moniquill:

No guys, I need to stop and talk about something in this movie and how fucking revolutionary it was; something that I haven’t seen in a movie before or since.

This is a movie about a kid who leaves her birth family.

Not a kid who find that they have a secret lineage or something that allows them to find their ‘true family’ - this is a movie about a kid whose true birth family is made up of bad people. So she gets out. And that is played as the right thing to do. She isn’t punished for it or made to feel bad about ‘abandoning her family’. There isn’t an underlying ‘but they’re your family and you have to love them’ or ‘they’re your family and they love you even if they don’t show it well or do hurtful things’ message of the kind that I see OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER in media. Matilda gets out and livess happily ever after because of it.

We need a million more movies like this to counter the metric shit ton of movies that directly counter this message.

Likewise, I’d love to point out about this movie is that it showed that it was okay to be a single child with a single mother - you can still be happy. This is ALWAYS ignored in movies, especially kids ones. 

When Matilda gets out of her family with a mother and a father and a brother - the “American Dream Family” - she’s adopted by a single woman who wanted a child, and there isn’t a single thing wrong with that.