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Fridge / Thumbelina (1994)

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Fridge Brilliance:

  • It was a good idea for the magical woman to give Mother a fairy daughter, rather than a human one. With the fairy's growing up so fast, Mother was able to raise Thumbelina, watch her get married, and presumably give her tiny grandchildren. Had Thumbelina been a human living a normal life span, Mother would probably have died of old age before her child was fully grown.
    • That might have less to do with her being a fairy and more to do with her being born from a flower...
    • Continuing that idea; tiny semi-adult? Inconvient, but still easy to take care of. Tiny baby? Accident waiting to happen.
  • The reason Thumbelina holds the Idiot Ball so tightly throughout the movie? She was LITERALLY born yesterday.
    • Or at least she was born so recently that her real-world experience is relatively limited; it may have taken a while for every animal on the farm to get that attached to her.
  • Initially, the 'story' about the sun that Thumbelina tells to Mr. Mole sounds like it merely projects her childlike belief that Winter has wiped out the world as she knew it. But looking back, it's also a song meant to mourn for Cornelius, and how he was claimed by the cold trying to find her ("Winter has killed everything, even the sun".)
  • The climax during the wedding becomes Fridge-Awesome when one realizes it ties in with how she wished she was big. But once she decides what her heart wants, this is the moment where she puts her foot down and stands up to everybody, even though they are all bigger and/or taller than her.
  • In the opening scene, Jacquimo cites "Samson and Delilah" and Romeo and Juliet as great, inspiring love stories. Anyone actually familiar with those stories should be screaming, right? Well, later Ms. Fieldmouse also mentions Romeo and Juliet, specifically calling out the tragic ending. So it's clear that the writers knew the stories but were deliberately using the dissonance to paint Jacquimo as a ditzy romantic.
    • Strictly speaking, Romeo and Juliet's actions did accomplish an impossible task, in that their tragic deaths convinced their families to stop quarreling with each other. And the fact that they died in the first place was not a direct result of their secret love — it was really a simple miscommunication that caused it.
  • How often is it pointed out that Jacquimo could've flown Thumbelina home the entire time? Well, that could actually be part of the movie's overall theme — that it's important to balance idealism with practicality. You shouldn't let romanticism and blind faith prevent you from doing things yourself or pursuing an obvious solution to your problems. But at the same time, practicality and cynicism are not the same thing. Even at your most pragmatic, there's nothing saying you can't still have hope in dire times.
  • Thumbelina is far away from her loving mother, Jacquimo (the first stranger who has ever helped her of his own volition) is believed dead and has just found out Cornelius was frozen to death. But she ultimately makes up her mind to marry the Mole so after Jacquimo recovers from his injuries. Why? Because he starts singing a reprise of "When You Follow Your Heart", you know, the song that encourages Thumbelina to listen to her heart. She screams at him to stop and tries to tell him to accept the fact Cornelius is dead but, of course, Jacquimo is too wrapped up in his own romantic dreams to listen to her. Nobody has been listening to her this whole time...so she figures she better accept the advice to someone who is actually focused on Thumbelina's own survival (although she doesn't realize that Mrs. Fieldmouse has her own selfish reasons to see Thumbelina marry the Mole).
  • Say what you will about "Marry the Mole" (it actually led to the film winning a Razzie for Worst Original Song) but if you pay attention to the song...it's actually a biting and sarcastic Villain Song directed at Thumbelina's desires to be find a Happily Ever After with Cornelius. Mrs. Fieldmouse has a point though; if it means surviving the winter, then an Arranged Marriage might be the best thing for someone in Thumbelina's position.

Fridge Horror

  • The fairy brings the old woman a flower bulb that contains Thumbelina. The fairies apparently come from flowers as well. Thumbelina gains wings at the end of the story just like the other faries. That means that Thumbelina could've been a fairy all along, and the fairy woman knowingly kidnapped her from her people.
  • Mrs. Toad's actions become a good bit more disturbing when you know more about the fine tradition of bridal kidnapping.
    • The plot in general is a lot more disturbing when you consider that it consists almost entirely of a naïve girl being kidnapped from her home and being used and tricked by nearly everyone she meets (even the bird is too obsessed with being a Shipper on Deck to get her safely home). And a lot of those people want to marry her, even though they're different species.
    • Just...the fact that she isn't given much of a choice whenever someone "proposes" marriage to her is also pretty shiver-inducing. Cornelius had the decency to ask her and gain her willing acceptance first, but both the Toad and the Mole treat it like they're entitled to have her just because they like her. Her agency in general is taken from her at nearly every opportunity.
      • But the contrast between Cornelius and Thumbelina’s other “suitors” is also Fridge Brilliance when you think about why she agreed to marry Cornelius. He treated Thumbelina more like a person than a possession, unlike the others.
  • The level of sadism in Ms. Fieldmouse and Mr. Mole. Ms. Mouse delivers the news of Cornelius's supposed death in the cruellest way possible, and taunts Thumbelina about it constantly, urging her to sing a "romantic" song for Mr. Mole. While Thumbelina's still going through that, Mr. Mole shows her the corpse of her best friend, treating it like an interesting discovery and happily saying "That's one less bird twittering up there." Also, Mole has bugs pinned to his walls as trophies or decor, and Thumbelina has interacted with bugs. So from the perspective of the non-human characters, Mr. Mole's walls are lined with corpses of dead people pinned up for decoration, and finds the accidental death of a man he doesn't know amusing. Also, he was holding his wedding ceremony in the cavern filled with dead-body decorations.
    • To be fair to the Mole, he may not have known about Thumbelina's history with the bugs (which, to be fair, was pretty negative), and he definitely didn't know about Jacquimo's history with Thumbelina until she saw his 'body'.

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