Thumbelina/Headscratchers

• Why doesn't Thumbelina just use the bird to get home? How come Mrs. Toad sings about why marriage sucks to get Thumbelina to marry her son? Why did Mrs. Toad leave her behind on the lilypad?
  • Jacquimo was too concerned with reuniting Thumbelina and Cornelius (via locating the Vale of the Fairies) to actually just take her home. She does ask him to do so several times, but he ignores her.
    • But then why doesn't he reunite them by flying Thumbelina to Cornelius, or flying her home and then flying him there? True, he wasn't sure where Cornelius was, but he could have let her ride while searching or dropped her off at home, then searched for him, then brought him to her home upon finding him.
    • Sadly, the writers were kind of locked-in to the original story and never fully explained why didn't she get off the lilypad by herself.
  • Mrs. Toad seemed to be trying to convince Thumbelina that marrying for love would suck, but that the marriage she had planned out (which seemed more like a convenient way to please her son and get a good singer into their family performing group) was awesome. One can only hope that Mrs. Toad was figuring that Thumbelina would forgo child with her toad son in favor of focusing on their career.
• Ignoring the fact that Thumbelina and Cornelius hardly knew each other, how the heck does the moral of marrying for love over money work? Cornelius is the fairy prince! Are we really to believe that he doesn't have enough money to support a family, or servants to raise the kids, or whatever else the arguments against him were?