Children’s Cartoons Rife With Death and Murder, Study Finds

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Children’s cartoons, often seen as innocent films about royalty and furry animals, are “rife with on-screen death and murder,” a new study finds.

The significant characters in kids’ animated films are 2.5 times more likely to die than those in adult dramas, researchers found. And the victims of those deaths in cartoons are five times more likely to be parents.

“Just because a film has a cute clownfish, a princess or a beautiful baby deer as its main character doesn’t necessarily mean that there won’t be murder and mayhem,” said the study’s lead researcher, Ian Colman, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Ottawa, in Canada.

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