The Disney Scenes That Traumatized Us
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The post The Disney Scenes That Traumatized Us appeared first on Consequence.
In the lead-up to the release of the live-action The Little Mermaid, Consequence will be looking back at the Disney Renaissance and how it shaped our culture. This time, we’re digging into our collective personal damage with a look at Disney’s most traumatic scenes.
How much childhood trauma can be tracked back to Disney’s decades of animated films? No quantifiable number exists, but certainly the related therapy bills add up to billions of dollars. Because while Disney’s entire thing is making family-friendly content (the company didn’t release an animated movie the MPAA rated higher than G until 1985’s The Black Cauldron), that hasn’t stopped its stories from terrifying young audiences over the years. Dead parents, violent showdowns, and horrific imagery — all of these have been proven to be essential elements of the Disney canon.
A Definitive Ranking of Every Disney Live-Action Remake
In looking back at Disney’s rich legacy of scarring the children of the world, Consequence decided to take a personal approach. There are dozens of scenes that could have made this list — and some of the most iconic, you will find below. Every person is different, however, and so we chose to spotlight the moments that still disturb us individually as adults, with the knowledge that we can’t be the only ones who found these moments troubling. Disney might be built on selling dreams, but it’s given us all nightmares at one point or another.
— Liz Shannon Miller
Senior Entertainment Editor
Fantasia (1940): Night on Bald Mountain
I absolutely hated Fantasia as a child. As an adult, I understand its cultural and historical significance (it resurrected Mickey Mouse’s career!), and appreciate the aesthetic wonders it presents. However, young me didn’t just think this was a bad film: It was evil. Again, now I understand its biggest crime is racist centaurs, but as a youth, the horror of “Night on Bald Mountain” burned my soul.
While Disney has always made its villains perfectly creepy, the Chernabog is straight demonic — literally. This towering Satan stand-in reaches his shadowy hands into a sleepy town and draws skeletal specters from their resting place — knights and hung men, witches and wraiths. He calls upon his demons to dance and transform before him, only to toss them into a fiery pit seemingly for his own amusement. Harpies pluck the creatures from the billowing flames as skulls and ghouls and disembodied heads rush the screen.
Set to one of the most terrifying pieces of music ever written, this nightmare-scape happens right after a scene of hippos and alligators dancing ballet. What was a little Jewish boy from Massachusetts supposed to think here? Sure, the whole thing ends with a bunch of people following the light of “Ave Maria,” sending the Chernabog back to sleep — but that demon is still there! Waiting at the top of a mountain to rally the dead around him and, what, grow more powerful by inhaling the fumes of his followers’ incinerated bodies? Nope, nuh uh, no. Dance your pretty dances, say all your little prayers, but there’s a monster up on that peak and I’m an atheist now. — Ben Kaye
Bambi (1942): Death of Bambi’s Mom
Midwestern hunting culture is mounting a picture of a deer leaping in a field next to a taxidermy deer who had been shot doing the same thing. This appreciation for the animal you’re trying to kill might seem odd to outsiders– or, for that matter, five-year-olds who liked cartoons and what my father used to call “sissy stuff.” Bambi was seen as an appropriate compromise, perhaps because Dad had never watched it.
I can still picture sitting on the carpet of my parents’ bedroom, the site of our only VHS player, and giggling at Bambi’s antics with Flower and Thumper. I can also recall the gunshots, the mad dash through the forest, and Bambi’s triumphant, “We made it, mother!” before he learned that there was no longer a “we.” Dad cursing me out for crying, I remember, too.
Disney never got over their fascination with dead mothers, though the company would later move their deaths a little further off-screen. And as for me, I don’t know if I ever really got over the shooting of that cartoon doe. Perhaps we can draw a straight line from Bambi’s plaintive, “Mother? Mother!” to my own discomfort shooting a gun, the private tears I shed after my first kill, or my decision — which preceded a lot of shouting — to quit hunting and become a vegetarian. Or perhaps I would’ve gotten there anyway; Bambi was hardly the first or last time he found me disappointing. Regardless, the death of Bambi’s mom has always stayed with me, and in order to remember her, I didn’t even have to hang her on a wall. — Wren Graves
Oliver and Company (1988): Poor Oliver
Most Disney movies save their bleakest moments for later on in the film, moments that have a profound impact on the audience after already having fallen in love with the central characters. But Oliver & Company kicks off its ’80s-set, feline-and-canine-led adaptation of Oliver Twist with a gut-churning sequence that horrified me as a little girl.
The film’s opening shot of the New York City skyline is accompanied by the beginnings of “Once Upon a Time in New York City,” one of Oliver & Company’s five original bangers, this one written by the iconic Howard Ashman and songwriter Barry Mann. As Huey Lewis sings about how “It’s a big old, bad old, tough old town,” we see a box of kittens on the street, with no identifiable owner present — but someone has to be collecting $5 per kitten, the price on the misspelled paper sign taped above the box.
While all the other kittens get adopted by excited children passing by, the small ginger tabby we’ll eventually come to know as Oliver keeps getting shut out, and eventually he’s abandoned, left alone in the cardboard box that held his brothers and sisters. And then even that refuge is lost to him as night falls and the rain begins to pour down, flooding Oliver’s box and washing out onto the street, where, terrified by the rain and lightning, he eventually finds some shelter and curls up for the night.
Oliver does eventually get some support, after falling in with a gang of disreputable but good-hearted dogs; moments after “Once Upon a Time in New York City” ends, we launch into “Why Should I Worry?” in which a mutt named Dodger (Billy Joel) explains to Oliver how things work on the mean streets. But I’m still so disturbed by the unanswered questions of the beginning: Where is Oliver’s previous human? Why didn’t anyone want Oliver beforehand? Why did he get left all alone? Can’t anyone see that he is a tiny kitten and needs help?!? Honestly, though, the most horrifying element of this scene is its mundanity. This could happen anywhere, not just New York City. — L.S. Miller
The Little Mermaid (1989): Eric’s Ship Burns
In 1997, Disney re-released 1989’s The Little Mermaid to theaters. According to the LA Times, this was a habit for the studio in the ‘90s; as momentum grew in the animated arena for Fox, Warner Bros, and the new kid on the block, Dreamworks, Disney worked to maintain their throne by putting favorites like The Lion King, Oliver & Company, and The Little Mermaid back on the big screen.
My mother took my older sister and me to the 1997 Little Mermaid re-release; the original came out well before either of us were born, but the VHS of the film we had at home had already seen some wear and tear, and she assumed we’d enjoy seeing the story in a movie theater. However, as a child, I was quite frightened of fire — that previous winter, a barn across the street from our home had gone up in flames in the middle of the night during a New England blizzard, an event Tiny Mary had a hard time shaking.
I’m told that I got upset seeing King Triton yell at Ariel and destroy her beloved grotto in surround sound, but the scene in which Prince Eric’s boat is struck by lightning and catches on fire completely pushed it over the edge. My mild-mannered older sister, who has always hated when I unnecessarily cause a scene, still remembers having to leave the theater because Tiny Mary simply couldn’t get it together. (I’d say it was the last time something like that happened, but that would be a lie.) — Mary Siroky
The Lion King (1994): Mufasa Dies
If you say the word “stampede” to me, the first thing I envision is the flurry of deadly wildebeests speeding down a canyon — I hear the snarling chaos, I feel the foreboding vibrations, and I see Simba’s aghast face.
Mufasa’s death in The Lion King wasn’t so much a traumatic memory, but a harsh, painful moment that cleaves the film in two equally brilliant halves. To be a child watching this sequence unfold is to put yourself directly in Simba’s shoes (or paws, really). At that age, it’s difficult to even conceptualize parental loss, and even more complicated to witness a so-called “family member” be responsible.
These images are burned into my brain; particularly the way Scar presses on Mufasa’s clutching paws and the look of terror on Mufasa’s stoic face as he realizes his fate. Even more heartbreaking is Simba finding a gravely wounded Mufasa in the aftermath, where he quietly begs for his father to wake up. It’s Simba’s lowest point, a nightmare of a scene that has become inseparably tied to The Lion King as a whole. It may be cruel, but with years of reflection, it’s a profoundly important detail in the scope of The Lion King, and though it’s difficult to not feel the pangs of loss after all this time, it’s animated with palpable emotion and cinematic elegance. — Paolo Ragusa
Hercules (1997): Hercules Turns Olllldddd
Perhaps I’m giving myself too much credit, but as a child, I wasn’t particularly afraid. When it came to ghost stories, monsters, or the boogeyman under the bed, I could barely muster up a yawn. I slept with the lights off and my closet door wide open, providing ample opportunity for any demonic spirit to dare to take me on.
But what did get to me, what filled me with the most paralyzing sense of dread, was the one thing I knew I could never fight against: the existential, ever-marching nature of time. Death inevitably awaited me, and every day I took one step closer to that final destination.
So, while my friends were hiding behind the sofa from jump scares and the living dead, I watched helplessly as one of my favorite Disney heroes, Hercules, aged a lifetime in a matter of seconds. At this point in the eponymous film, Hercules (Tate Donovan) has foiled the apocalyptic plans of Hades (portrayed wonderfully by James Woods), but at the cost of Meg (Susan Egan), his love interest. With Meg’s lifeless soul drifting further into the depths of River Styx, Hercules dives in to save her. Instantly, he grows frail and old as the river drains life from the demigod.
Of course, he makes it out just fine, with Meg’s soul recaptured to boot. But the happy ending did nothing to obscure the stark, existential mirror Hercules held up to young fans. “Here’s the rest of your life presented in 10 seconds,” it seemed to say. Consider it Baby’s First Memento Mori. — Jonah Krueger
The Disney Scenes That Traumatized Us
Consequence Staff
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