Editor’s Note: This article contains mention of sexual assault and depictions of graphic images.
Most millennials and Generation Z members have grown up watching Disney and Pixar movies as their main form of entertainment. However, upon looking at them through the lens of adulthood, it is troubling to reflect on the sheer amount of deeply traumatizing and gruesome elements allowed for child consumption.
While that doesn’t mean children need to be completely censored from the hardships of life, maybe not every movie they see should have parents dying — often by murder — or be exposed to such violent means like stabbing and gallows, as seen in Disney’s “Tangled.”
While it is likely kids aren’t fully absorbing or understanding the dark depictions they are habitually taking in, it still has the potential to desensitize children to cruel and inexcusable behavior.
It’s one thing to help a young person learn how to navigate grief or aim not to fill their heads with completely false depictions of reality, but are these films complicit for bringing morbid stories to mainstream media? The world is already dark enough, do movies really need to add to it?
A large majority of these films are adaptations of stories that have even darker origins. Stories like that of the Brothers Grimm contain such disturbing elements that it is incredibly questionable why Disney thought to adapt them for kids in the first place.
For example, in the earliest version of “Sleeping Beauty,” entitled “ Sun, Moon and Talia,” a young girl by the name of Talia falls into a sleeping curse after being pricked in the finger by flax. Later, while still unconscious, she is raped and impregnated by a king.
Talia is able to give birth to twins and one of the babies sucks the splinter out of her finger, waking her from her curse as a result. The king’s wife is outraged he fathered kids with Talia and tries to have the children cooked and eaten. The king responds by burning her alive and then marrying Talia.
In the Brothers Grimm story of “Cinderella,” her stepsisters try to convince the prince one of them is Cinderella, cutting off parts of their feet such as their toes and heel in order to fit in the glass slipper. The prince catches on to the scheme when he sees all of the blood pooling out of the slipper and ultimately is able to identify the real Cinderella.
At their wedding, the stepsisters are begging for forgiveness when pigeons come and pluck their eyes out, leaving them blind and broke.
In the original story of “Rapunzel,” the imprisoned young girl has a number of encounters with a prince while still locked in the tower and gets impregnated. When the witch finds out about the unborn child, she cuts off all of Rapunzel’s hair and leaves her to fend for herself in the wild.
At the same time, the prince returns to the tower to find Rapunzel and is accordingly pushed out the window by the witch and blinded by thorns. Despite the fact the lovers are reunited in the end and the prince is able to get his sight back, it is still a deeply distressing premise.
Even though Disney managed to take out the darkest of dark themes from the original stories, the nature of the stories kids are being raised with still raises a giant red flag.
Rapunzel is still kidnapped for the first 18 years of her life and has to witness Flynn Rider being brutally stabbed. Sleeping Beauty is nonconsensually kissed by a man she barely knows and Cinderella endures her parents’ deaths and is grossly mistreated by her stepmother. These three examples are just a glimpse into the horrors that play such a large role in children’s entertainment.
Although, on a lesser degree of trauma, Pixar movies contain dark depictions as well. In the film “Up,” Carl and Ellie suffer a miscarriage after setting up a nursery for their child. Not much later, Ellie falls ill and dies, leaving Carl to grieve the life he thought he would have.
In “Toy Story 3,” the bear Lotso becomes a dictator, imprisoning and torturing the toys. He moves on to brainwash Buzz Lightyear so his friends will remain under Lotso’s control. Despite being a story about a stuffed bear, the animation got quite dark with the plotline.
Aside from the darker aspects of the movies, there is a common theme of harmful gender stereotypes and toxic masculinity within the long-enduring stories. Many of the female main characters in these stories are constricted to stereotypically traditional roles for women.
The examination of this point has sparked controversy with the most recent Disney live action movie “Snow White,” with people hating on the main actress Rachel Zegler for making the same point.
Additionally, the animated depictions of women create unrealistic body idealizations for young viewers. A large majority of Disney princesses in these films have extremely unrealistic hip-to-waist ratios and have the potential to make young women feel bad about their own appearance in comparison.
None of this is to say children’s animation like Disney and Pixar is inherently bad or shouldn’t be watched, but it’s not productive to turn a blind eye to the flaws either. If a film like “Snow White” was originally adapted in 1937, it is okay to not agree with some of its messaging anymore.
If “The Little Mermaid” was to be put under a microscope, it could be noticed that whether intentionally or not, it is telling women you just have to be pretty and a man will fall in love with you without ever uttering a word to him. This is not okay.
People can and should still enjoy these films but that doesn’t mean you should neglect what is being conveyed to young minds. For some it could be a way to elicit productive growth in their children’s understanding of the world, as these movies can prompt difficult conversations that will ultimately help their development further down the line.
It is all about healthy communication between parents and their children so that there is an accurate lens of the world without causing crippling fear.
