Everyone knows (spoiler alert on a movie that was released in 1942) that Bambi's mom dies, but "Bambi" is a story for children, right? Children's movies and cartoons are supposed to be fantastic, full of imagination and fun, but a new study says children's programming is "rife with on-screen death and murder."
The main characters in a cartoon intended for a child-filled audience are 2.5 times more likely to kick the cartoon bucket than the leads in adult dramas, according to Live Science.
"Just because a film has a cute clownfish, a princess or a beautiful baby deer as its main character doesn't necessarily mean that there won't be murder and mayhem," the study's lead researcher, Ian Colman, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Ottawa, told Live Science.
Coleman started thinking about the instances of death in children's movies when he watched shows with his daughter. In "The Land Before Time," an animated film about dinosaurs, "the mother of the main character gets savagely attacked and killed by a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the first five minutes," Colman told Live Science. "At that point, my daughter was completely hysterical and was begging me to stop the film."
Coleman and his team compared the top 45 animated films for kids to the top "grown-up" movies, analyzing how long characters made it until they were off'ed by scriptwriters. From 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" to the 2013 film "Frozen," each film was matched up to the top-grossing films for adults like "The Exorcism of Emily Rose," "What Lies Beneath," "Pulp Fiction" and "Black Swan."
Cartoon characters have a lot of accidents ("Oddly, falling out of windows or high places is quite common in children's films," Colman said), but cartoon characters were also 2.8 times more likely to be murdered than the characters in adult dramas.
"Children's films are often about children," Colman told Live Science. "If you want them to go on some adventure to overcome some challenges, it's tricky to have parents in the way ... I really wonder if killing them off is necessary, or whether we can just find some other way to get parents out of the picture.
Aren't kids too young to understand death? The bad guy might have died in the end, but death isn't just for quick plot clean ups.
"People have no idea of how scary children's movies can be," Victor Strasburger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, told Live Science. (Strasburger was not involved in the study).
Parents should check out a cartoon's rating on CommonSenseMedia.org, a nonprofit group that rates movies based on violence, language and sexual innuendos, Strasburger suggested.
Also, parents who watch the movies with their children have the unique opportunity to create dialogue with their kids and to provide comfort if something upsetting happens. "That way, if anything really difficult comes up, the kids can ask you about it, or talk with you about it," Coleman told Live Science. "And that might be a really positive experience."
