Study: Children's films have higher death rates than adult movies

[CaitSeith]

Just to clarify, this is about the rate of movies that include death vs. movies without any death, not the body count. Anyways, in comparison of the death rates in 45 top children's animated films with 90 adult films that were box-office winners for the same years, a researcher in Ottawa discovered that [http://www.montrealgazette.com/health/family-child/Children+films+have+higher+death+rates+than+adult/10658289/story.html]:

[ul]
[li]Major characters are 2.5 times more likely to die in children's animated films compared to dramatic films for adults;[/li]

[li]Where a death occurs, it's 2.8 times more likely to be a murder in children's animated films; and[/li]

[li]The victim is five times more likely to be a parent in children's films.[/li]
[/ul]

Seems that adults don't like to deal much with death in their movies, but animation studios like Disney loves to include it as part of the plot in their movies. Just think about it: Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Finding Nemo, Frozen, the Lion King... all of these have memorable death scenes (a good character, an evil character, or even both).

What do you think? Is it funny, shocking or you just don't care? (personally I think it's funny)

EDIT: Link fixed
EDIT 2: Here is a link [http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7184] to the study itself.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Well, yes, kids aren't supposed to watch porn, and nobody is allowed to die in porn.

(Alternatively, the kids are watching really, really awful porn)

 

[Scarim Coral]

Err I'm pretty sure some of the Disney films was part of the reseach as I can't think of any children films (does Harry Potter films and Titan AE count as children films?) with death scenes other than a few Disney films.

 

[JoJo]

It makes sense, the plots for adult movies can be based around more complicated threats such as debt, relationships, divorce, imprisonment, the legal system etc which don't necessarily need to include death whereas children's films tend to have simpler plots with a much more clear black and white threat. Though equally, most kid's film's deaths happen off-screen or implied, like someone falling off a cliff into darkness for example.

 

[Eclipse Dragon]

Err I'm pretty sure some of the Disney films was part of the reseach as I can't think of any children films (does Harry Potter films and Titan AE count as children films?) with death scenes other than a few Disney films.

Spoiler: How to train your dragon 2

Gain a parent, lose a parent.

The Land Before Time
Quest for Camelot
Anastasia

The Prince of Egypt?

Watership Down, Felidae[footnote]I don't know if these two are actually meant for children...[/footnote]

 

[Scarim Coral]

Err I'm pretty sure some of the Disney films was part of the reseach as I can't think of any children films (does Harry Potter films and Titan AE count as children films?) with death scenes other than a few Disney films.

Spoiler: How to train your dragon 2

Gain a parent, lose a parent.

The Land Before Time
Quest for Camelot
Anastasia

I haven't watched that film yet (my own fault for clicking it).
Ah shit! I forgot about the Land before Time! Now I think about it more there are deaths in Osmosis Jones, Ice Age, Shrek (that little bird) and etc.

EDIT- We should totally make a list of children movies that has death in it and others that does not just as a comparison.

 

[Eclipse Dragon]

I haven't watched that film yet (my own fault for clicking it).

Eh it's not much of a spoiler anyway, all the trailers pretty much heavily hinted, half of it.

 

[Neverhoodian]

Yeah, I can't say I'm that surprised. Disney in particular has a fetish for killing off the protagonist's parents. Making a character an orphan is an effective way to garner sympathy from the audience, but it loses its impact when you resort to it constantly. The villain usually kicks the bucket as well falling down a botomless pit or something. Rather strange for a company that has a reputation for wholesome, family-friendly entertainment.

 

[IndianaJonny]

I wonder if, over time, the crackdown on these themes in kid's TV has been more strict than in films?

Some of the best TV from my youth was littered with 'fatalities'... and the occasional suicide bomber:

 

[Eddie the head]

Well, yes, kids aren't supposed to watch porn, and nobody is allowed to die in porn.

(Alternatively, the kids are watching really, really awful porn)

Or krogan porn? If it's anything like there party's.

 

[Zeraki]

Err I'm pretty sure some of the Disney films was part of the reseach as I can't think of any children films (does Harry Potter films and Titan AE count as children films?) with death scenes other than a few Disney films.

Spoiler: How to train your dragon 2

Gain a parent, lose a parent.

The Land Before Time
Quest for Camelot
Anastasia

I haven't watched that film yet (my own fault for clicking it).
Ah shit! I forgot about the Land before Time! Now I think about it more there are deaths in Osmosis Jones, Ice Age, Shrek (that little bird) and etc.

There was also 'The Secret of NIMH', which was a movie with talking rats plotting a murder conspiracy, talk of throat slitting, a character getting crushed to death by a giant cement block and a character taking a knife in the back and falling off of a cliff to his death.

Don Bluth films were usually really heavy on deaths.

 

[Queen Michael]

Well, that's a given, innit? Adult movies only contain "the little death."

 

[Lilani]

I'm not surprised, for a few reasons.

1. Kids generally don't understand death, and a lot of people try to use cinema, among other means, to mentally prepare children for the inevitibility of having to deal with it in the future. I even have a younger cousin whose mother died when she was a year old, still doesn't really understand death and hasn't really experienced that sort of loss because she was too young when it happened.

2. Kids understand trauma less than they even do death.. Death is a nice, easy way to do something bad to a person, especially when the death is a senseless murder towards a happy person. Thats just in general as well, not specific towards children, as trauma is much more difficult to stage the circumstances of its occurances and display in the ongoing story. Death kills a person off, and we don't have to worry about their feelings, their role in relation to others, what they'd do at that stage in the story or anything like that because they're dead. Them being out of the picture generally makes it easier to write the story.

3. Since the audience surrogate for a children's film is a child, it makes sense to aim for the thing that is closest to that audience, which is their parents. There's just some stories that kids just can't really understand because they're kids, and that limits their potential surrogates, and its much easier as an adult. I mean, do you expect the average eight-year old to understand and experience Telltale Games' The Walking Dead at the emotional level the way all of us did? I'm not trying to pull the "kids are stoopid" card, and I think people tend to severely underestimate them, but really their life experience limits their ability to understand many situations.

To add to this, children's stories are often coming-of-age stories, and sometimes having the parents present would solve the child's inner conflicts way too easily to make a dramatic story. Frozen is a prime example of this: if Elsa and Anna's parents had been alive the whole time, Elsa would never have been forced to take up the crown, Elsa would have had someone who knows her secret to go to whenever things got rougher, and there would have been someone around to explain Elsa's situation to Anna if she still had her breakdown. So while their parent's death in the movie was so fast it was almost comical, it was necessary to drive Elsa to that breaking point and force Anna to deal with her directly.

 

[FirstNameLastName]

The title seems somewhat misleading, it seems to refer to protagonist deaths or deaths of major characters, not just deaths in general. Although the link doesn't seem to work, so i can't verify.

This isn't all that surprising, given the results all it really seems to say is "children's movies often kill off the parents," for reasons others have already pointed out.

 

[CommanderZx2]

I couldn't find the actual study in question on that site, so I have a question for you... What does this study define as 'Children's films'? If they mean PG13, well the reason there's so much death in those movies is due to producers cutting their action movies from an R to a PG13 for a larger target audience.

In the past when it was an action movie they'd almost always go for the blood, gore and nudity with the R rating, because they were targeting adults as they should do. Now a days with the much greater costs of films it has become all about the money. Therefore taking movies that should actually be aimed at adults and cutting to movie to fit within the limits of the PG13.

 

[dragonswarrior]

Makes sence. Kids movies are generally poorly written as fuck, and if you're a bad writer, death is probably the easiest way to create character drama and conflict without even trying.

While I'm not entirely disagreeing with you, I would like to point out that some of the best children's films have death as a major or medium plot point. Lion King, Mulan, Up, Frozen, etc...

 

[Thaluikhain]

Makes sence. Kids movies are generally poorly written as fuck, and if you're a bad writer, death is probably the easiest way to create character drama and conflict without even trying.

Not seeing kid's movies being on the whole written worse than adult's ones, myself.

 

[Batou667]

Unsurprised. Children's stories deal with dramatic but not particularly nuanced themes, so overtly "bad stuff" like characters being kidnapped, thrown in prison, eaten and killed is par for the course. Think of any classic fairy tale or folk story and there'll be similar themes. Everything in young kids fiction is pantomimed, including the conflicts.

Unlike some people in this thread, I don't think the laziness or cynicism of content producers is to blame - I think children do gravitate towards very literal, visual forms of conflict and conflict resolution. A scene where the bad guy is engaged in debate and comes to realise his plans for world domination were wrong, and grudgingly accepts house arrest and a fine to cover compensation for his victims, would confuse or bore children. A scene where the bad guys are removed from the scene by kicking them into the sunset (think: Team Rocket blasting off agaaaaiiiin) makes much more immediate and intuitive sense.

Worth noting of course, that despite dealing with themes like infanticide, imprisonment, kidnap, slavery and execution, most children's fiction still has a light and sanitised tone. I don't think any kids are being traumatised or primed for a life of violence just because they enjoy reading about Grandma being gobbled up by the wolf, of whatever. Watching the evening news or a True Crime documentary would scar them much more.