Children’s Cartoons are Obsessed with Death & Murder: Study
The next time you’re watching an innocent little children’s cartoon, be mindful that it’s likely to be “rife with on-screen death and murder,” according to a new study.
In fact, animated characters are 2.5 times more likely to die than those in adult dramas, researchers found. And if your kids seemed especially attached to you after watching a cartoon movie, it’s because the victims are five times more likely to be parents.
“Just because a film has a cute clownfish, a princess, or a beautiful baby deer as its main character doesn’t necessarily mean that there won’t be murder and mayhem,” said the study’s lead researcher, Ian Colman, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Ottawa.
Remember the dino tale The Land Before Time? “The mother of the main character gets savagely attacked and killed by a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the first 5 minutes,” Colman explained to Live Science. “At that point, my daughter was completely hysterical and was begging me to stop the film.” No wonder I grew up with an irrational fear of T-Rexes mauling my parents.
Using the 45 children’s animated films with the highest box office grosses, Colman and his crew noted how long into the runtime the key characters died, their roles, and manner of death.
The researchers then matched each cartoon with the two top-grossing films of the same year for adults. These titles even included uber-violent films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose, What Lies Beneath, Pulp Fiction, and Black Swan.
The researchers concluded that two-thirds of the cartoons contained a death, compared to half of adult dramas. The most common cause of cartoon death? Animal attacks and falls from high places. (Much like reality, right?) In other films, it was guns, cars, and illnesses.
On top of all this, animated characters were 2.8 times more likely to be murdered than their live-action counterparts.
The study was published in BMJ, a serious medical journal. Seriously.
The moral of this story: don’t get too attached to any beloved cartoon characters, as they’re likely to be mercilessly slaughtered before your very eyes at the drop of a hat.
[via NBC News]
