{"id":66659,"date":"2015-12-09T01:39:04","date_gmt":"2015-12-09T06:39:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=66659"},"modified":"2015-12-09T01:39:04","modified_gmt":"2015-12-09T06:39:04","slug":"why-death-is-so-common-in-childrens-animated-movies-and-how-parents-can-help-kids-understand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2015\/12\/09\/why-death-is-so-common-in-childrens-animated-movies-and-how-parents-can-help-kids-understand\/","title":{"rendered":"Why death is so common in children\u2019s animated movies and how parents can help kids understand"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo<\/a>
Photo from Flickr\/Joel Olives<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

LOS ANGELES \u2013 In the latest Pixar release, \u201cThe Good Dinosaur,\u201d little Arlo\u2019s dad is dramatically washed away by a raging river.<\/p>\n

And Arlo isn\u2019t the only animated hero to lose a family member in the film\u2019s first act.<\/p>\n

The protagonist in last year\u2019s \u201cBig Hero 6\u201d loses his brother in an explosion. Then, there\u2019s Nemo, whose mom is eaten by a barracuda in the opening minutes of \u201cFinding Nemo.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cFrozen,\u201d Anna and Elsa\u2019s parents are lost at sea. And, who can forget the heartbreak of \u201cBambi,\u201d when a shotgun blast kills the little deer\u2019s mother.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of death in animated movies for kids. In fact, research has found that main characters in these films are more than twice as likely to suffer traumatic death than in dramas aimed at adults.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s a parent to do?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that cartoons are trying to scare young viewers. Death of a parent is often used as a dramatic device to focus on the young protagonist, says University of Ottawa professor Ian Colman, who conducted a study on the subject published last year in the British Medical Journal.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho deals with kids\u2019 problems? Parents do,\u201d Colman said. \u201cIf you want to make it a really compelling story, you\u2019ve got to get the parents out of the picture so kids can go through this process themselves. One way to do that is to kill them off.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when parents or older siblings die onscreen, younger viewers fare best when real grown-ups are there to talk about it.<\/p>\n

Children generally don\u2019t understand the permanence and inevitability of death until they reach elementary-school age, said youth bereavement expert Dr. David Schonfeld, and popular movies often do little to depict realistic ways of dealing with grief.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just model the distress,\u201d said Schonfeld, director of USC\u2019s National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement. \u201cWe leave the character in that distress, and then the resolution is: Grow up and have your own cub. That really isn’t how we grieve.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, there are not a lot of animated films that show how we can help kids deal with loss. It becomes more of a vehicle to draw them in,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe could do a better job with trying to match children\u2019s understanding with what\u2019s in the film.\u201d<\/p>\n

Colman was inspired to launch his research after watching \u201cThe Land Before Time\u201d with his 4-year-old daughter.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe mother of the main character gets really brutally attacked and killed by a T-Rex in the first five minutes of the film,\u201d he said. \u201cMy daughter was hysterical and begging me to stop the film.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coleman and his research team compared the top-grossing animated films from 1937\u2019s \u201cSnow White\u201d to 2013\u2019s \u201cFrozen\u201d with top live-action dramas from the same years and found that murder or death of important characters happened sooner and more often in the animated movies.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a good opportunity to talk about death and have a difficult conversation,\u201d Colman said. \u201cSometimes we do need to be prodded a bit to have hard conversations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Children as young as 2 can begin to understand the finality of death, Schonfeld said.<\/p>\n

\u201cKids in this age group are trying to learn concepts of death. They\u2019re drawn to it because it\u2019s important,\u201d he said. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t want children\u2019s stories and movies to eliminate themes of death, because then they have very little opportunity to talk about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The filmmakers behind \u201cThe Good Dinosaur\u201d declined to be interviewed for this story. But the creative director of Pixar’s \u201cCars\u201d franchise said his team was forced to confront death onscreen when Paul Newman, who voiced series character Doc Hudson, died.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve never talked about how a car dies or is born,\u201d Jay Ward said. \u201cThe beauty of Pixar is that we tell different stories different ways, and sometimes loss is an important part of the story… For kids, that may be hard for them to grasp. It\u2019s a human emotion. It\u2019s a real thing. It does happen to everybody at some point.\u201d<\/p>\n

Susanna Fogel, writer and producer of the young-adult series \u201cChasing Life,\u201d said artists should be bold when it comes to depicting the range of emotions around death and dying.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople avoid it because they worry about what it means politically or is this too depressing,\u201d she said. \u201cBut there\u2019s something about not getting a straight answer and having euphemisms in place of honesty that is more terrifying.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no avoiding these issues in life,\u201d she added, \u201cand the earlier we can address them in a thoughtful, sensitive way in entertainment, the earlier people can have the conversations they need to have with their support system.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LOS ANGELES \u2013 In the latest Pixar release, \u201cThe Good Dinosaur,\u201d little Arlo\u2019s dad is dramatically washed away by a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":66664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1080],"class_list":["post-66659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-lifestyle","tag-ap","mauthors-sandy-cohen","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}