This movie always feels flat for me. It took me years to realize that my dad would never give anything up to make me happy.
Well that and he’s a self hating bigot.
I think the big takeaway is that there are no sides to the matter, even if it’s easier to empathize with one over the other, so the meme still stands on the empathy part.
The “antagonist” of the whole thing is that they both failed to communicate with each other. Which isn’t weird, Max is a teenager experiencing a lot of stuff for the first time, and Goofy is scared for his relationship with his son, having to be a single dad, and never raising a teenager before.
The major issue at hand is that Goofy might as well be a minor deity of extreme luck (good and bad), so normal child/parent friction turns into being attacked by Bigfoot while later becoming an integral part of a huge concert.
.
As a kid, you definitely side with max and as you get older, you see that goofy was just trying to be a good dad.
Goofy isn’t flawless in the movie, either. He, like many adults, struggles to understand how to connect with his teenage son and instead falls back on the things he knows (camping, fishing, etc) rather than venture into unknown territory and try to do what Max wants to do. It doesn’t make him a bad parent necessarily, just not a very perceptive one.
Pete on the other hand demonstrates what bad parenting is by straight up not caring what his son wants and dragging the family along as an accessory to his vacation.
But Goofy of course gets there in the end.
