Ten things that used to be okay in kids' animated movies (spoileriffic)

A pleasant diversion, though this will tie in with why I hate Disney so much: I present Ten Things That Used To Be Okay In Kids' Animated Movies But Became Taboo Somewhere Around The Mid-Nineties.  Try saying that with your mouth full.  Spoilers abound, so don't say I didn't warn you.  Thanks to Cracked.com for format inspiration.

10: Other Gods Mentioned By Name

God is an issue in kids' movies.  After all, everyone is scared of indoctrination.  People who don't indoctrinate are scared of everyone else doing so, and people who do indoctrinate are scared of people trying to indoctrinate their kids with other beliefs.  It's a tricky issue.  Anyway, back when bigotry was rife, it seemed somehow more acceptable to talk about other gods.  I guess when everyone was so sure that their way was the right way, they figured they were too moral to be corrupted by other influences.  Now that we're supposed to be tolerant, we're scared of other influences.  Yeah, makes no sense to me, either.

Died out: Admirably late, with culprits hanging on as long as 2003 (Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas).  Particularly in the highly fantastical tales, it's not unusual to have gods pop up and offer their assistance: Hercules has its pantheon - a pantheon specifically designed, I believe, just to piss off anyone who actually knows anything about Greek and Roman mythology - Watership Down has a whole bundle of rabbit gods and demigods, and The Prince of Egypt has intervention from the fellow in the Old Testament Himself - though technically that doesn't count, since I'm looking for mention of any gods but that one.

Worst offender: Disney's Aladdin (1992).

I'll be honest, I haven't seen this one recently on DVD or the Disney Channel, so for all I know they've edited this one just like they did the opening song (something for which I'm not sure I'll ever forgive Disney).  But, assuming it hasn't been changed, I'm pretty sure Aladdin is the only mainstream animated movie that casually throws out a heavenly name other than just "God", without that deity ever actually showing up.  I know, I know, technically Allah is the God of the Old Testament, but bear in mind that, for the sake of political correctness, even in live-action movies the writers will often play it safe and just refer to the dude upstairs as God, with all the Christian implications that carries.  Even in other takes-place-in-another-culture movies, like Pocahontas and Mulan, Disney tends to play it safe and just eschew gods altogether, seeking its divine intervention from spirits and ancestors instead.  Aladdin takes the ballsy but admirable route of having its characters refer to the culturally appropriate god, without having said god show up in clouds of theatrical smoke with a song-and-dance number, and without at any point making a big deal out of it.  Throw in the fact that America wasn't on the best terms with the Islamic nations even in 1992, and you have to admit that Aladdin takes the prize for this one.

What they do now instead: Mostly just avoid talking about gods altogether.  Pixar's movies are firmly grounded in the secular world, and Disney and Dreamworks have been following suit.  Disney might have a firm foothold in the right-wing Christian market, but it takes a decidedly subliminal approach to the God thing, knowing that the gods of marketing decree that thou shalt not alienate any demographic.  If deities are absolutely necessary to the story, a viable alternative is to refer to unnamed "gods" (always in the plural), "spirits", or "friends in high places".

"Friends on the other side" is something completely different.

9: Racism

 

Long necks don't play with...seriously, what are you?  A Saurolophus?  What kid knows what that is?

Racism is the ultimate politically correct hot button topic.  Everyone's on the moral high ground here, because, at least in theory, racism officially ended in the 60s.  Practically it might have been later, but still, it wasn't too horribly long before failing to accept every colour and eye shape as equal was a brutally quick form of social suicide.  Consequently, just about every kids' movie these days has at least one token black/hispanic/native American/Asian/whatever-you-like character who, aside from having a suitably ethnic voice actor, is basically indistinguishable from all the Caucasian characters.  That's not what I'm talking about here.  I'm talking in-your-face, stereotyping, segregated, this-is-the-way-the-world-is racism, portrayed in kids' movies.  The kind where Tommy asks his mom why he can't play with Chung Li down the street even though they both just got the same light-up yo-yo, and Tommy's mom says, "Because we don't play with Chinese kids".  That kind of racism.

 This kind.

Died out: This is a tough one: racism didn't go away with Civil Rights - it just became more subtle.  And it's hard to know where to draw the line between the type of racism I'm talking about above, and "We need a convenient excuse to make this character an outcast, and we won't sell as many posters to pre-teen girls if he's an unattractive dweeb".  

 Like this guy, for example.

This could go any number of ways, but I'm going to call it with The Lion King, in 1994.  Never mind the fact that Scar has darker fur than all the other lions, I'm talking about the hyenas.  In a world where species-ism doesn't seem to be much of a problem, we have a whole class of animals who are voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin, scavenge off the lions' welfare, and live in the Pride Lands' incarnation of the projects.  From that point on, Disney and imitators got the hint from annoyed moviegoers and included at least one morally acceptable character in every negatively stereotyped minority.

Like this chick.

Worst offender: Much as I'd like to use the original Fantasia, I can't, because the really offensive scene (image above) was cut from the theatrial version.  Nor am I going to go with Song of the South, because it's already attracted far more controversy than it deserves.  No, the prize for this one goes to Peter Pan (1953)...

Because seriously, who can argue with that?

 

What they do now instead: By and large, animated movies avoid the issue altogether, either by sticking to non-racial casts (Pixar's modus operandi, like in Monsters, Inc., Toy Story, and Cars), or by making the central issues of the story completely irrelevant to race.  The simple fact is, in The Princess and the Frog, Tiana's conflict would have been almost exactly the same had she been a lower-class white girl.  Her mother was a seamstress, not a maid, so it's being set pre-Civil Rights was completely irrelevant, and the dream of owning a restaurant could have belonged to any down-on-her-luck gal, regardless of race.  The really sad thing is: had Disney given her a race-related issue to deal with, one that would actually have made her being the first black Disney princess relevant, the public outcry would have shut down Disney animation permanently.

8. Violence

Again, I need to make a distinction here.  It doesn't count as violence if there's no actual peril to the characters.  If the fight is purely comic, if it's so mismatched the hero doesn't stand even to get hit, let alone hurt, if there's no intent to maim, it's not violence.  I'm talking real, up-close-and-personal, characters trying to kill each other.  It needn't be graphic: it just seems to me that even bloodless fights in animation ain't what they used to be.

Died out: This one's easy: 1998, in a three-way tie between Pixar's A Bug's Life, Dreamworks' Antz and Dreamworks' The Prince of Egypt.  The Prince of Egypt has Egyptians beating slaves, but A Bugs' Life takes the cake with this:

When I saw this scene I actually feared for Flik's life.  And that's a bold move for a kids' movie.  So close to what we assume to be a happy ending, we have the hero outmatched, bruised, beaten, and possibly inches from death by strangulation?  There was a very real possibility he would not survive the encounter, and that was frightening.  In contrast to just about any Pixar movie before or since, the happy ending was an actual, honest-to-God relief.  Especially with the extremely violent Antz coming out the same year (which featured the hero reassuring the disembodied head of a decapitated ant soldier after a brutal massacre by termites), it may well have been too much for family audiences, because since then, all the happy endings have been reassuringly inevitable.

Worst offender: Again, an easy one: Don Bluth's The Secret of Nimh (1982).  This one stands apart in that none of the violence is comic.  If those mice and rats are trying to hurt each other, they are trying to hurt each other.  There is biting, scratching, stabbing, slashing, drowning in mud, squishing by bricks...the fun never ends.  But the important thing is that there is never a moment's doubt that the characters are in very real peril.  The Secret of Nimh is the darkest of Don Bluth's movies: the only other that really comes close for actual danger to characters is The Land Before Time.

 Sparks!  The big rat means business!

What they do now instead: Stick to comic violence, or violence from a distance.  Or avoid situations where violence is relevant altogether.  Pixar has tried all three: The Incredibles relied on comedy and projectiles, and Cars had a completely violence-free story.

 Seriously, that's blood on that sword!

7. Smoking

 Cruella doesn't smoke.  She flames.

Like with the God issue, we're worried about our kids being indoctrinated.  Influenced.  Told to do stuff.  We're way more worried about movie influences than peer pressure, which may explain why so many modern kids' movies feel so...well, so weak.  Anyway, smoking is such a prevalent issue that the UK has tried to push through legislation requiring that any movies that show characters smoking be automatically slapped with a rating of 18 (the British equivalent of NC17), thus very effectively making them not kids' movies any more.  They're even considering editing classics to remove smoking scenes.  I'm going to let the last scene of Thank You For Smoking comment on that for me.  Watch from about 3:05:

Died out: This is about the only one to which I can put a solid date: May 12th, 2007.  On that day the MPAA announced that it would include depictions of smoking as a determining factor in a film's rating, and, since a PG-13 rating is just about the kiss of death for an animated movie, studios scrambled to comply.  In July of 2007, Disney formally announced that it would no longer depict smoking in any of its movies.  Practically, the last animated movie to really show much in the way of smoking was probably Hercules (1997), which has Hades lighting up using his thumb as a lighter.

He smokes his feelings.

Worst offender: Disney.  Disney, Disney and Disney.  If I had to narrow it down to just one, I'd pick Pinocchio, because that's kids smoking and enjoying it, but seriously, just look at this:

No wonder they're trying to tone it down: maybe never even thinking about putting anything remotely resembling a cigarette in anything ever again will almost make up for that lot.

What they do now instead: This.  And I wish I were kidding.

 Have I mentioned how much I hate Disney?

6. Alcohol

And it's only ten in the morning.

 The argument against showing drinking in kids' animated movies is identical to the one against showing tobacco, just toned down for those parents who are violently against tobacco but like a glass of wine with dinner.  Conversely, alcohol has always been depicted less than tobacco.  Disney has yet to make a formal statement regarding whether they plan to edit all the alcohol out of their old movies as well.

Died out: Since it was never as pervasive as tobacco, it's hard to put a date on this one, but I'm going to be generous with this one and go with Pixar's Ratatouille, in which the protagonist Linguini gets not only drunk, but hungover too.  This puts the official death of alcohol in kids' animated movies at 2007, but Ratatouille is also a late, brave exception.  The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Aladdin, both of which quite happily showed tobacco, had only passing mentions of alcohol itself, and none of the effects.

 There is wine in those glasses, right?

Generosity aside, if you accept Ratatouille as something of an aberration, I'd put the onscreen death of animated alcohol at around 1998.

Worst offender: No competition - it has to be Dumbo (1941).  The beer that Dumbo drinks has to be laced with LSD - either that, or alcohol has a vastly different effect on baby elephants than it does on humans.  Was anyone not permanently scarred by the elephants on parade?

If Stephen King were an elephant...

What they do now instead: The alcohol issue has kind of been overshadowed by the tobacco issue, so there hasn't been any controversial re-editing or re-rating.  Instead, it's just kind of faded from view.  With the exception of Ratatouille, I have trouble thinking of any recent animated movie that involved overt drunkenness: it seems to have been easier just to let it fade away.  If Pixar's Cars is any indication, the perpetual stoner is taking the place of the perpetual drunk in popular media - I'm guessing fewer wives have been beaten by stoned husbands than by drunk ones, so it seems, legality aside, to incite less controversy.

Dude, this organic fuel is, like, awesome!

5. Lust

Jessica and her two co-stars

This is, by far, the most difficult one on the list.  While kids' movies in general go heavy on the love thing, there's a general agreement that the birds and the bees conversation belongs to the parents, and to risk premature exposure to adult themes is to risk the wrath of countless parents who weren't quite prepared for the question of why Jessica Rabbit's chest makes that "boing" noise when something hits it.

Died out: Another late-ish one: I'm calling it with Dreamworks' 2000 film The Road to El Dorado.  The feelings Tulio has for Chel most certainly do not start out as romantic, and there's some overt flirtation that left many parents with a sour taste in their mouths.

You tell me those aren't flirty eyes.

Even so, lust is such a rare one that it's hard to pinpoint exactly where it left the map.  I feel pretty confident saying it's no longer around in kids' animated movies, but I'd be hard put to say precisely when it disappeared.

Worst offender: It comes down to two.  One is Disney's Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)  - Jessica Rabbit takes the baton from Betty Boop as the most overt animated sex symbol on record, and no excuses are made for that fact.  Her boobs go "boing" when you hit them, and more jokes are made about her sexuality than almost anything else in the movie.  Having said that, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is not my winner in this category, because Jessica's sexuality, while unabashed, is really just a running gag.  For the winning depiction of adult, heavy-breathing, no-holds-barred lust, the prize has to go to Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996).  There is diddly squat that is romantic about Frollo's feelings for Esmeralda, and while (unlike in Roger Rabbit) there is nothing overtly sexual in the animation, the consuming, fiery, burning lust depicted through the wonderful Hellfire song is far more powerful than bouncing boobs or animated erections could ever be.

That is not the face of a man in love.

What they do now instead: Stick to the romantic love.  It's rare that animated movies show lust, so it's been easy to phase it out.  The occasional flirtation (Cars, for example) is perfectly kosher, so as long as things are kept mild and lighthearted there's no problem.  Characters as complex as Frollo are animation's equivalent of a Tasmanian Tiger: every so often, someone claims to have seen one, but most experts agree that they're extinct.

Try telling this guy he's extinct.

4. Onscreen Death

Characters die in movies, even kids' movies.  Bad guys die often, villainous sidekicks less often, and good guys only occasionally.  But what is almost universally true about those deaths is that they happen safely offscreen.  Death isn't a taboo subject, like sex or alcohol: it's just tricky.  "Out of sight, out of mind" is a lot easier to deal with for a kid than the whole concept of being dead.  Keeping the deaths offscreen also avoids that difficult moment of transition: the point at which something that was alive becomes the exact opposite.  Having said that, animation - and particularly recent animation - treads even more carefully around the issue of onscreen death than live action.  Those few animated movies that involve death at all usually keep it determinedly off-screen.

Died out: Unlike the characters involved, this one won't stay dead.  Technically, I guess the most recent occurence was in Disney's The Princess and the Frog (2009).  You can debate to a certain degree whether the annoying Cajun firefly died when his eyes closed or when his light went out, but it was still pretty much onscreen.

Oh, boo hoo.

Having said that, I am - entirely subjectively, of course - choosing to discount The Princess and the Frog entirely for purposes of this list.  I'll write a separate article about it later, but the short version is this: I consider The Princess and the Frog to be a complete anomaly.  It was an attempt by Disney to re-capture everything that Disney feature animation used to be, and it failed.  It was a moderate commercial success, but not the sweeping triumph for which Disney was hoping.  As a result, at least as far as I can tell from their announced releases, Disney has no plans to return to their old form for good.  Instead, they're making the very best of their acquisition of Pixar, and continuing with Pixar's shinier, spunkier style of doing things.  The Princess and the Frog is a movie out of its time: it belongs in the early nineties, perhaps sandwiched between two more successful princess movies.  Chronologically, that irritating little firefly died in 2009, but stylistically he kicked the bucket around 1995.

So, with that little diversion over, I'm calling this one at Don Bluth's Titan, A.E. (2000).  Don Bluth is the undeniable master of this trope: he plays death like a fiddle, and knows exactly when not to pull his punches.  All of Don Bluth's best movies contain onscreen death, so it is only fitting that one of his should be the one to end the trend.

Splat.

Worst Offender: Fittingly, for the end of an era, Titan, A.E. wins this one as well.  Bluth, master of the onscreen death, really outdoes himself this time: nothing quite compares to the brutality of a character having his neck snapped from behind with an audible crack.  I had to rewind that scene and watch it again just to be sure I'd seen what I thought I'd seen.

 Seriously, click on the picture.  I had to show this one in all its glory.

What they do now instead: It's a return to old form - the bad guys die offscreen, and the good guys aren't really dead.  They always recover in the end.  The one major exception to this rule is Ellie, from Pixar's Up, but she dies offscreen so she still doesn't count for this list.  But Disney, Pixar et al have gone back to dealing with the death issue by not dealing with it, something that bothers me personally but is quite understandable in the context of children's movies.

By the way, I'm well aware of the fact that the first picture for this section is misleading: in Disney's Tarzan, while Clayton does end up getting hung from a vine, the moment of death itself occurs offscreen.  I included it here because it's so damn brutal you almost wish they'd shown the whole thing: it's right up there with Titan, A.E.'s neck snapping.

This is the only one I can think of where the parent dies onscreen.  Harsh.

 3. Flowing blood

 It doesn't start hurting until you see the blood.

It is widely believed - though of course unconfirmed - that showing flowing blood will automatically knock your MPAA rating up a category.  What was G becomes PG, what was PG becomes PG-13, and so on.  The MPAA has been getting stricter of late, and, for animated movies, easing up on the blood is a straightforward way to help avoid the damning PG-13 rating they all fear so much.  Especially for films that do attempt to tackle more adult or controversial subjects, showing no blood can help keep things firmly in kid territory.  It's a small sacrifice to potentially preserve the depth of your story.

 Look: no blood!

Having said that, Disney characters' curiously bloodless wounds have always bothered me.  Even Bluth is surprisingly guilty in this case: though he shows blood in the fight between Justin and Jenner, it is oddly static.  The wounds in The Land Before Time, even inflicted by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, do not seem to bleed at all.

Died out: The longest-extinct of all the themes on this list, flowing blood left the building in the early eighties, making a brief appearance during the climactic duel in The Secret of NIMH (1982), and earlier, during Mrs Brisby's escape from the farmer's house.  Bluth did a good job with the blood in NIMH, but after fears that its dark tone had hurt its box office numbers, he opted for the bloodless route in his subsequent features.  Since no one else had really had the balls to try it in the first place, that pretty much spelled the end for flowing blood in kids' animated movies.

It drips.  That counts.

Worst offender: Two-way tie here, though, since they're from the same production company and based on books by the same author, I feel fairly safe counting them together.  The first of these is Watership Down (1978), based on the book of the same name by Richard Adams.  Now, the book is no Care Bears convention, but the movie is an all-out gore fest.

 Not convinced yet?  Try four minutes of bloody rabbit-death:

Watership Down single-handedly makes up for the bloodlessness in about half the rest of all kids' animated movies.  Coverage of the other half goes to Watership Down's brother film, The Plague Dogs (1982).  Inching ahead by a hair, The Plague Dogs has scenes that make the rabbit torture porn above look tame by comparison.  Combine it with a story twice as bleak as that of Watership Down, and...well, you get a dog accidentally shooting a hunter in the face with a rifle.

Not the best of days.

The observant among you will notice that the dog in the background appears to have had recent brain surgery.  The Plague Dogs is not a light movie, but it was marketed as family fare, so it's fair game in this category.  It also might explain why this category is so sparse.

What they do now instead: The smart thing - no blood.  I'm not a fan of dumbing things down, but when you look at Watership Down and The Plague Dogs, it's easy to see why studios are wary of flowing blood in animation.  Quantities of blood that might be realistic or even funny in a live action movie quickly become exaggerated and grotesque in animation.  It's a lot easier to use animation's inherent suspension of disbelief to imagine blood where there ain't none, than to tone down an arterial spurt.

Arterial spurts like these.

2. Death of the protagonist/love interest/everyone's favourite sidekick 

In a departure from #4 up there, when a beloved character dies they normally get the dignity of an on-screen death, rather than the screaming fall off-screen reserved for the villains.  Animated movies hate killing off characters we love, so when they do there's normally some pomp and circumstance involved.  Again, this is something from which Disney tends to shy away, and which Bluth does better than anyone.

Died out: Just to reiterate, The Princess and the Frog does not count.  It's a blip, an anomaly, an anachronism.  So this trope did not die with that annoying little firefly: it passed away with dignity some decades before.  I'm calling this one with Disney's The Lion King (1994); remember, for this one it doesn't need to be an onscreen death.  Mufasa was a strong, sympathetic character whose death deeply affected both the story and the audience, and is one of the biggest tear-jerker moments in animated history.

I'm crying just looking at the picture.

There's a reason I went with The Lion King, and not with Tarzan (1999): while it's true that Kerchak's death in Tarzan is both sad and significant, it also falls into the cliche of the old leader passing the torch on to his young protege - Obi-Wan dying so Luke can continue, for example.  It's a plot contrivance, not death because death happens.  Yes, Mufasa's death enables Simba to continue with the rest of the story, but it is not a passing of the torch: it happens when Simba is young, and vulnerable, and unprepared, so there is a resounding story of grief and acceptance that tends not to happen in the pass-the-torch scenarios.

Worst offender: This one's easy, and it comes from the master himself - Don Bluth's The Land Before Time (1988).  This one has it all: like Mufasa and Bambi's mother, it's a parent figure who dies.  Also like those two, she dies trying to protect Littlefoot from great peril.  She is Littlefoot's only parent, and one who is shown throughout the first scenes as a kind, loving, protective mother.  Her death has all the hard-hitting, emotional aspects that make the deaths of Mufasa and Bambi's mother such iconic moments in animation history, plus just a little bit extra.  She dies on screen, with Littlefoot watching.  By the time Simba or Bambi realises that anything is wrong, the death has happened.  Nothing they can do.  Not so with Littlefoot. He is there for his mother's last moments: he is aware the exact moment she stops living.  It is utterly heartbreaking, and Littlefoot's grief and depression are all the more resonant because of it.

This one gives me the weepies, too.

What they do now instead: Honestly, I don't have an answer to this one.  It's used so seldom that it's hard to say whether a studio will pull it out again for shock value some time in the future.  I'm inclined to doubt it, though: Dreamworks avoids death, and after The Princess and the Frog, Disney will more than likely stick to the Pixar route, which is also distinctly anti-death.  It takes serious balls to kill a character your audience genuinely loves, and even more to do it with conviction (no miracle resurrections).  For now, the policy seems to be to avoid plots where major character deaths are necessary.

1. BOOBS!

Well, anatomy in general, before you get too worked up.  Disney may have been a chronic purist, but when he let one slide, he let it slide big time.

Died out:  The human form has been gradually receding from animation for decades, so it's hard to put a date on this one.  Dreamworks' Road to El Dorado may have been one of the last animated displays of overt cleavage, but Disney had been raising its necklines for a good five years prior to that.

Worst offender: Disney's Fantasia (1940).

  
Like I said, when Disney let one slide, he let one slide big-time.  This is precisely the only example I can find of animated nipples in a kids' animated feature.

What they do now instead: This:

 Need I say more?

This is Copyright Cat, signing off.