Song of the South when the boy was injured by the Bull. It took me almost 40 years to see the end of that movie because my brother was crying so hard at that point we had to leave the theater.
There was a movie back in 1940 that my grandfather took his kids to - The Biscuit Eater. The story is two little boys get a thrown out bird dog puppy and train him to hunt. They enter him in a competition against one of the boy’s father, a professional dog trainer, who’s field-trialing a rich man’s dog. The boys hear that if their dog beats the rich man’s dog, the dad will lose his job, so they sabotage the dog’s trial. The dog runs off, and after looking for him all day, the boys go home. That night, they here a gunshot, and the kennel man has shot the dog as he’s trying to come home. Movie ends with the dog dying in the kid’s lap. My grandfather and all the kids were sobbing as they left. Even 70 years later my mother would cry when the movie came on.
StG
This film scarred my whole family. My son was probably 8 or 9 when we saw it. He’s 18 now and if you bring it up he still gets emotional.
The Dark Crystal, while not necessarily intended as a children’s movie, was pretty damned freaky. I both loved and was terrified of this movie when I was 5.
Another Jim Henson movie, Labyrinth has the same sort of freaky stuff but not quite as intense.
I was traumatized as a little kid by the movie “J.T.,” which I watched on TV. For a long time, I couldn’t remember anything about it (including the title) except that this poor kid in the projects befriended a kitten he hid away in an abandoned building because his mom wouldn’t let him have a pet. He’d take it food, visit it, etc.–until some bullies found him and the kitten ended up either running or getting tossed into the street where it got hit by a car and killed. This destroyed my little cat-loving heart.
I found the movie online a couple years ago and watched it again–nope, no change. Still destroyed. Even though the kid got another kitten at the end, I can’t bear watching movies where bullies hurt a beloved pet.
Once when I was substitute teaching at an elementary school, the principal announced that as a special treat, the whole school was going to see a movie. The kids cheered. “It’s called Old Yeller,” the principal added. None of the kids (at least, none in my classroom that day, which was fourth or fifth grade) knew what was going to happen. All of the teachers (especially for the younger ones) were exchanging horrified looks. Yup, all the kids broke down.
I remember being force-fed all those depressing movies when I was a kid.
It was the same with books: adults were always pushing us to read the latest Newbery Medal winners, and it seemed like they were all horrible downers. One of the reasons I got into science fiction was that I was sick of reading about dying dogs and so forth.
I think pretty much every Disney hero or heroine is an orphan.
'One of those moments that I kind of wish we had a “like” button.
Our school went to see the animated movie Watership Down when I was a kid.
I loved it; but many of the kids where traumatized.
Particularly at the scene where a rabbit is recalling the genocide of his whole people, or the scene where a prisoner rabbit screams while he has his ears mutilated by Gestapo-rabbits, or the scene where the Gestapo-rabbits are raping the female rabbits, or the scene where the hero is slowly being garotted in a snare while gore and foam drips from his mouth …