The Bizarre Tragedy of Children’s Movies

A few weeks ago, I came across a GIF from the 1994 film The Lion King that made me weep. It shows the lion cub Simba moments after he discovers the lifeless body of his father, Mufasa; he nuzzles under Mufasa’s limp arm and then lies down beside him. I was immediately distraught at that scene, and my memories of the ones that follow: Simba pawing at his dead father’s face, Simba pleading with him to “get up.”   

That scene lives in my thoughts with a few similar ones: the baby elephant Dumbo cradled in his abused mom’s trunk as she’s trapped behind bars; Ellie, the beloved wife in Up, grieving a miscarriage and eventually passing away within the first five minutes of the film; Bambi, the young deer, wandering around the snowy forest looking for his mother, who has just been shot dead. When they pop up in my mind, I’m always left with the same thought: Why are so many kids’ movies so sad, and how does that sadness affect the kids they’re intended to entertain?

Young viewers experience these movies differently, depending on how sensitive they are, their personal history with the film’s themes, and how well they understand the material, Randi Pochtar, a psychologist at NYU Langone Health’s Child Study Center, told me. It’s up to the caregiver to monitor their reaction, looking specifically for changes in behavior. “Are they now suddenly afraid to go downstairs themselves; are there changes in sleep or appetite?” Pochtar said. If so, it might be time to limit the amount of upsetting media they’re exposed to.

In general, though, Pochtar thinks that sad films are just one of many ways kids are exposed to life’s tough realities. Seeing characters prosper after tragic events can also show kids that although life can be hard, joy and meaning are still possible.

[Read: What kids learn from hard conversations]

Still, it wasn’t clear to either Pochtar or myself whether the filmmakers behind heavy kids’ movies typically intend for sad scenes to be teaching moments. I figured the most direct answer would come from someone who’s made those creative choices, so I reached out to Rob Minkoff, The Lion King’s co-director.

Minkoff agreed that kids can learn important lessons from sad films. But he also pointed out that many of them aren’t just made for children; they’re also supposed to be compelling for the adults watching. If you focus only on making a movie that’s good for kids, he told me, “it’s going to be PAW Patrol.” (Not familiar with PAW Patrol, the intensely popular children’s series about dogs with emergency-services jobs? Ask any parent of a young child if they like it more than they do The Lion King.)

Before the period commonly known as Disney’s Golden Age—1937 to 1942, when hits including Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi were released—animation was reserved for short comedic vignettes, and not everyone was sold on the idea that the medium could sustain a feature-length running time. Disney had to keep the stakes high enough to engage people of all ages. (The studio’s first animated feature was the 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which concerned an attempted murder and ended with a woman falling off a cliff and being crushed by a boulder.) And out of economic necessity, Minkoff told me, Disney often mined the public domain for storylines. Snow White’s source was a disturbing fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm; Pinocchio was based on Carlo Collodi’s alarmingly cruel novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio, in which the disobedient puppet kills his cricket friend and, for separate reasons, is eventually hanged.

In Minkoff’s estimation, Disney’s animated features became softer and safer after the studio’s golden age; he and the Lion King team wanted to get back to that envelope-pushing era. They drew inspiration from Bambi, but he took issue with how that film dealt—or didn’t deal—with the death of Bambi’s mother. After she dies off-screen, Bambi eventually learns what has happened—but then the film fades back in, after some time has passed, with a happy song about spring. “I felt very strongly that [The Lion King] needed to dive into this story, into the death as a subject … to talk about it and not to ignore it or deny it,” Minkoff said. One way he wanted to do this was by having Simba interact with Mufasa’s dead body. Yes, the exact scene that I’d found so brutal.

Not everyone on his team agreed. “We were presenting the storyboards for it, and someone’s comment was, ‘It’s too confrontational; it’s too intense.’” They suggested having the sequence happen in shadow or in the distance, but Minkoff fought to keep it conspicuous. He knew that people could underestimate the power of animation as a storytelling form, and he wanted to prove them wrong.

[Read: A cartoon gateway to real-world issues]

More recent animated movies, and kids’ movies in general, have included similarly grim moments. Take 2010’s Toy Story 3, which infamously involved a plot point that saw its characters stuck on a conveyor belt leading into an incinerator—holding hands, heartbreakingly, while realizing they might be living their last moments—or Inside Out, the 2015 computer-animated film in which a lovable character sacrifices himself, never to be seen again.

But young viewers can usually handle it. Meredith Bak, who studies children’s media at Rutgers University at Camden, told me that kids might identify with sad movies or find them meaningful; they might be introduced to new perspectives. “I think it’s important for filmmakers to really respect their young audiences by recognizing their ability to engage with this full range of emotions,” she said.

Now that I think about it, I don’t recall being deeply upset when I saw The Lion King in theaters as a kid. I just remember loving it. With this in mind, in a group chat full of family members with kids, I took a poll: When watching kids’ movies with sad themes, who is more emotionally affected—the kids or the parents?

It wasn’t unanimous, but it was close. “One hundred percent me,” my cousin said. “My kids have 300 questions about death but are unphased, while I’m on my second box of tissues.” Although some of my relatives’ kids get emotional, more of them react inquisitively, or with theories about how the characters could have avoided their fates. Their parents, however, are a wreck.

Children tend to understand a lot more than we give them credit for, and many childhoods aren’t easy. Still, if it’s true that these movies can hit adults particularly hard, perhaps it’s because adults tend to have the experience or the cognitive ability to appreciate them from multiple perspectives. When watching that scene with Simba and Mufasa, I don’t only think about the devastation of losing a parent. I think about the tragedy of leaving a child behind. I see the scene refracted through my life and the lives of people I care about; hell, I even see my dog, and how confused he might be if I ever left him.

The question might not be whether these movies are too sad for kids. It might just be whether they’re a bit too sad for adults.