 Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim. Alhamdulillahir bilalameen. Allahumma salli ala sayyidina Muhammadin wa ala alihi wa sahbihi as-salam. Tonight is a... we've scheduled this for a few months ago and I know times have changed and things have changed but I'm still here inshaAllah planning to do this talk and was excited about this. Sharing this journey with... it's a parenting journey that my wife and I had. We have three older boys now, they're all men. My youngest is 19. My eldest is about to be 26 and I grew up here in the United States since I was three years old. So I grew up on these movies. I grew up on Disney and one of the things we realize now is that Disney is one of the most powerful media conglomerate companies in the world. It wasn't at the time when I was a kid and it's gotten more and more powerful and we know that it's not just entertainment but it's entertainment that has a purpose. Everything is done with very, very specific messages with very, very specific scripts, the emotions, the feelings, the emotion, the music. It's all very, very scripted and very, very intentional and so as I was raising my children and experiencing movies when I was a child and going through the emotions of seeing movies and films and what they had, how they had effect on me at different ages and what I was able to do when I had children with my wife we were very intentional about what they were watching and so we kind of became research buffs about what are we gonna allow our children to see and what are we, why are we going to allow certain things to be seen and why are we going to allow certain things not to be seen and one of my earliest memories the other thing is that the Prophet Salaam was very generous and when we started our parenting journey there were many elders in my community that I admired a lot and I watched them very closely at my wife, watched them very closely, we sat down with them, we asked them questions and they shared their parenting journey with us and so we're very, very grateful to those folks and I'm not gonna embarrass them by mentioning that by name so they wouldn't want me to do that but because we've gone through this parenting journey now and mashallah we have this experience we want to go through and share the prophetic so not being generous sharing our story sharing our journey and hopefully it'll help others so like I said Disney now owns Pixar it's a very powerful conglomerate, it owns Pixar, it owns Marvel, it owns Star Wars, it owns Miramax so when it doesn't want to associate itself with adult content it uses Miramax for a movie company also owns ESPN now so I've followed ESPN since the beginning I was a kid when it came out and I see that ESPN has changed it's about clicks it's about narratives it's about messages just you know sort of selling things rather than actually analyzing sports it's changed and as Disney gets involved it changes quite a bit so I'll just share a couple of interesting stories about my first exposure to media as five to six years old and my first exposure to television was asking my father why 363 people had committed suicide in Guyana and it was all over the news so there was this people's church called Jonestown and my first experience was you know finding out about this person Jim Jones and I was very curious about it you know I was sort of trying to understand what's going on and my parents and I had a little bit of conversation about it and I asked them you know dad why are all these people sleeping in the forest in the middle of the day because they kept showing these helicopter shots of this jungle in Guyana and all these people asleep you know laying in the grass laying in the forest and he said they're not asleep they're all dead and I was wow I was like wow this is fascinating why would they die and he said they followed this person and they followed him to the point where they started a church and they went out there and then they got more and more scared about the fact that the world is ending and they all decided to cook this Kool-Aid and the adults gave it to the children first and then drank themselves so in our culture there's this thing about called it's called drinking the Kool-Aid it's when you just drink something so somebody gives it to you and it's it's actually referring to Jim Jonestown and so I was very very fascinated so there's a couple things that I learned just from this media exposure I learned about false prophets I learned about another church I learned about end times prophecies and I learned about suicide just as a kid these are all my experiences in my brain I was very very fascinated with this stuff the second exposure that I had was this this Indian Bollywood movie that was coming out and my parents and I went to see it it's called Hare Rama Hare Krishna and it's made about Hare Rama Hare Krishna is the chant of this cult and so another another exposure to cults when I was a child and the one thing that really I haven't gone back and watch this movie I actually intend on going back and watching this movie but this movie was very traumatic to me because the beginning of the movie there's a family with a boy and a girl mom and dad and they have this montage and the and the parents have this terrible fight and they break up and get divorced and as I'm experiencing this movie with as a five-year-old without parents talking to me about it or anything no discussion about it there was the first exposure I had that it was possible for a family to be split into two I didn't even know what divorce was I didn't know was possible for a parent a mom and a dad to split up I thought you know families are families they're a unit and I was very very disturbed by it I never talked to anybody about it and I remember the whole movie I would just couldn't concentrate on whole movie I don't even remember what happened I know that the girl went to a cult in in she went to a cult in northern India in Nepal and then the brother goes to try to save her you can see the picture there and the next time that my parents had a disagreement it was in the kitchen a few days later I was freaked out my little heart was beating out of my chest I remember so much anxiety so much stress and I started to really really just every time there was any kind of friction between my parents I freaked out and I realized that you know the the different ages that you're exposed to different media have intensely different effects on you so as I go through my talk I want you to think about having a five to six-year-old boy or a girl a five a nine-year-old boy or girl in a 13-year-old boy and a girl all experiencing these movies and these messages that I go through with you so I'm gonna go through the different messages and what they mean to the different ages and so so this was this was my first experience of media the other one that's funny story is I remember Richard Nixon stepping down I just remember him saying I'm not a crooked and I was like well the president can can be just put down too so there's a lot of things in the small human brain that go on that if they're unanswered or you're not talked to you know you can't reconcile we just sort of make snap judgments about things so the next slide is I'm gonna talk about six major themes this is a survey of Disney over the last 80 years since it's existed I went back back and studied some of this stuff and I was aware of some of these things but as time has gone on and as I've had children I've seen things intensify and the messages get more and more bold so let's go through the through the six themes pretty quickly the first theme is oh let me cover Disney so Disney is shown as a family man a good family man he had a family but if you go and research Disney and people who actually lived in his house the unapproved biography of Disney it is told that he had night terrors he walked around the house screaming and then at some point he spent most of his time in the Disney theme park in his old age and he spent he was obsessed with Pirates of the Caribbean that was the last ride that he actually built himself and supervised being built he spent a lot of time doing that so I researched that he was a failed writer and a director he tried to direct normal films and he was obsessed with the 11 to 13 year old girl who was his protege and he wanted her to be an actress it's easy sometimes it's easy to find these things online but they get taken down I watched some of the scenes and it was very it seemed very inappropriate because she was the actress in the script that was written it was a very poor quality movie poor writing and she was winning all the arguments she was kind of like a girl that was above her age and so I I saw that this man was obsessed with a girl that it seemed inappropriate that was his protege and he was a failed writer and director these movies flopped they didn't even make it out of the studio you know they they ended up in the floor they ended up in the vaults but he did have genius he came up with a technique to print cartoons frame by frame but he moved the background at the slower pace and then he created a middle ground and he created a foreground and so with that animation and with the films being done on clear paper on clear plastic the three different levels and matching the story to voice and music he was able to create something that had never been seen before and his first big hit was steamboat willy it was 1930s and he matched song sound and motion of animated characters to this small film and he called it steamboat willy and then disney was such a success they decided to do a full feature length film after that and they branded willy to mickey mouse so that's mickey willy became mickey mouse so this is uh the other thing is he created characters out of inanimate objects so the steamboat had eyes and face and smiled and tooted to the music was really kind of at that time it's very very cutting edge and then he used that to build a studio to get the money to do snow white which is his first full feature film okay so here are the themes the first theme that we notice is the trauma of parental loss okay you could see it in the movies a lot it's kind of there and i noticed it you know cinderella doesn't have a mother right um sleeping beauty uh no so um there's there's a list there's a list so theme one is the trauma of lost parents witnessing the death of a parent so bambi actually witnesses a forest fire and his parents are burned in the forest fire um um and then they uh i went through the list and looked at some christian websites that look at disney movies and sort of you know give uh advice to parents about the disney movies and the messages and that's where i get a lot of this content but you had snow white who didn't have a father uh a mother uh cinderella bambi jumbo little mermaid uh beauty and the beast bell uh Aladdin jasmine uh lion king he loses his father hunchback of norah name is uh raised in the in the church uh by a religious elder uh brother bear tangled she has parents but she's actually being raised by a woman who claims to be her mother was a witch frozen she loses her parents the sister of loser parents finding Nemo doesn't have a mother uh moana moa no sorry not moana uh and and i think so there's some movies that have two parents so moana mulan and brave they have multiple parents so this is the trauma of lost parents but it's not just the lost parents it's the fact that the parent who actually is the biological parent isn't caring for or involved in the life of the child the stepmother doesn't or or they're under complete neglect or the parent is very very strict and overbearing so there's extreme strictness uh as in king triton a real experiences extreme strictness from her father um you know he doesn't understand her and beginning of the movie you know she is singing about a world that she wants to be in uh neglect from the existing parent and they've married a stepparent who's cool or wicked or wants to uh you know doesn't wish them well so cinderella has stepsisters right and a stepmom the tipping point for me when i realized this was a really dangerous theme was when i watched lion king i said oh wow this is another level and the reason is is because not only does simba the the boy king witnessed his father's death at the hands of his uncle but then he goes to the body and he sits with the body and he cries and goes through this full arc of emotion with the music and with all of the animation together with it and when i witnessed uh lion king and when i watched the movie i realized this has gone to a completely different level it's it's it's amped up and uh i was very careful about when my children were watching because i was like you know this is not the same as what happened with the kind of movie that i experienced when i was younger so that to me is a tipping point and i think this uh theme is really important for your children that are under the age of six or seven they're a lot more innocent they're a lot more dependent on their parents so if you have a nine-year-old and a 10-year-old or a 13 14-year-old this theme is not as intense for them but that child who's younger um has to be reassured after the movie that you know if this what do you think about this if this happened to you what would happen you know auntie and uncle would take care of you or you know uh your other parent would take care of you we wouldn't leave you to another step person who's cruel like you have to not let that child go to bed with those emotions like i said my experience with the harirama harikrishna was i was terrified and i never told anybody i went through several days or maybe a week of intense anxiety because of that and so we have to be aware as our adult brain that we're in charge of this little brain the fitra is very raw very uh i just very cute girl looking at me here she just distracted me but yeah the fitra is very raw and so they have to be looked at and and talk to about this i'll move on to theme two so theme two shows up in the very first movie it's magic and sorcery the first movie snow white everybody everybody knows mirror mirror on the wall the stepmother does not care about snow white um resents her and as snow white grows more and more beautiful um the the generally it's known by the mirror that she is gaining beauty and the stepmother is getting older and she resents her but there's clearly magic going on there's sorcery going on and um the second theme the second image that you see there is is called night on bald mountain it's actually the second full feature movie that disney did and it's called fantasia and fantasia is a movie about eight different songs and eight different themes it's a very operatic movie they sort of created this music and the songs it's eight different themes uh one of them the pictures that you always see is mickey mouse in a sorcerer's hat and you know he's he's called the sorcerer's apprentice and he has to train himself to become a better sorcerer and he has tasks to do so one of the things is that he's has to clean up the attic and he uses the two brooms you know he doesn't want to do the manual labor so he's working on two brooms and he's trying to get them to go into the water buckets and then dance for him and it's all done to the music that's all good that's the image of fantasia that they want you to see this night on bald mountain is terrifying the little white things that you're seeing in the foreground are actually very emaciated human bodies if you look really really closely they're emaciated human bodies and one of the scenes in night in bald mountain is that this is a if this is a soul stealing demon that is going around in the middle of the night in their small villages and a volcano and the soul stealing demon actually has these bodies coming out it comes out of smoke but within the images of the smoke there's bodies and then he takes the bodies and they dance in a circle in the smoke and then he casts them into the lava into the volcano so if you haven't seen this movie it's quite quite intense and it's the second movie the second movie also you have a fairy magic i'm talking about the themes that are in different movies you have fairy magic nature spirits spells witches and warlocks genie and jinn you know everybody knows about Aladdin that's a jinn spirits objects that come to life and help um demons and temptresses so the the most famous uh sort of temptress which is Ursula in in Little Mermaid and they just remade that movie um so sorcerer's apprentice night on bald mountain the beast has a spell on him the spell can only be broken uh sleeping beauty she's under a spell uh snow white mother mirror mirror uh hunchback actually talks to these statues that come alive in the castle of Notre Dame his friends he's very lonely his name is Quasimodo and it's based on a classic novel but they took the classic novel story and they disney sort of appropriated it and now that the Quasimodo is having conversations with spirits that live inside of statues and those are his friends so magic and sorcery is very good i also went to a christian website and looked at it and they had a list of about 50 disney movies that had magic and sorcery in it so they're normalizing the fact that you can gain power in the dunia to get the things you want by uh beings of magic and sorcery so let's see uh yeah so we talked about a little mermaid little mermaid has Ursula and of course you know robin williams is a gen he's a genie right um even in moana she has uh she follows her grandmother spirit her grandmother passes away and then you can see her spirit is a stingray that guides her to leave the village um controlling the elements is big in moana because she has the the sea is very dangerous she experiences almost near death when she just goes out and see by herself second time she goes the sea is now her friend so the very very dangerous elements become friendly um and then of course there's maleficent we'll we'll talk about maleficent and supernatural powers and there's a lot of very stuff in maleficent so that is a theme that is theme two all right we're on to theme three now oh and uh again if you're thinking about a five to six year old a nine to ten year old 13 to 14 year old you know this is probably the age this affects the age of imagination the age of imagination is more under the age of 10 so you would be concerned with those two children rather than your teenager although now there's a lot of which is stuff on youtube you can go and figure out all these people who have youtube channels that will teach your teenagers all kinds of spells unfortunately that's that's the reality of open source uh videos um so i do want to make a comment about each age group as i go through um the third one is peril and punishment i'll i'll i'll define my my title so moments of extreme danger fear injury death capture kidnapping imprisonment punishment with no end and constant worry so um the reaction of the beast in this image here with bell um her father wanders out to do a task and gets captured by the beast who trespasses and then she goes out to help to find her father and she's experiences this beast so not only is he completely volatile dangerous and mad angry but he also threatens to kidnap her forever right she has to in order to free her father she has to be imprisoned in his castle forever so that's punishment with no end cinderella same thing cinderella she's going to stay there her stepsisters are going to uh prosper in the house while she lives with the animals you know her name is actually ella but she lives in the cinders so her name is called cinderella a snow white of course she runs away from this wicked stepmother who's obsessed with her beauty and there's magic going on and then she ends up with the dwarves um sleeping beauty uh let's see she's going to sleep forever punishment with no end uh frozen uh frozen because she has power she's afraid that she'll affect other people so it's cold death uh hunchback um he's forever locked up and not you know he's considered a freak um the good dinosaur is one of the worst movies i've ever seen uh it's this uh dinosaur named uh farlow and they show him as a very cutsy part of his family he's very he's already very on edge he's just not normal he's not brave or anything and then him and his his father forces him hey you know you have to man up and come out with me and he witnesses his father die in a in a collapse of the side and he drowns in a river and the entire movie is far low basically facing death and disemmermen are bitten by bugs or snake or falling or dying the entire movie is parallel in passion it's one of the worst movies you can show your children there's no point to it and uh i watched it and the other thing i realized is it's again he's he experiences the death of his father watches it not just sees it from afar but he he emotes it um so parallel punishment is is really intense and it affects the younger ones even um when bel goes to save her father she just she's just going through the forest at night but the forest comes alive and the trees are tentacles and they're about to tip over her wagon and she's about to be grabbed so she's almost kidnapped by the kidnapped and killed by the forest before she ends up in the castle of the beast so it's like it's it's it's slammed it's uh double whammy on double whammy punch on punch and your children are experiencing this as a belter kind of yeah that's that's really intense wow but then your child could be terrified so we have to look towards these these young hearts and what they're going through especially when we're allowing them to watch these movies with us or um you know we're allowing them to view these movies because yeah you know they're radi g they're disney let's it's all right it's okay just you watch this while i do something else that's not what we want going on so theme four we're getting to some really good themes um the tipping point oh yeah i wanted to mention this too the image that i have is uh tangled it's a rapunzel story and it's remade by disney but instead of just being locked away by a mother who resents her she's actually imprisoned by a witch who is staying young by the energy of of rapunzel and so that's another um they've made it worse than the book was actually done so they they make it more intense and she has a song called mother knows best when she's just terrifying the girl into just stay here don't even think about going anywhere you're a klutz you'll go out you'll die you'll be you'll have a thief there's a whole song that goes on it's called mother knows best theme four okay this is uh the absence of any adult helpers okay so we live in a mashallah community where you have large families you have aunts and uncles friends cousins um when we go on hutch as a couple you know we talk to our uh brother or sister-in-law and say you know what if something happens to us we're gonna get a will and then we're going to ask you to take care of our children if something happens to us on hutch if we don't come back and we have community we have mosques we have charities we have orphanages um in disney movies no there's none of that there's no adult helpers there's no relatives there's no community members that are upstanding and moral there are no leaders there's no ethical people there's no upstanding citizens um simba has an uncle that just caused the death of his father and then wants him gone um in in hunchback of Notre Dame Quasimodo is the ward of a religious leader he's the bishop of the church and uh you know he's confined to his um he's confined to the church to be locked up and again he talks to those friends when the adult isn't there those animals come to those toys come to life for him and then dumbo is really interesting because dumbo loses her mother i mean dumbo loses his mother and this scene that you're actually seeing the picture of i remember i don't remember the movie but i do remember that the dumbo has these ears and the different elephant mothers who are sitting there in the circus they have other children they're deciding whether they want to take dumbo in and they actually gossip about gossip gossip about dumbo's ears and why he's not normal so even the adults that are there that are considering taking the the the character in are terrible adults who gossip and then they reject it so he has to offend for himself with his friends the other animals that are in the circus um and there are good characters i mean there's a there's a chipmunk that runs a circus that you know helps him ariel has sabastian the crab who's afraid of triton and tries to say you know what you should stay home and not mess around not do the wrong thing um pinocchio has uh uh a friend who guides him to write so there are these characters but they're not listened to so um this this is a very theme that actually affects the younger ones again the the 13 year olds and 14 year olds and your children you know they kind of understand their their brains have evolved beyond the imaginative world but the younger ones definitely have to be reassured when you see these themes especially when adults are not acting in the best interest of the characters um let's see my notes here that's theme four we're going to get into the most interesting theme now that really really pervades a lot of the a lot of the disney movies um individualism so this is the theme that is probably the most pervasive and my title is individualism freedom from obligations rules tradition running away is best um tab going towards the taboo because you know better because it'll give you uh the chance to do the things that you want to do um running away with uh you know you know best to be with enchanted beings uh party or uh partner up with spirits pets um the ocean the elements you look for reckless adventure um you don't care about your responsibilities and you break family and obligation rules so that's individuals and um jasmine you know she leaves with a thief right Aladdin's a thief but he's got a flying carpet so he's pretty cool um tangled she leaves with um fin rider is the character she actually he's so unintelligent that she apprehends him very quickly he can't even escape her she's smarter and better than him she uses her hair to tie him up you know and then the interesting thing about uh fin rider entangled is that it's very clear from the characters that his horse is smarter than he is one of my favorite characters entangled is the horse and fin rider says go this way and the horse will roll his eyes and the Rapunzel and the horse will know yeah we need to go that way so even though you're an individual you're going to leave with the worst losers the thieves and the losers Ariel of course um she's supposed to reject the world of men and she she pints for it her opening line um is that uh she says i don't get why my father doesn't understand i don't agree with my father about uh how he feels about men and she says how can the world that creates all these neat things be terrible and she's in a shipwreck she sees coins and things like that you know she's actually sings about a taboo she's she knows it's taboo and her first opening song is about part of your world it's called part of your world she wants to be part of their world and then when there's a man the song changes to part of your world um let's see individualism bambi you know he goes off with his friends after his parents died that's kind of innocent um but it was a lot more innocent this theme has gotten more ego driven during the newer movies more sinister and more ego driven if you're thinking about you know your children sometimes you have the child that's spirited you have the child that you're strict with they get the message that my parents don't understand me and i have friends who understand me and there's always a little buddy character in the movies you know the little fish in moana she's got the little scared chicken hey hey his name is hey hey um and so they they kind of just talk themselves into going out with this buddy but that buddy's just kind of a sidekick sometimes a buddy's a good luck charm um we're in the age now uh this is another parenting talk and the parent told me this i wrote down we're in the age where authority is always being questioned and individualism reigns supreme that is the age we're in and these messages are going into your children you know it's it's a slow slow seep i'm not saying that all these movies are bad i'm not saying you're not going to watch them but i'm going to say that you have to the talk is about viewing them with muslim eyes and viewing them with the responsibility their parent should have over the fitra of their children those that's that's really the goal here that's really what i'm trying to share um it's not that they're all evil i've enjoyed these movies for a lot of my life i laugh i enjoy some of the characters um so that's theme five um and i want to talk about theme five a little more because i want to highlight some of the songs um the songs are you know so so brilliant uh so ariel starts with i just don't see things the way he does i don't see how a world that makes such wonderful things could be bad and she starts i want to be where the people are i want to be where they're laughing and singing you know she doesn't have legs so that's her main message she's already inclined towards the taboo um she disagrees with her father's uh interaction or or or command to stay away from them um moana she says here i wish i could be a better daughter i wish i could be a perfect daughter because she's supposed to take on her tribe um but i come back to the water no matter how hard i try so she's singing about the fact that i know i have responsibilities but this thing keeps calling me as she says i know i need to be a perfect daughter then she says see the line where the sky meets the sea it calls me see the light as it shines on the sea it's blinding one day i'll know how far i'll go so while they're showing that she has tradition and she has responsibility her song and her emotion and it's towards i'm i'm i holding back but i'm gonna go there i'm gonna go there i'm gonna feed my nerves what i want to do is eventually gonna happen um elsa's famous song that you know if you Halloween time every girl you ask is going to be Elsa wearing the frozen costume her song her main line when she runs away from her responsibilities is no right no wrong no rules for me i'm free and as they time the song she climbs this imaginary stair which keeps building as she steps and then her last step is her right foot she says i'm free and this castle appears before her so the message is really tuned to the music it's just it's it's it's so um brilliant in its in its message you know you have to read the lyrics of the music after you've seen the movie so moana i felt one way about the song while watching it there's that yeah she's trying to be responsible she's trying to be good then when you read the lyrics the lyrics are just like i'm i know i'm gonna get out of here i know my ego and my individuality i really wanted to take the time to talk about that theme um theme six theme six is an important one i learned this from dr. Leonard sacks he has two books one is called boys uh boys adrift the other book is called girls on the edge if you have children under the age of 10 boy or girl please buy these books both of them they're just so invaluable and i've learned so much from dr. Leonard sacks um and he uh came up with this phrase i knew it was there but really really defined it and when you define it you start seeing it it's called moral inversion so this is the theme of moral inversion always taking what society and our rules have is right and doing the exact opposite and uh Leonard sacks talks about the video game grand theft auto where if you drive if you steal a car you get 100 points but if you steal a car and you run over a lady with a cane and then you kill a cop and then you run through a store and kill more people you get a thousand points so this is where the the moral inversion is accentuated where they're sending a theme to you you should be doing the wrong thing grand theft auto is a very very terrible game it's about a russian gangster who comes to america with no money and your role playing you gotta make some money you gotta take over the gang first you take over the russian gang then you take over the italian gang then you take over the asian gang and you just get better and better it's it's a game version of scarface right and so um moral inversion i've got these images here so elsa if you look at elsa here she's wearing a beautiful dress her hair is perfect she looks perfect she's not in the previous part of the movie she's buttoned down very matronly she has responsibilities but once she leaves her responsibility she has this major sorry to say this is glow up her eye shadow is all of a sudden shaded purple i'm sorry i noticed this stuff but it's crazy it's really crazy i'll show you the other image of elsa afterwards um ariel she decides that she wants to be so in the world of men that she's going to sell part of her she makes a deal with a witch and arsala is a two-timing witch because arsala resents her father who's king triton the king of the oceans and arsala knows hey i can get this girl and i can destroy her father and then take back the kingdom and she's so two-timing that not only does she do a deal with the girl but the girl uses her voice to attract the man she says your price is the voice so like the woman is left with no voice and she's what am i gonna do and she says oh men don't like it when women talk anyway you know it's really really interesting um arsala is it's a very two-timing character and then you know moral inversion we've got jasmine who runs away for adventure you know she has this adventure with the genie in the gym you make it all look really funny ha ha robin williams and his one joke a minute you know um he's a depressed man he killed himself you know and uh they make this stuff look like adventure and fun that it all turns out okay well let's see uh always doing the opposite of what is moral and right do the taboo the forbidden the dangerously tempting be rebellious and be talked into doing the wrong path there's always one character that says maybe you shouldn't do this but that person is doing it out of fear of king triton not because he's saying it's the right thing to do that character doesn't tell them no the character says you don't do it out of fear right um don't just go against moral go against your parent and not only parents but some of these parents are tribal leaders kings and triton happens to be god he's like the god neftu god with the little g sorry to say that but allah says it doesn't have a little a there's only a lot but with god the word you have goddess goddesses those are all little cheese um yeah go against that the authority figure um let's see rely on nature spirits also you know it'll be okay um there's many levels of rebellion and moral inversion and the other thing i wanted to say is these themes kind of are layered on top of each other so bell doesn't have any adults to help her get her father then she has peril and punishment in the forest and then she has the extreme danger of the beast so it's multiple layers of multiple themes layered together see let's see what i'm saying it's it's not just one all the themes are kind of compacted and layered together um yeah so ariel she has no mom a strict dad okay so that's theme one uh she dreams of that taboo that's individual that's team the theme five uh she goes it alone with a sorceress that's theme two multiple themes all in the same movie all in the same character all woven into the same a narrative um a bell her father's kidnapped so there's no helpers peril in the forest imprisoned for life um having to do a deal with a beast so that her father can be free she doesn't have anyone to rely on moana she goes against the tribe she follows a spirit she argues uh with a selfish male god named maui um she relies on ocean magic and then there's pagan nature and earth goddess at the end of the movie so these are multiple themes so these are my six themes there's four more themes that i was doing this i decided there was going to be four more themes that i wanted to add to this so there's a modern agenda going on and as these movies are have these themes in them in and of themselves since the 1930s 40s and 50s the new modern movies i wanted to highlight the three modern movies um and those are pushing modern agendas four potent messages that are now woven into disney's offerings so we've got moana there we've gotten maleficent there so i mean tell me if you if you're driving home one night and maleficent suddenly levitates in the front of your car most people would probably have a heart attack right there on their steering wheel and run into a tree it's it's really really scary when i first saw this poster before the movie came out i was i just stopped in the movie theater i was like what is that this two horned black beast what is that how can they make a movie out of this i just i was so confused i i couldn't believe it all right and then they use uh so-called beauty queen angela jolly i was like wow double whammy here we go let's let's let's figure this out so the movie comes out and uh you know uh i i looked at a christian website and there's a woman called christian kids mom that was her handle and she wrote she watched maleficent and she wrote in her blog i wrote this down she said um i know maleficent is a demonic looking character but as i went through the movie i could not stop being more and more and more compassionate to her cause and identifying with her please you walk in and you see her in the first scene and then they build the whole story in the narrative of how she's protecting the fairies in the forest against the men armies this that and all this stuff happens in the end of the movie you're sympathizing with this character you know and this is this is the mind flip that you know uh shaitan doesn't have a lot of tricks but within the tricks that he has the sophistication is very very powerful um so i'm going to go through these themes the first theme is the patriarchy okay we've got male characters now in sleeping beauty and in cinderella the prince was good man and he wanted a princess he wanted a queen he wanted to rule his kingdom well with a wife that was the prince now in frozen prince hans is a deceiver he wants to take the he wants to marry anna the sister because he wants the kingdom he has an alternative agenda the bishop here uh his agenda was to keep ozomoto away from the gypsies there's a whole gypsy family with a beautiful gypsy girl named esmeralda and he's used he realizes he's using his power and he's doing it for his own nupsy game um and then you know we've got the demigod here his name is maui he's in moana and he sings about how he brought the islands up from the ocean and the clouds in the sky the sun from the stars and all this stuff he has a song called you're welcome it's actually really funny song uh enjoyable song but the message there is that he is a god but he has limited power and at some point he just just there's a crisis on the island and the story begins with this male god he doesn't care anymore he lost his hook he lost his power he's like yeah that's fine she has to go out in the ocean try to save her village and and the um the her society from starving okay so that's this is the patriarchy these are the male figures they call it the Homer Simpsonism of dads you know dads are these doofus characters who babble and they're always like oh dad you're so embarrassing you know not male figures not people who you know really know what they're doing who are going to command the the room and who do things for the right reason and you trust them that's that's that's the modern world the second one is the supreme feminine so mashallah we know the feminine is supreme women are able to give life women are able to nurture women are able to give the initial food Allah swt has made women i mean we we men are in awe when we see our wives have children i just like what just happened how did you do that and women are able to hold the baby and say yeah i want another one and i'm like wow i'm still in shock i'm trying to deal with the first baby i want another baby women are the supreme right but this is in the competition and in the arena of men okay Maleficent has to protect the fairy she's going to go against the world of men the armies the castles the the armor the blades everything um in this one Moana she takes a frat seat the male god has to follow her lead and he's afraid he he loses his hook then he gets his hook and then he's going to help her and it's about to break so he's afraid he's going to lose his powers he kicks off she has to find the she has to fight the final battle yourself this is really interesting and this follows the other theme which is i don't need no man why do i need a man i can do this myself well you know families are built with two people yin and yang we have male traits female traits and we appreciate each one we know we're different we're equal partners but we're different we have different roles um so this is the supreme feminine okay the theme three new theme three is the toxic masculine of course right prince hans he just wants the kingdom he's greedy uh in this case you see Elsa there this is Elsa buttoned up when she's got her before her glow up right this is her buttoned up when she's got responsibilities she's supposed to take care of her sister um the male that's in the picture with Maleficent you know he falls in love with her they have a thing and then he steals her wings traumatizes her you know because he wanted something else you know he just used her it's very very terrible and then the last picture very disturbing picture is the bishop he's looking into a fireplace and in this scene he actually sings a song called desire on fire and he sees Esmeralda in the flames of that fireplace and she's not closed this is hidden in the mess in the in the in the in the visuals of the of the movie my children did not watch the hunchback of Notre Dame we we realized this wasn't the movie we wanted for them my 26 year old son i asked in preparation for this talk i said have you seen little mermaid and hunchback of Notre Dame because we were clearly like we're not gonna have him see this movie he's like no i haven't seen him yet he hasn't seen movies my younger one 19 year old he's like yeah i've seen i've seen hunchback of Notre Dame i turn it out you know he's 19 years old he can watch it once now he's a man but we were very conscious of doing this um and there's frames there are famous frames in Disney movies i'm not gonna name them here but there's frames that are intentionally if you stop them you'll see something that you don't want to see and Disney allows it to be there they're famous you can go on the web and find them but i'm not gonna mention them here i've already mentioned one i regret it uh the last one is climate catastrophe children are being told by politicians by the green movement that they're not gonna live to see 15 years in the future 20 years into the future and these themes are also being done into the movies so um frozen has the the concept of cold death she has a responsibility she runs away she knows her town is going to freeze to death but she doesn't she doesn't look back um so there's this constant uh part of the story that everyone's going to die because of climate and then in the in Maleficent the armies are deforestation they're the men are just greedy if they want land they just want to cut it down just want to take the wood they want to burn it they want to make metal they want to make cat catapults whatever they're going to do right it's the the the world of men is going to consume the nature and in Moana she goes to the pagan mother earth island to say that she actually goes there so this is a climate catastrophe kind of theme that's in the movies woven into the movies um i'm going to end with some parenting tips uh things that work for us we as parents need to be aware of the different ages the effects on the ages if you want please take a picture of this slide this is not for me this is from people who guided us um we're now in the world of multiple screens if you have four people in a house you probably have 12 screens if you have a car sometimes maybe you have a 15th screen in the car you know so each person in the house can have three screens they can have a phone an ipad or computer the number one thing that i would say and again we cannot say no to watching these movies these movies are part of our culture we're in the west our children are going to enjoy these stories and and and consume them but we need to consume we as parents need to consume these stories with them and guide them and be aware of the different ages that are affected by the different stories and different themes so number one consume the media together and discuss with open ended questions if you sit there and watch a movie like ariel and go oh my god she did this she did that while the movie's going on your children are going to check you out let them enjoy the movie don't destroy the movie for them but afterwards ask the different ask the kids did you do you think she did this right why did she do that if you don't let them talk you're not going to know how they think if you talk over them or talk at them you're not going to learn anything and they'll check you out and then they won't learn anything so the number one message here i put this at the very top is to talk to them with open ended questions at the appropriate age so climate catastrophe is not something you talk to a five-year-old about but you can definitely talk to them whether the man is bad or not you know you can tell them whether this prince was really did he have good intentions or all movies and tv or view with the family until the age of 13 a lot of parents are worried that these are not popular rules but the parent has to be the parent where your kids are going to have three four hundred friends in their life and they're only going to have two parents two parents that really see them from their purest fit that i aged to the age of discernment who's 16 years of age 16 is about the age where it's like you've got to start to sort of let go but every parent that i know in the recent past the battle for the phone keeps going at a lower and lower age now i have a friend who called me said i just gave i just gave my phone to my 13 my 12 year old is about to be 13 and i'm having a lot of problems i regret it everybody that's done it younger than the age of 15 or so and i've talked to them has has regretted it they're they're you get you get fooled by their physical size and their ability to have logic grammar and rhetoric but they're still toddler adults a 13 year old is a one year old adult two year old adult three year old they're still toddlers they're trying to figure it out so they're not they have the rhetoric is like mom this is for safety i gotta do my homework i need the internet at school there's all these reasons they're really good with the reasons but they are still toddler adults they don't they have to have parental guidance to manage these things so that they can continue to grow so inshallah this is what the talk is about is to help and to guide and most of the disney stuff is more princess oriented it's more girl oriented guys don't really get into this as much the internet shut it off shut it off at 10 p.m. there's no there's no reason for it especially on a weeknight i realize i'm getting into isha here uh share party i'm ours here and i just wanted to end asking you for your duaz this is an addiction uh and uh you have to keep your children busy because right now the default for non-busy children is screen time the screens are available they're accessible the internet is not charged by the minute it's affordable and has all these things so so i just wanted to end with three other characters that i have this is more towards the boys i also grew up with comics and i'm very much into these comic book movies and there's some very interesting themes so i'm trying now work on another presentation the gentleman on the left is named apocalypse he's from the x-man movie it's called x-man apocalypse um and then there's ultron who's in an avengers movie and then there's Thanos who is in the last two movies so i want to end now we're gonna have adan for isha and i want thank you all for coming shella make dua for me uh inshallah keep our family and our community in your duaz and my duaz are with all the young ones salamu alaikum