The idea that children’s films have more death and murder than adult movies is leaving me with a really, REALLY confused look on my face. It’s the same look I’d give to anyone that suggests Bambi’s mother getting shot was way worse than however many Sarah Connor’s really got their ticket punched in The Terminator. Think about it, you can throw every mathematical equation you want to at this issue and the problem still comes down to the variables that people don’t see that could possibly exist and could blow a crater-sized hole in their theory. Adult films are less violent than kid films? The next thing someone will tell me is that Mowlgi following after the village girl at the end of the Jungle Book was worse than any adult stalker movie.
I won’t deny there’s a disturbing amount of adult material in cartoons. I can’t, since that would be just as foolish. But the idea that kids’ movies are anywhere near the level of violence that is shown in adult films is kind of ludicrous. Yes they’ve gotten a bit risky in the past and yes there have been some seriously suspect moments in the films of today and back then that were geared for children. After all, in Brave the demon bear, Mordu, tears the king’s leg, which causes him to wear a wooden prosthetic the rest of the movie. But somehow I think Hostel, where a man is shown slicing a piece of flesh from a young man’s leg before sitting down to dine on it, is a lot worse.
Or we could go to a golden oldie, Snow White, where the Huntsman was supposed to carve Snow’s still-beating heart from her chest to give to the queen as proof. Wait, he let her go, remember? But then some poor pig had to give up its heart for her life. I seem to remember however a movie called Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in which a priest ripped a man’s still-beating heart out of his chest and then held it while the man was lowered into a pit of swirling lava. Hmm, violent? Maybe it’s implied, but it’s not always shown.
Ah, let’s get to another one with Tangled. There’s nothing really wrong with the movie aside from creepy Mother Gothel until she decides to just about gut Eugene when he comes through the window to save Rapunzel. But, um, really that doesn’t hold a candle to a lot of films in which a person is stabbed again, and again, and again. Even The Village was a lot more violent than this. Maybe I shouldn’t even count that one since Eugene lived.
In fact there are only a few actual animated kid movies that I can recall that would have been that disturbing. One of them is the Black Cauldron, and as I remember that one got pulled for being too graphic and too demonic. Then there was Transformers: The Movie. It didn’t get pulled for its brief language or the gruesome death of so many Autobots, but it did silently slip into oblivion.
The real difference between violence in kid films is that most of the time it’s implied, never really shown. In adult films you get to see it up close and personal a lot of times.
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