Murdered mothers: The traumatic frames of maternal death in Disney animation.

This article examines the "dead-mother-plot" in Disney animation, focusing on how maternal death is constructed as a traumatic event through three key narrative elements: maternal sacrifice, child development, and homicide. Using a textual analysis of Bambi’s mother’s death, the study highlights how Disney frames maternal loss as a gendered trauma that reflects and reinforces cultural ideologies about motherhood, sacrifice, and childhood vulnerability. The violent and sudden nature of these deaths, often depicted as homicides by hunters, intensifies the trauma and shapes audience identification with the child characters’ grief and developmental challenges. The article situates Disney’s portrayal of maternal death within broader cultural and media contexts, emphasizing how these narratives contribute to collective trauma by uniting audiences around shared social meanings of motherhood, violence, and loss.