Top 10 on the 10th: The Top 10 Disney Moms We Would All Be Lucky to Have

Happy Mother's Day!

Today's Top 10 is a little different. No SEL standards. No lesson plans. No reflection prompts.

Just ten Disney moms who absolutely deserved more credit than they got, and a few who got exactly the credit they earned and still managed to make us cry about it.

Grab your coffee. This one's for the moms.

10. Sarabi — The Lion King

Sarabi lost her husband, watched her kingdom fall apart, and raised her son under the roof of the lion who took everything from her. She never broke. She never stopped believing. And when Simba finally came home, she was right there — still standing, still dignified, still the queen. Sarabi does not get nearly enough flowers. Today, we are giving them to her.

9. Mama Coco — Coco

Okay, technically, Mama Coco is a great-great-grandmother at this point, but the whole movie is about her. Every single thing Miguel does, he does to bring her back to herself. And when she hears that song? When she remembers? There is not a dry eye in any room anywhere on planet Earth. Mama Coco is the heart of that entire story and she did not even know it.

8. Kala — Tarzan

Kala found a baby in a treehouse after losing her own child and chose, without hesitation, to love him completely. She raised a human boy in a gorilla family and never once made him feel like he did not belong. When Tarzan finally finds out where he came from, and Kala tells him she will always be his mother, that is the whole movie right there. Everything else is just plot.

7. Laurel Lightfoot — Onward

Laurel finds out her two sons have gone off on a dangerous magical quest, and does what any reasonable mom would do: she puts on a suit of armor and goes after them herself. No hesitation. No waiting by the phone. Just full armor, full speed, full mom.

She also spent most of the movie keeping the bottom half of her late husband's body from causing a public incident, which honestly deserves its own award category.

6. Queen Elinor — Brave

Queen Elinor spent the entire movie as a bear. A bear. And she was still parenting. Still communicating with her eyes. Still trying to hold her family together with absolutely zero opposable thumbs. The relationship between Merida and her mother is one of the most honest portrayals of a complicated mother-daughter dynamic Disney has ever put on screen. They drove each other absolutely crazy because they loved each other that much. Every mother-daughter duo in the audience felt that one personally.

5. Tala — Moana

Grandmother. Technically. But Tala was the one who saw Moana. Really saw her. When everyone else was telling Moana to stay inside the reef and be practical and stop dreaming so loudly, Tala was in the corner telling her to go. She came back as a manta ray. She showed up in the stars. She never stopped cheering. If you have ever had a woman in your life who believed in you before you believed in yourself, you know exactly who Tala is.

4. Duchess — The Aristocats

Duchess is elegant. Duchess is gracious. Duchess is also a single mother of three kittens navigating Paris, a kidnapping, and a very charming alley cat who keeps showing up, all while never once raising her voice or losing her composure. She is the most underrated Disney mom in the entire catalog, and I will absolutely die on this hill.

3. Chicha — The Emperor's New Groove

Visibly pregnant. Three children. Husband accidentally brings home a llama and a whole villain situation. Chicha handled every single bit of it with patience, humor, and zero drama.

She is the most relatable Disney mom in the entire catalog. She did not sign up for any of what happened, and she handled it better than any of us would have. Chicha deserved her own movie, and we are still waiting.

2. Perdita — 101 Dalmatians

Perdita gave birth to fifteen puppies. Fifteen. And then, when Cruella De Vil showed up, and the unthinkable happened, she and Pongo went and got them all back, plus 84 more.

She did not come home with 15 puppies. She came home with 99. Perdita is a hero. Perdita is a legend. Perdita needs a nap that she will never actually get.

1. Helen Parr — The Incredibles

Helen Parr is the greatest Disney mom ever put on screen, and it is not even close.

She retired her superhero career. She built a family. She held everything together while her husband was quietly having an identity crisis of spectacular proportions. And when it all fell apart, she did not wait around, she got on a plane, she stretched herself across a boat, she turned into a parachute to save her children, and she fought a villain in a cape with the same energy she used to pack school lunches. Helen Parr is every mom who ever held it all together, and an actual superhero who nobody remembered to thank. Today, we thank her.

Honorable Mentions — Because We Could Not Leave Them Out

Aunt Cass — Big Hero 6. Technically, an aunt. Absolutely a mom. Raised two boys, ran a restaurant, and kept the whole operation together while being genuinely the most fun adult in the room. She deserved a bigger role, and we will not stop saying it.

Julieta — Encanto. She heals people through her cooking, loves her daughters fiercely, and somehow stays warm and steady in a family with a lot going on. She is the quiet heart of the Madrigal household, and she does not get nearly enough credit for it.

Riley's Mom — Inside Out. There is a moment near the end when we see inside her head, and Sadness is at the controls, which means this woman held herself together through an entire cross-country move and a family in crisis, quietly falling apart on the inside. One of the most real mom moments in any Disney film ever made. She deserved her own movie, too.

The Counselor Clubhouse Take

Disney has given us villains, heroes, sidekicks, and talking animals. But some of the best characters they ever created were the moms, inconvenient, the ones who showed up, stayed, believed, and loved even when it was hard and inconvenient, and sometimes involved being temporarily transformed into a bear. To all the moms, the grandmoms, the aunt-moms, the chosen-moms, and everyone who has ever loved a child the way these characters did:

Happy Mother's Day. You are the magic.

This post is dedicated to my late mom. Disney with her family was her happy place :)