When I was a kid, cheery animated fantasy movies were something of a constant for me – like a perpetual scrolling backdrop to my childhood imagination. Having dismissed most of Disney as irredeemably sexist by my early teens, it’s only in my twenties that I’ve revisited the sort of films I grew up with. And much to my delight, there are a lot of children’s movies which – watching them now – I realise are actually surprisingly dark (and/or grown-up). Here are five of the best.
(This post contains SPOILERS for every film listed!)
5. Mulan
Okay, yes, it’s a Disney film. Yes, it has a wise-cracking dragon sidekick voiced by Eddie Murphy and a cute little cricket. Yes, it has perhaps the most anachronistic and inappropriate final credits song Disney has ever done. It also has some moments that are really damn dark. The film gives us ultimate mood-whiplash when cheerful song ‘A Girl Worth Fighting For’ – complete with comedy animations as the small band of newly-trained soldiers describe their ideal sweethearts – is interrupted mid-note as they round the crest of a hill to discover a burnt-down village. A red and smoking sky, the charred shells of homes, and a lost doll (which, in a previous scene, is found by villain Shan Yu who tells his army that “the little girl will be wanting her doll back”). As well as invoking the death of this unseen little girl, the film then shows us a battlefield – which, although free of blood and guts, still manages to conjure up the death of hundreds of men (including Shang’s father, whose helmet is found). It’s a scene that caught me out – obviously Mulan is set during a war, but this scene really hammers it home.
There are two earlier scenes which I also found (perhaps disproportionately) upsetting: firstly, when Mulan’s father – who walks with a stick, and has been called up to fight in the war – takes up his old sword and tries to practice, but trips over. It might sound corny but god, I really felt for him: the idea that he was planning to go to battle where he knew he would die… Secondly, Mulan’s early experiences with coercive femininity: she may have trouble perfecting her spitting and swaggering when she heads out to battle in her dad’s armour, but for me, the real nastiness is when she’s scrubbed and dressed and covered with make-up and then made to feel worthless because she’s unable to behave like all the other girls: ouch. Even without necessarily subscribing to the trans reading (which adds further depth to her sung line, “When will my reflection show who I am inside?”), wow was that nasty for my tomboy younger self.
(Something else important to flag up something else here – Mulan has been criticised for its depiction of China, for example at Bitch Flicks by Karina Wilson. I don’t agree with everything in that article – I don’t think Mulan’s male presentation is necessarily anti-feminist and I’m rather uncomfortable with the reference to ‘a pre-op kathoey’ – but I think it’s important reading for critical engagement with this film.)
The Gmork faces off against Atreyu as the Nothing draws nearer.
4. The Neverending Story
When you think of the Big Bad in a children’s movie, more often than not I’ll wager it’s one of the Disney classics like Scar, Jafar, or Maleficent. Someone a little camp, with devastating style and a show-stealing Villain Song. Someone who can be despatched in an appropriately dramatic (but gore-free) way. So in those terms, the primary antagonist – if it can even be called that – in The Neverending Story is a real game-changer: not a sentient villain with evil designs, but a blind entropic force that literally removes people and chunks of landscape from existence. In a genre where so often, death is not the end but a form of transcendence to becoming some sort of spirit guide – think of Mufasa’s advice from beyond the grave in The Lion King – confronting children with the spectre of simply not existing any more is genuinely terrifying. ‘The Nothing’ is not something which can be defeated in any normal fight, and for most of the film, there is a real sense of powerlessness against it. There’s also the lingering death of Atreyu’s loyal horse, Artax – with close-ups on the wide eyes and obvious distress of a real-life flesh-and-blood animal, it’s the kind of thing to stick in a kid’s mind (I know it did in mine).*
The trappings of the film are also pretty scary in their own right: the sentient Sphinx gate, strewn with bones and armour – the callous giant swamp-turtle Morla the Ancient One – and of course the Gmork, a ‘servant of the Nothing’ that takes the form of a black wolf and shares a climactic fight with Atreyu in a ruined city while the Nothing approaches to take them both.
True, the film eventually does give us that happy ending when Bastian – our audience stand-in who has been following the events of the film in a dusty tome stolen from an old bookseller – is finally convinced to get involved in the story himself, and renews Fantasia by giving the Empress a new name. We’re treated to less than half a minute of film showing that Atreyu, Artax, and our other favourite characters are alive again – and the film ends on a note of futurity, with “but that’s another story”. Even if you’ve not read the (excellent) book, which goes on to show in detail the fragility of Bastian’s heroism and achievements, I feel it’s implicitly clear that giving the Empress a new name won’t last forever – she will need to be christened anew each time the Nothing encroaches: the abyss has only temporarily been staved off.
3. The Last Unicorn
The Last Unicorn is one hell of a grown-up film, to the extent where it feels slightly wrong even including it in this list. It’s an animated movie about unicorns that was marketed to children when it came out, but god, it’s powerful – and sad – and disturbing. Myrna Waldron at the excellent Bitch Flicks has already beaten me to a longer analysis of this film, but in brief: this is a film about loss, and regret, and sacrifice. Almost every line resonates with a sort of mythic power. And it confronts death head-on. There are also some more traditionally threatening villains – the immense Red Bull, the vicious Harpy, the cackling Mommy Fortuna – but what really makes this film darker than the average kid’s movie is how it looks at death and change.
When the titular unicorn is transformed from her natural form into that of a mortal woman, she stumbles in pain and confusion, crying out “I can feel this body dying all around me!” – if there’s a more poignant one-sentence description of mortality in a movie for kids, I sure haven’t heard it. The whole film is suffused with a sense of the tragic inevitable of age and decay – when Molly Grue, an outlaw’s wife whose hopeful youth is long behind her, finally sees the unicorn, her reaction of anger and sadness – “Damn you! How can you come to me now, when I am this?” – is one of the more powerful moments in a film full of them. Watch it. And then there’s the witch Mommy Fortuna, who captures dangerous magical creatures and is actively hoping for one of them to kill her – so she can die gloriously and be remembered forever. Death, death, and death.
The ‘happy’ ending – releasing the rest of the unicorns so our heroine is no longer the last – is very much tempered by sorrow. Prince Lir sees his beloved Amalthea turned back into an immortal unicorn and lost to him forever, and the defeat of his adoptive father King Haggard is certainly not a glorious moment (his villainy being ultimately due to his unconquerable sadness and loneliness) – only Molly and Schmendrick exit on a hopeful note, riding off together to seek a new life. In the final lines, we hear how the unicorn is now the only one of her kind to know regret or love – and both she will carry forever, even when humans too are only the stuff of legend.
Would you look at this poster and expect something unambiguously cheerful?
2. Watership Down
Okay, here’s a confession –on a reactive level, I don’t understand people who don’t like this film. I especially don’t understand people who think it’s unsuitable for children. Weird as this may seem, Watership Down is one of my comfort movies – a film I’ve loved forever, and put on when I’m ill or need cheering up. As with The Neverending Story, I loved the book as well – with all its Tolkienesque footnotes and in-world mythology – and perhaps that’s coloured my reading of the film, but… really? It’s too scary for kids? I mean, just because it has some rather bloody fights, a relatively high character death count, a chilling depiction of a fascist state, some utterly nightmarish scenes of destruction, and – oh. Oh, I see.
So, despite how surprised I was the first time someone suggested to me that this was a “scarring” or “terrifying” film to show to kids – yeah, it kind of is. In fact, Watership Down seems to be one of the most often cited examples of “a really scarring children’s film”, and certainly if you go into it expecting something fluffy then you’re in for a shock. (There was a later, fluffier, and incredibly anodyne version years later for BBC TV, but it’s really not worth looking for – the real small-screen spiritual successor of Watership Down was The Animals of Farthing Wood, which (for a show about carnivores and herbivores sort-of working together) really didn’t shy away from realistic death and violence for its animal ensemble.)
So, to round up the reasons in a little more detail: in two disturbing scenes (one a prophecy, one a memory) we see the Sandleford warren’s destruction – showing bleeding fields ripped to pieces by monstrous machinery, and close-ups of asphyxiating rabbits, in a feat of surreal animation that recalls The Wall more than Bambi. There’s the almost casual way one of the characters dies part-way through and the frequent depictions of characters drenched in dirt and blood and frothing spittle, in and out of the context of fight scenes. There’s the creepy barn sequence, with music that still makes me a shiver a little bit. This film has a way of making the mundane seem big and horrifying – so there’s the cat who holds Hazel under his claws with sadistic joy, and the blood-soaked jaws of dogs and badgers. And then, there’s the socio-political horror (if such a grand name can be applied). The Sandleford warren is shown as something like an oppressive government, with the doddering old ruler and his strict enforcers. But that’s nothing compared to the two warrens our travelling band encounter on their journey. At one, the local rabbits seem to live in luxury, being fed regularly by a man – and when they leave one of our heroes slowly choking to death in a trap (another agonising and bloody scene), the extent of and reason for their indoctrination becomes clear. (You can find the scenes in question on the last three minutes of this link and the first three of this one.) And then there’s the warren Efrafa, run as a police state by the violent General Woundwort, with torture, executions and (worked out in a moment of Fridge Horror) probably state-sanctioned rape.
So, in short – Watership Down: it probably shouldn’t have been rated ‘U’.
1. The Brave Little Toaster
I said at the start that these were children’s films which I’ve watched again in my twenties. That wasn’t entirely true. Because, dear gentlefolk, I am still too scared of The Brave Little Toaster to watch it again. That film was fucking traumatic. It turns the process of growing up (and outgrowing your childhood possessions) into an act of abandonment – and not just with your beloved toys (a seam which the Toy Story franchise would later mine) but with your goddamned household appliances. I’m sure I can’t have been the only youngster to start worrying about my lamps and vacuum cleaners after watching that film. I swear, it had a hand in turning me into the packrat I am today. I also remember some truly terrifying scenes: a character getting struck by lightning, an incredibly tense scene involving crossing a waterfall and the vacuum cleaner cord, and the climactic scene where they’re all about to be mangled by a car-crusher and the eponymous Brave Little Toaster throws himself into the gears to save the rest… A friend of mine who picked up the VHS informs me that it’s all shot very emotively – if you can use the word ‘shot’ to describe the framing of an animated movie – and yes, apparently it’s definitely as upsetting as I remember. In the course of writing this, I found the full version on Youtube – perhaps I’ll sit down to watch it on a day I feel like wading through the emotional mire of my childhood viewings.
It might be a bit of a cop-out to end this list on what is basically a half-remembered account of childhood terror – but maybe still being troubled by the idea of watching it now is in fact the truest sign of a dark children’s movie, justifying its position at the top of this list. It’s not as universal in its themes as The Last Unicorn, or as chilling and bloody as the scariest moments of Watership Down – but it takes an inevitable part of the end of childhood (“putting away childhood things”, to paraphrase the Bible) and twists it into a nightmare-fuelling story about how everything you’ve ever broken or thrown away still loves you and misses you. Yowtch.
Honourable Mention: Fern Gully. This animated feature is an environmentalist fable that dealt with the destruction of the rainforest – at first by pure human greed, and then by releasing an Evil In A Can named Hexxus. I remember it fondly as the film which scared my childhood self into getting fervent about recycling.
Participation Prize: Legend. This early Ridley Scott film was clearly trying to be Darker And Edgier, and contains some interestingly surreal cinematic moments that foreshadow some of his later work (also, those unicorns in Blade Runner). It ends up being a compendium of 80s camp, with a villain looking like Hellboy via The Village People, a roster of comedy prosthetic-wearing goblins and gnomes, a paper-thin plot behind the surrealism – and it’s hard to take even the darker moments seriously when every prop, costume, character, and piece of scenery is covered in glitter.
* There are also rumours that the horse genuinely died during filming – this Snopes thread provides evidence from a now-defunct website (citing R. Eyssen) that the horse was certainly distressed enough to pitch the actor playing Atreyu into the swamp, but there’s no mention of equine death.
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