Wow, I never noticed this but it’s absolutely true that 90s / 2000s kids all grew up with an entire genre of cute animal media that emotionally traumatized us. Don’t believe me? Check out this list of examples including Watership Down, The Land Before Time, The Animals of Farthing Wood, Into the Wild, The Capture, Redwall, The Secret of NIMH, and more. This is practically how all of us learned about war, death, betrayal, and oppression:
Got any more traumatizing cute animal books or movies to add to the list? Let us know in the comments below.
Except Watership Down, The Animals of Farthing Wood, and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which is what The Secret of NIMH is based on, were all written in the early 70’s! 🙂
All Dogs go to Heaven
My 8 year old just started reading the warriors and guardians of gahool series, she cant put them down lol
yall dont forget all the disney movies like
oliver
(i forgot what its called but its like sherlock holmes but with mice)
the rescuers
the rescuers down under
aristocats
The Great Mouse Detective, for the Sherlock Holmes one. And you missed the granddaddy of them all in the form of The Fox and the Hound. Probably also Dumbo.
The Deptford Mice should be in this list. OMG they were depressing.
I got into the WarriorCats franchise (Warriors is the series’ title, but they’re collectively referred to as WarriorCats) as a tween when my school has a Scholastic Book Fair & I found the first book of the second series (story arc? series? Idk what to call it – every six books focuses on one main character and their adventures, interactions, issues, etc, with an overarching plot and many sub-plots that all resolve by the end of the sixth book before starting all over again with a new MC, their adventures, their issues, etc), called “Midnight”.
I honestly fell in love with the franchise with that book, and bought all the original 6 books, the 5 remaining books in that 6-book set I had started with, and the next 6 books after that. It’s honestly quite well written, with characters written well so you form genuine attachments to them, villains written well so that you hate them for their despicable actions, a fully developed political system/hierarchy, even a spiritual belief system, etc.
And yeah, it messed me up, big time. On multiple occasions. Like bawling my eyes out with snot going everywhere ugly crying messed up. Because I grew to really care about characters and root for them and want to see them have all the good things happen to them, and then – they get killed off. Not in some low-key, off-screen, sad-that-they-died-but-not-horrible way. Their deaths were always heartbreaking and often horrific.
***SPOILER WARNING***
In the final book of the first set, the main antagonist/villain has taken his followers & teamed up with a vicious group of alley cats known for killing dogs horribly (in the franchise, dogs are nothing but vicious killers of cats who will go out of their way to eat the cats), only for the leader of those alley cats to turn on him and tear open his belly.
The thing you need to know about this is that the villain who got his belly torn open didn’t just die once – he died 9 times in a row from this one injury.
This is because, in the franchise, the leaders of the wild “Clans” of cats are granted 9 lives when they are recognized by their dead ancestors (part of the spiritual beliefs) as a legitimate leader of their Clan (there are 4 of these Clans, normally). All other cats of the Clans only have one life. When a leader dies, normally that uses up one of their 9 lives, they are healed and brought back with full health and full energy, and can continue on to lead their clan.
For the villain, his belly being torn open could not be healed by this mystical/spiritual thing, so he died once, came back, suffered and died again, came back, suffered and died again, and so on, until he lost his ninth life, thus permanently killing him.
And this was all described pretty graphically.
There is another scene in that same set where a different leader of a different Clan who was on her last life (I think), but hid that fact from everyone, sacrificed her last life to save another by leading some dogs or foxes or something over the edge of a waterfall and drowning in the process, again in pretty heavy descriptive detail.
There are even more horrific deaths in the second 6-book set.
***END OF SPOILER***
There’s all sorts of political and emotional drama and heartbreak and turmoil and stuff in the franchise as well.
Honestly, is a pretty damn good franchise, and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who like that sort of thing, anyone who likes cats, and anyone just looking for a good read in general who doesn’t mind having to read 6 books to reach the climax of the story (each book is around 300-320 pages, on average).