Adults Are Useless / Animated Films

• The entire town in The Boxtrolls really but a special mention should go to Lord Portley-Rind; if it's not about cheese, he has absolutely no interest.
• Played straight and averted in The Christmas Tree. Judy's a decent person, if a bit dim, and genuinely cares for the children. The mayor, however, doesn't seem to have the slightest inkling that anything is amiss at the Orphanage of Fear, and is perfectly willing to fork over large sums of cash to Mrs. Mavilda without much question.
• Chicken Little: Other than Kirby's parents, who are just looking for their missing child, not a single adult bothers to be helpful towards our main characters. Sure, Buck helps his son to return Kirby to his parents in the climax, but he falls in the same category through the story for being irresponsible and just caring for his own reputation.
• Downplayed in Coraline. Coraline's parents didn't do much and aren't especially nice, but they had pretty good reasons not to believe Coraline's Cassandra Truth. On the other hand, Bobinsky gave Coraline a subtle warning and Spink and Forcible also warned her that she was in terrible danger. And at the end, Spink and Forcible gave Coraline an important item to help her find the eyes of the ghost children.
• Played with in Incredibles 2. The adult Supers (including Bob, Helen and Lucius) are actually quite competent, but when they are incapacitated, it comes down to the kids (Violet, Dash and Jack-Jack) to try and save the day. It comes down to Jack-Jack nudging Helen's goggles enough to free her to turn the tide of the final battle.
• Justice League vs. Teen Titans: Zig-zagged — Batman can't keep Damian on a leash forever and thus opts to send him to the Titans to cool him off. However, when the potential for Raven's danger is made real, the League steps in, not wanting a threat like this to spread. That last bit is vastly different from both the comics and previous animated variations, which they are either ignored or Adapted Out.
• The Land Before Time III: The Time of the Great Giving: Not long after a meteor storm, the Great Valley's main water supply, a river running down from beyond the wall, mysteriously dries up. Rather than say, investigating the river's source (they could have sent fliers if they were worried about carnivores), the adults decide to wait in the valley and hope the water returns. In the meantime, water is running low, tempers are running high and all the food is quickly dying off. In the end, it's the children who accidentally find out that the water was blocked off and the adults can't agree on a plan of action and eventually, the children save the day by accident.
  • This is a very common occurrence throughout the series. None of the adults want to risk personal safety going out into the Mysterious Beyond for any reason whatsoever, leaving the children to do everything themselves.
    • In The Land Before Time IV: Journey Through the Mists, where Littlefoot's grandmother (who had been willing before to leave and search for a flower with healing properties) and the mother of a new character not only fail to go after their runaway children but don't even seem worried or concerned that the kids are gone.
• Mr. Peabody & Sherman: Briefly towards the beginning, when Penny is quite openly bullying Sherman and even ends up putting him in a choke hold, with a crowd of kids gathering and cheering, there is not one adult to be seen. Apparently, the children are simply left unattended at lunch. And when adults are brought in, the bullying is dismissed as kids being kids; the bully is made to be the victim even though she provoked Sherman to violence. The principal is later shown to be mildly ineffectual. Subverted with Mr. Peabody, though; in this film, the trope only applies to human adults.
• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls has Principal Celestia and Vice-Principal Luna as reasonable authority figures... except that most situations fall far outside their areas of expertise, due to most problems the main characters face being magical in nature. Leading to moments like them getting brainwashed along with the rest of the student body in Rainbow Rocks. They can also be oblivious, such as the first Equestria Girls having them unaware of Sunset's bullying and control of the school, or being easily fooled by falsified evidence in a scene pretty much designed to give credibility to the Satellite Love Interest.
  • Friendship Games technically has this in Principal Cinch of Crystal Prep. She isn't useless in terms of the film's actual plot, but it regards to her actual job as a principal, she's pretty bad. She says point blank in her Villain Song she has always known that human Twilight Sparkle has always been an outcast at Crystal Prep, but has done nothing to help her. In addition, she blackmails and pressures her students to do well in the games for her own reputation and isn't above spying and cheating. Dean Cadance is a lesser example, she is a reasonable authority figure just like Celestia and Luna and it is obvious she cares about Twilight, but isn't seen helping her against peer pressure and bullying on screen. Instead she just offers her good advice knowing where she will be happiest.
• ParaNorman: Most of the adults range from Too Dumb to Live to entirely oblivious, when they aren't just plain Ax-Crazy.
• Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension:
  • The members of the Resistance and everyone in the final showdown are all kids and teenagers (excluding O.W.C.A. agents, who are all animals). The only adults taking action in the showdown are Doof (who attempts to head up to his penthouse to help stop the invasion) and Doof-2 (who personally engages into a fight against Phineas), while the rest of the adults only seem to be good for getting subjugated, with Linda-2 even spending most of the time hiding in the basement.
  • Love Handel actually offered their help, but Phineas relegated them to musical accompaniment — which they enthusiastically provided. In fairness though, this is Phineas and Ferb. A sequence like that simply wouldn't work without a musical number, and Love Handel were pretty much the best guys for the job (and Danny does get a robot kill to his name in a deleted scene, with his bare hands, no less).
  • Candace's plan to ensure victory for the heroes does involve adult participation, but that's more "making use of" adults than adults actively being useful.
  • Depending on how old Albert Du Bois (Irvin's older brother) is, he might qualify if he's turned 18 since "'The Doof Side of The Moon'".
  • It's offscreen, but Major Monogram-2 — once liberated by Candace-2 — appears to have taken charge of the resistance forces.
• Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Candace Against the Universe:
  • With Doof, this is to be expected, despite his insistence to the contrary. However, he zig zags this trope as he sometimes is useful to the plot, but is also often enough an obstruction. He already built a compatible spaceship for the kids to fly to Feebla-Oot, but he's just about useless when it comes to flying it, and it actually doesn't come with an ion shield, despite the planet that they'll going to being blocked by an ion field. Once on the planet, he tries to lead the group to the fortress that they believe Candace is being held, but gets them all hopelessly lost in the jungle, although he does stumble upon the fortress eventually. He also uses one of his inators to transport himself, Vanessa and Perry back to Earth, but his first attempts have failed due to there already being a chicken on the planet and it was Vanessa that remembered that he had another setting to have them switch places with the furthest chicken. His inator was also responsible for sending the Big Doctor and Mama back to Feebla-Oot to save the day, but it was Candace that ended up using it for this purpose, though Doof instructed her to put the correct settings on the inator to get the job done.
  • Played straight with every other adult on the planet Earth. Absolutely no adult was involved in fighting off the alien invasion, except for Doof who shows up about halfway through. When the aliens first show up, all the adults present were too distracted by the destruction of their statue to even notice. When they do notice, the aliens immediately release their mind controlling spores on them, brainwashing them. Only the kids had masks to protect them from the spores and thus were able to participate in the fight, even Doof himself was able to get one to prevent himself from being brainwashed by the spores.
• Tom and Jerry: Blast Off to Mars: None of the adults on Earth can handle the alien invasion.
• Turning Red: Basically, the entire adult world — police, school staff, security, etc. — exists only as part of the background. Ming doesn't face any consequences for her false accusation of Devon. Mei causes a substantial amount of damage during her frantic run home from school in panda form, including a three-car crash, but there's no massive hunt for the mysterious bear creature that caused all the ruckus. At school, no one seems to notice when Mei and her friends appropriate a classroom and turn it into a photo studio^note although there is a possibility the school staff allowed it. At the concert, there's no security, no stage crew, and no arrangements to prevent a massive "crush" from frantic attendees rushing the stage. And no one calls the authorities about the kaiju-panda stomping through Toronto and attacking the SkyDome. Ming herself also qualifies since she doesn't do anything to help her daughter get through the trauma her transformations are causing her.
• Wreck-It Ralph: Invoked. King Candy never steps in when Vanellope is bullied because he is the one who originally made her a glitch and influenced the other racers to bully her by altering their memories.