My Take | Deaths in children’s movies can be sources of trauma
- While today’s mainstream films for adults infantilise the audience, those for children, now and in the past, have frequently been brutal in the way they deal with death and suffering as to possibly shock or even traumatise the young viewer
Why do so many characters die in children’s films? I came across this question while reading an article in Cliodynamics, an academic journal. As a parent, this question has long haunted me. My wife and I were seriously shocked as children after watching our beloved characters die in Japanese anime. I honestly think that should be considered childhood trauma as Japanese anime has long dominated Hong Kong entertainment.
Anyway, the journal article, on culture and the internet, didn’t give an answer. But it did disabuse me of a long-held assumption of mine: characters often die in Japanese children’s films whereas they rarely do in American or Western ones, especially those in Disney movies.
Well, it turns out the kill count in American movies for kids can be extremely high too, though it’s usually the mother or both parents who bite the dust, leaving the hero child to fend for himself/herself. Remember that eternal shock of horror when little Bambi realises his mother has been shot and killed by a hunter? That has been the paradigm. In Japanese films, however, even the main characters like Bambi can die.
Consider this 2014 study, published in the British Medical Journal. The researchers examined 45 top-grossing animated children’s films and 90 dramatic films for adults in English-speaking countries, mostly in the United States, between 1937 and 2013.
It turned out that two-thirds of children’s movies depicted the death of an important character while only half those for adults did. They also found that the main cartoon characters in children’s films were 21/ 2 times more likely to die, and three times as likely to be murdered, than their counterparts in movies for adults.
Armed with these statistics, you may want to reconsider the distinction between movies for adults and those for children. The former, especially those being turned out by Hollywood these days, are more infantilising and anodyne than the latter.
In Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur, little Arlo’s dad is washed away by a raging river. In Disney’s Frozen, Anna and Elsa’s parents are lost at sea. Nemo’s mum is eaten by a barracuda in the first five minutes of Finding Nemo. The brother of the main character of Big Hero 6 dies in an explosion. In The Land Before Time, main character Littlefoot’s mum is attacked and killed by a T Rex.