LOS ANGELES—Since the days of the trombone-voiced adults of Peanuts, parents have often been portrayed as interferences, nincompoops, or enemies in tales told from a child’s perspective. But have parents been taken for granted in these narratives for too long?

“It’s become sort of a tradition of stories where parents are idiots,” Mars Needs Moms director Simon Wells says at a Beverly Hills news conference. “And, actually, it’s kinda not true. Quite a lot of parents are quite smart and kinda know a thing or two, and kinda have the best interests of their kids at heart. And so, yeah, I think we wanted to actually tell one of those kind of stories.”

Wells adapted Berkeley Breathed’s illustrated book Mars Needs Moms, which is about a boy who chases after Martians when they kidnap his mother, into a 3-D animated feature (made with performance-capture technology).

“That’s the reason the book appealed to us, because, no, this is actually a story where a parent is realistically portrayed, having to say stuff, having to say ”˜no’ to the kid, having to actually discipline the kid, which, as parents, we spend quite a lot of time doing, you know? And then proving not to just be an idiot.”

Wells has already directed four other animated features geared toward young audiences, including An American Tail: Fievel Goes West and The Prince of Egypt. In his latest offering, which is now in theatres, frustrated nine-year-old Milo (portrayed in performance capture by Seth Green but voiced by 11-year-old Seth Dusky) doesn’t appreciate his mother (Joan Cusack) and hurts her by saying that he’d better off without her. But when his mother is taken away from him, he’s forced to face the reality of his own words.

“Inherent in Berkeley’s book are the two tent poles in the book: there’s a moment when the kid is incredibly rude to his mother, and then there is the sort of payoff to that when he really discovers what his mother’s love means,” Wells says. “And that really spoke to my cowriter—my wife, Wendy—and I. Plus we have our own children”¦and, let’s be honest, we wanted to indoctrinate them with that message.”

Wells admits to infusing the female-run Martian society depicted in the film with a Nazi-style quality. In contrast, the Martian men are unproductive tribal goofballs who live in a subterranean garbage dump. He explains that these representations exaggerate Milo’s perspective.

“The Martian world is, on some level, it’s kind of Milo’s world writ big. It’s what he thinks his world is. He’s got an absent dad who’s fun but never around and a mom who’s dictatorial and wants everything clean and tidy and precise. So there’s a kind of large-scale nightmarish quality to the world that is run by the female Martians.”

In a hotel interview room, Wells later tells the Straight that these dystopian extremes reveal that balance is essential to parenting. “People forget the role of love in the relationship. It’s neither all about discipline nor all about being lovey and huggy and sweet and having fun. You actually have to blend the two.”

He adds that the film’s nannybots represent “an abdication of you actually”¦parenting your children. It’s sort of, your handing it off—expecting somebody else, some other process, expecting schools to parent your children for you—is a mistake. There’s a job that parents are supposed to do.”

Although the film tackles poignant issues like mortality, Wells feels that it’s an effective way of introducing these subjects to kids—with parental accompaniment, of course.

“I think this is actually the perfect material to deal with as a family together,” he says, “because it’s good for children to see stuff that’s, you know, a little scary to them but in the safety of knowing that their mother or father’s arm is around them, and they’re actually okay and they’re safe, and because, after all, movies are about experiencing something vicariously through the characters on-screen that you don’t have to actually experience in your real life.”