WHY DEATH IS COMMON IN KIDS’ FILMS AND HOW PARENTS CAN COPE -The social informer

There’sa lot ofdeath in animated movies for kids. In fact, researchhas found that main characters in thesefilms are more thantwice as likely to suffertraumaticdeath thanin dramas aimed at adults.
What’s a parent todo?
It’snot that cartoons are trying to scare young viewers. Death ofa parent is often used as a dramatic device tofocus on theyoung protagonist, saysUniversity ofOttawa professor Ian Colman, who conducteda study on thesubject published last year in the British Medical Journal.
“Whodeals with kids’ problems? Parents do,” Colman said. “If you want to make it a really compelling story, you’ve got to getthe parents out of thepicture so kids can go through this processthemselves.One way to do that is to kill them off.”
Butwhen parents or older siblings die onscreen, younger viewers fare bestwhen real grown-ups are there to talk about it.
Children generally don’t understandthe permanenceand inevitability ofdeath until they reachelementary-school age, said youth bereavementexpert Dr. David Schonfeld, and popular movies often do little to depict realistic ways of dealing with grief.
“We just model the distress,” said Schonfeld, director of USC’s National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement.“We leave the character in that distress, and then the resolution is: Grow up and have your own cub. Thatreally isn’t how we grieve.
“Unfortunately, there are not a lot of animated films that show how we can help kids deal with loss. Itbecomesmoreof a vehicle to draw them in,” hecontinued. “We could do a better job with trying tomatch children’s understanding with what’s in the film.”
Colman was inspired tolaunch his research afterwatching “TheLand Before Time” with his 4-year-old daughter.
“Themother of the main character getsreally brutally attackedand killed by a T-Rex in the first five minutesof the film,” he said. “My daughterwas hystericaland begging me to stop the film.”
Coleman and his research team comparedthe top-grossing animated films from1937’s “Snow White” to2013’s “Frozen” with top live-action dramas from the same years and found that murder or deathof importantcharacters happened soonerand moreoften in the animated movies.
“It’s a good opportunity to talk about death and have a difficult conversation,” Colman said. “Sometimeswe do need to be prodded a bit tohave hard conversations.”
Children as young as 2 can begin to understandthe finality ofdeath, Schonfeld said.
“Kids in this age group are trying to learn conceptsof death.They’re drawn toit because it’s important,” he said. “I wouldn’t want children’s storiesand movies to eliminate themesof death, because then they have very little opportunity to talk about it.”
The filmmakersbehind “The Good Dinosaur” declined to beinterviewed for this story. But thecreative director of Pixar’s “Cars” franchise said his team was forcedto confront death onscreenwhen Paul Newman, who voiced series character Doc Hudson, died.
“We’ve never talked about how a car dies or is born,” Jay Ward said. “The beautyof Pixar is that we tell different storiesdifferent ways, and sometimesloss is an importantpart of the story… For kids, that may behard for them to grasp. It’s a human emotion. It’s a real thing. Itdoes happen to everybodyat some point.”
Susanna Fogel, writer and producerof the young-adult series “Chasing Life,” said artists should be bold when it comesto depicting the range of emotions around death and dying.
“People avoid it because they worry about what it meanspolitically or is this too depressing,” shesaid. “Butthere’s something about not getting a straight answer and having euphemismsin place of honestythat is more terrifying.
“There’sno avoiding theseissuesin life,” she added, “and the earlier we can address them in a thoughtful, sensitive way in entertainment, theearlier peoplecan have the conversations theyneed to have with their support system.”