choice for the greater good demonstrating love. But the movie never really explains exactly why this choice needs to be made. There are antagonistic figures like Grimmel and the warlords, but they are defeated, and aside from them, it's not shown what the world at large thinks about dragons. This gets even worse in the follow-up Christmas Episode How to Train Your Dragon: Homecoming, which shows the next generation of Vikings have grown fearful and superstitious of dragons, specifically because of their absence. Hiccup tries to make a pageant to convince them otherwise, but this ends up a near-disaster, and in the end, it only succeeds because Toothless returned. So the separation between Vikings and dragons is shown to be the wrong choice, which has deepened the divide, and only the dragons' return fixed that divide.
• Golden Films' The Hunchback of Notre Dame is supposed to teach that True Beauty Is on the Inside, but Quasimodo becomes handsome, so the moral is that looks don't matter if you're handsome. Not helping by the fact that Quasimodo doesn't even look grotesque in the first place, as to paraphrase Phelous: "He looked ready to join a boy band."
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Jetlag Animation): The ending and the last song intend to teach about how love can be liberating, but the film fails to convey this message. The rest of the film was about how love can be destructive, and Quasimodo was not truly lacking anything before being paired with Esmeralda.
• The Incredibles spoofs this in bonus features on the DVD. One feature has one of the superheroes who was a Friend to All Children and worked regularly to keep them safe and educated give a speech about how important it is to stay in school, since the superhero in question dropped out. However, he quickly realizes he is mangling the aesop with him saying things like "stay in school, or you'll end up like me," since he is famous and well-beloved and has superpowers. He does not quite know how to proceed once he figures out that this is not sending the correct message.
• The Aesop of Inside Out is not to stuff your feelings... only, it's heavily implied that the emotion creatures are what makes Riley feel the feelings (e.g. Fear pushes a button, and that makes Riley afraid). So Sadness not doing her job should logically not be equivalent to Riley not letting herself be sad, but rather Riley not being able to be sad.
• The Little Panda Fighter: The movie tries to teach the viewers the "be yourself" aesop, but since Polaris (who was pretending to be Pancada in the boxing ring) gets away with his treachery, the message is ultimately twisted into "you can be something you're not".
• The Lorax (2012) has a message about saving the planet. Despite this, Ted spins donuts in his motor scooter, which is spewing out smoke, instead of just stopping and waiting for his love interest.
• Mars Needs Moms has the message that people are meant to be raised by a mother and a father. But Milo's mother is the only parent shown raising him for almost the entire movie. His father seems to show up at the beginning and end only to drive the moral home and dispel the notion that Milo is raised by a single parent.
• The "Christmas: Impossible" short in Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas tries to have a "Scrooge's selfishness was bad" message. However, the only drawback of Scrooge's greed was that he didn't get a bagpipe from Santa — in other words, he regrets his greed because it made him miss out on a material reward. The Aesop breakage gets worse when he gets the bagpipe anyway in the end.
• Most media aimed at children contains the Aesop of "be yourself" or "follow your dreams". Moana sets-up the Aesop that accepting your responsibilities and working to help others is more important. During the "Where We Are" song at the beginning of the movie, Moana keeps trying to run away from her responsibilities and sail the ocean instead, but then she accepts that she needs to lead her people and become the best chief she can be, and gives up her selfish desire to simply sail away. The movie then completely undermines this lesson by setting up a situation where she can only help her people by sailing away on the ocean. Yes, she's doing it to help her people, but it's presented in a way that makes it look like the more traditional Aesop, "follow your dreams," is the one that's meant to be learned.
• Monsters University:
  • Mike gets slapped with the Hard Truth Aesop that some dreams are unattainable, physical limitations can't be ignored, and you'll be better off if you accept it. Fair enough, except for the fact that half the cast is made up of cuddly, awkward monsters — arguably more cuddly than Mike — who play their strengths and utilize creativity to become successful scarers. It seems the only reason we're expected to believe that Mike is not scarer material and never will be is because he's Doomed by Canon.
  • Sulley's laziness in using the same roar every time is portrayed as a weakness he has to overcome in order to truly be a good scarer, yet both of the critical moments that depend on his scariness have him using that same roar. Granted, he does learn that it also takes the building of atmosphere to build up an effective Scare.
• The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature seems to want to have the moral that park animals should live in natural surroundings where they can be wild, rather than be semi-domesticated through human interaction. But it keeps undercutting this for the sake of a gag — Andie's lectures on the subject look particularly hollow when it turns out that while everyone else was at the Nut Store, her foraging had produced a cache of four rather sad-looking nuts, and the last line is Andie not only giving Surly permission to steal a bag of nuts from the Nut Cart but adding "Two bags, because I am not sharing." It was probably meant to be a one-off Not So Above It All moment, but as the end of the film, it feels more like "You know that stuff I was saying all the way through this? Forget it."
• Peace on Earth makes a good point in showing just how destructive and idiotic war really is, the animals discover in the ruins of a church a copy of the Bible, build their own society and come to the conclusion that the humans failed to heed the books teachings, while the message of peace, co-operation and non-violence is well intentioned, the problem is that religion itself has caused many wars throughout history. One cannot help considering, since the animals did not know what caused the war that drove humanity to extinction, whether it could have been religion.
• Penguins of Madagascar has a "looks don't matter" Aesop that is a bit broken in many ways:
  • First, the mutated Private isn't nearly as unattractive as all the other mutant penguins - he still looks mostly like his adorable self, despite having allegedly taken on all of the other penguins' disfigurements.
  • In The Stinger, the penguins go through the trouble of changing him back to normal, at his request.
  • The sheer fact Dave's plan counted on the humans trying to kill the penguins simply because they were hideous and scary looking (but still affectionate). Since nearly every human there calls for the exterminators in droves, the climax revolved around the penguins having to change back to being cute.
• In Planes, Dusty Crophopper dreams of competing against his heroes in a race around the world. Unfortunately, being a crop duster, he's not built for speed and must compensate with his considerable skill, setting up a lesson about how hard work and talent aren't as important as dedicated practice and perseverance. And then the rest of the cast donates new, superior parts to him so he can compete in the finale, to the point that by the time he's upgraded and ready to fly, he's not actually a crop duster anymore. Guess you can't be a winner unless you're built to win after all.
• Pocahontas: The film tries, especially in moments like the "Savages" sequence, to show that both sides are guilty of prejudice, and that we all need to put our judgements aside and learn to live together. The problem is that the Powhatans' suspicions of Ratcliffe's landing party are shown to be 100% justified - they are invaders and they have come with the express purpose of stealing the Powhatans' land and plundering its resources.
• Raya and the Last Dragon enjoys hammering in the idea that trust is important, and that Raya must learn how to freely give it rather than be skeptical of others. Except the film's post-apocalypse setting is a result of Raya being too trusting of Namaari during her youth, who subsequently took advantage of it to try and steal the dragon gem, with the aftermath leaving all of Raya's people turned to stone and the Drunn running rampant across the land. And this is the person that the narrative wants Raya to blindly trust the most, when Namaari never openly shows any remorse or regret about the damage her actions caused. This is made worse when Raya is finally convinced by Sisu to try trusting her once more, only to get betrayed again, with the movie framing the result of this second betrayal as somehow being Raya's fault for not fully committing to believing in someone who has done nothing but antagonize her over the past six years.
• Rocko's Modern Life: Static Cling hinges on Rocko and Ed Bighead learning to accept changes in the status quo. One plot point is the Chameleon Brothers reviving the Fatheads as an All-CGI Cartoon. Rocko, however, believes Only the Creator Does It Right, and sets off to find Ralph Bighead (now Rachel Bighead). For this instance, Rocko's stance against change is justified, and the 3D take on The Fatheads is rejected in favor of Rachel's more traditional take, which becomes much more successful.
• Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken: A core conflict for the Gillmans a whole is them having to hide who they are to the much fearing humans of Oceanside which gets resolved with the humans embracing them and the driving antagonistic force in this conflict, Gordon, realizing the error of his ways and even apologizing on camera for his words and actions regarding Krakens whom the film paints as misjudged by humanity at the beginning of the film. While this pushes for a message about embracing people who are different and not judging them immediately on a surface-level, it falls apart because it's proven Ruby herself should've judged Chelsea simply for being a mermaid even after she had saved her life. Had Ruby judged Chelsea not for her own actions and blindly believed her family that mermaids are all evil with no nuance whatsoever, she and her loved ones wouldn't have been placed in any danger near the end of the film.
• Rumble: This film’s has the Aesop that you should Be Yourself and that in life you do not have to follow in the footsteps of other people. However, the film’s poor execution of these morals results in multiple issues.
  • First off regarding Rayburn “Steve” Jr, he is the character who learns the aforementioned lesson as he is taught that he should be his own person and that he does not have to rely on his father to and follow in his footsteps to be successful. Unfortunately, the film shows that Steve was forced to be in the monster wrestling league like his father because Winnie interfered with a match he was supposed to throw, placing him in severe debt with his boss and giving him no choice but to be in the league to pay the debt off. Winnie also bosses Steve around while coaching him as she expects him to become a champion wrestler like his father in order to preserve Stoker’s stadium. Even worse is that the townspeople of Stoker mock and ridicule Steve for his love of salsa dancing only to grow to suddenly like him when Steve reveals who his father is.
  • Secondly in regards to Tentacular, distancing himself from Rayburn is exactly what he tries to do in the film by moving to Slitherpoole but the townsfolk of Stoker consider this a betrayal and expected him to be their next biggest representation of Stoker like Rayburn Senior. Tentacular’s motivation to then try to have the stadium torn down is so people would stop comparing him to Rayburn Senior but the film paints him as selfish and envious of Rayburn Senior for this even though the film does not show any scenes of them interacting together in flashbacks. This makes the film imply that people are only allowed to not follow in the footsteps of others only if they are related.
  • For all of the monsters in the film, the only career they all seem to be allowed to partake in is wrestling, meaning that they will all be connected and associated with Rayburn senior in some way no matter how distant they try to make themselves from him. Even though Steve is shown to desire to be a salsa dancer as a way to prove that he is his own person and not like his dad, he is shown to only be more comfortable with wrestling by incorporating dancing techniques into his wrestling moves. Even before that he is shown to still be wrestling in a subpar lounge, meaning that the job he is in is the same sport and is associated with the wrestling league in general. The only other professions the monsters seem to do is commercial advertising as shown with tentacular, and sports news advertising as one of the news anchors is an angler fish kind of monster. and there are no mentions of schools and education for monsters. Only the humans in the film are shown to have different jobs and careers. The lack of careers for monsters completely undercuts the morals of individuality.
  • The film also teaches that in order to succeed in life, you must put in hard work as hard work is what merits great reward. Unfortunately the way this is shown with Steve completely falls flat as he was first shown to be unethusiatic about training and when he gets punished by Winnie by being forced into a match with a strong monster, he ends up winning due to sheer luck. He only gets motivated to work hard by incorporating salsa dancing into his moves. While this does help him win more matches. He still gets mocked and harassed by Stoker’s townspeople for his love of salsa dancing and ultimately needed to remind them that he is Rayburn’s son in order to get people to respect him. This causes the moral to add extras onto itself and it ends up coming across as “in order to be successful in life, hard work is not enough to be successful as you also need lineage and the reputation of your family members”.
  • A moral about hero worship is also seen in the film, which argues that hero worship and idolizing celebrities is not a good idea because it can lead to the things being idolized not as great as previously proclaimed and resulting in the Broken Pedastal. This is exemplified with the town of Stoker turning their love of Tentacular into hate for him when he moves to Slitherpoole and their decision to refurbish their stadium in honor of Rayburn Sr and Jimbo Coyle backfiring when it lands them in debt. There are three problems with the moral though. The first is that the people who are supposed to learn this lesson don’t actually learn it as exemplified with the tattoo guy switching his tattoos from Tentacular to Steve. The second is that the film treats Rayburn Senior as a sacred god archetype and in one scene, sunlight reflects on a statue of Jimbo right after it was hurled onto a cliff. The third is that Steve is shown to have issues with his father and does not idolize him like the other people of stoker but the film does not explain why he has such a low opinion of Rayburn Senior even after his death other than a flashback showing Rayburn Senior ridiculing his son for dancing.
• The Sword in the Stone tries to have a "Knowledge is the real power." message delivered by Merlin to Wart both throughout the film and in the ending, but almost nothing in the film supports it because Wart is a Pinball Protagonist who has no control over anything that's going on around him, and his problems are almost always solved by Merlin's magic anyway despite Merlin saying magic can't solve all his problems (even if they do unwittingly tend to cause as many hardships as they solve, Merlin is doing the real work for Wart, even if he sincerely is trying to make a point to him) and he doesn't even get his happy ending by using anything he learned from Merlin—in fact, Wart ends up doing the exact opposite of what Merlin wanted by willingly accepting a degrading position as Kay's squire instead of focusing on an education. It was by sheer luck that he ends up going to London and turns out to be the one worthy of pulling out the sword, making him King of England right then and there.
• Tytus, Romek i A'tomek is all about how advertisement and commercialization are bad; however the movie is rife with product placement, to the point that the good characters use an actual KFC restaurant as their spaceship.
• Wish (2023) tries to push the Aesop of "You have to make your dreams come true on your own, though help is okay as needed", but it's badly muddied by Asha not doing anything to undercut Magnifico's rule until Star arrives in direct response to her wishing for a better life for her people (and it's never explained why she was seen as worthy of such help), and in the end he is stopped only when she and the townspeople wish en masse for him to be stopped.
• Wonder Park is an infamous example of this. The film's message is about not letting grief destroy the things you love. As the "Darkness" surrounding Wonderland is meant to represent the main character, June's, feelings over losing her mother. The Darkness is eventually defeated, but a small dark cloud still looms in the distance, which shows how the sadness related to grief can become smaller, but it never fully goes away. The problem with this message is that June's mother is still alive, returning home fully recovered at the end of the film. While a loved one experiencing a health scare can be frightening to a young child like June, her behavior throughout the movie (throwing away any reminder of Wonderland, lashing out at family members, constantly fretting over her dad's safety, etc.) would make much more sense if her mother had passed away. The mother being alive and well by the end makes the film's message about accepting loss and overcoming grief completely arbitrary.
• Wreck-It Ralph has a Fantastic Aesop that game-jumping is wrong, because it may cause people to think the machines are malfunctioning and unplug them, killing everyone inside. This is undermined when Ralph adopts the homeless Q*bert and his friends into his home game. While Q*bert has no game to jump from, jumping to Fix-it Felix Jr could still cause issues with the latter game and lead to its removal. And that's not even taking into account the risk to Q*Bert himself, as he won't respawn if he dies outside of his own game. Despite this, it's depicted as a positive thing, unlike all the other examples of game-jumping in the film.

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