Humans Are The Real Monsters / Animated Films

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• Implied in the "Bolero" sequence of Allegro non Troppo: Life on a distant planet evolves out of a discarded soda bottle. Eventually, apes (who are masses of black, sketchy fur compared to the brightly colored cartoon animals and have red eyes set in black sclera) are revealed as cheating bastards who don't follow the animals' evolutionary path and eventually mess up the planet by creating war, religion, and destructive cities. By the end, they have evolved into humans, but on the inside, they're still vicious, unsatisfied animals.
• The Animatrix: Zig-zagged.
  • Humans start the Robot War purely out of Fantastic Racism (the robots literally came before humanity bearing flowers and open arms) and that the robots locked humanity in the Matrix purely as self-defense against genocide and attempting to give them an utopia which human minds did not want.
  • In the present day, they create a device to show the machines that not ALL humans are/were bastards and that they wish for peaceful co-existence. It also gives them free will to decide whether or not to fight alongside the humans or continue the war at all. It ends with the deaths of the humans involved and the machines sent to destroy them, leaving the machine all alone to decide his purpose now...
• Atlantis: The Lost Empire: Commander Lyle Tiberius Rourke, especially since his plan to visit Atlantis was just a way for him to obtain that place's namesake Heart of Atlantis for his own greed, even if it means leaving the Atlanteans to their potential extinction once it's completely taken away from them. When compared with his second-in-command Helga Sinclair, Rourke himself is a lot more sociopathic than her.
• Bambi: The sole sign of human interaction with deer is a gunshot. However, the aversion of this trope is enforced. Walt Disney pointedly refused to make the hunters larger characters because he would have had to show them as two-dimensional villains given their actions.
• Battle for Terra plays with this trope. The Earth is destroyed and what's left of the human race is forced to live in a military fleet that invades the peaceful title planet. While they are doing this by force and goal to kill all the aliens they are portrayed as simply desperate. If you want to know why don't they just live together, the humans and Terrans don't breath the same air. Further played with in that the President and his council are Reasonable Authority Figures who want to explore all options before they go with genocide, but a coup happens with a General who advocates an "us or them" position.
• In the Laika film The Boxtrolls, Eggs briefly becomes convinced of this after his disastrous attempt to blend in with civilized people and Lord Portley-Rind's refusal to help. That being said, the film still shows that not all humans are pure evil, some instead acting out of ignorance.
• Cats Don't Dance is a parable in which animals are Paper-Thin Disguise minorities trying to break into show business and humans are the racists of Hollywood, keeping them out. The ending epilogue shows the humans invert this eventually because the animals become movie stars.
• In Dumbo, Dumbo's mom was separated from him and chained up in a cage because she gave a bratty human kid a (well-deserved) spanking for harassing Dumbo. This can be a double subversion, however, because from the POV of the humans who don't quite understand that the animals are all perfectly capable of restraining themselves, the bratty human kid is an audience of the circus, and Mrs. Jumbo's rampage will risk an injured audience and smear on the circus name, possibly causing it to lose audience and go bankrupt because of the risk of rampage. Even if it's harsh, the Ringmaster is doing what he can to keep the circus alive and allow animals to have their role in his circus... except that his future treatment to Dumbo is to force him to play the clown and be the subject of further ridicule and also risk his well-being, thereby the double-subversion.
• Fantastic Planet is set in a future where humans (or Oms) have been purchased by a species of giant blue humanoids called Draags, who don't recognize humans as intelligent beings like themselves. So they instead see them as either pets or vermin. When the main protagonist and co reach the Draag homeworld's moon to escape their blue overlords, they discover giant headless statues that the Draags use to reproduce. So what do the Humans do? They start destroying them via the defence turrets mounted on their rockets, which nearly causes Draag society to collapse when they realize that they're about to go sterile. Thankfully, the Humans and Draags do make peace in the end, but the fact the humans were willing to hold Draag civilization itself by the throat and nearly destroy it, honestly makes them no better than the Draags. Sure, the Draags might have been routinely exterminating any wild humans they found, but almost destroying their entire race in retribution shows that the humans are just as bad as the Draags if not worse. The fact that human civilization had destroyed itself prior to the events of the film, further illustrates this.
• This is one of the main themes in the animated film Felidae. It's both played straight and subverted in regards to humanity's relationship with animals (particularly cats in this case). On the one hand there's Gustav ("Gus"), Francis's dim-witted yet otherwise good owner. On the other hand there's Pretorius, a scientist who experiments on cats while trying to create a special tissue-bonding glue. Most of the cats die horrible deaths, and Pretorius becomes a rambling alcoholic because of it. The only surviving cat, Claudandus brutally murders Pretorius and later develops a burning hatred against humanity.
  • Likewise, one of the cats, Felicity, believes that all humans are good stating that only humans would be kind enough to give a blind cat like her a home. Ironically, it's heavily implied that it was due to humans experimenting on her in the first place that she's blind.
  • Bluebeard at first believes that it's a human causing the murders stating that only a human would do something so cruel to a cat. Of course, it turns out to be a cat (IE: Pascal/Claudandus) committing the murders rather than a human. He also refers to humans under the slang term "Can-Openers", believing that humans are only good for opening cans of food for cats.
  • Francis gets into an argument with Claudandus, asking about the good men. Claudandus yells back, "No! NO! There aren't any good men! They're all bad! They're all the same!" Claudandus is even spitting as he yells this. Obviously, Claudandus's argument is flawed, because Francis's owner is a good man.
• Finding Nemo takes the misguided point of view. The dentist believes that he has rescued the lame Nemo from the dangers of the reef rather than separating him from his father, and the main antagonist is a hyperactive little girl who doesn't realize that if she shakes the bag too hard she'll kill the little fish inside. It's clearly ignorance rather than malice. Then again, when one of the sharks earlier in the movie hears about Nemo being "kidnapped", he says disgustedly, "Humans. Think they own everything."
• Happy Feet: Humans are viewed by the penguins as "aliens" who take their fish and leave behind "artifacts" (litter). With the dance-off at the end, however, this is ultimately subverted when humans realize that the penguins weren't just dumb birds, but actual individuals who could understand and enjoy the concept of dancing and having fun, and therefore warranted treatment as such.
  • Adding to this, it seemed a lot of the people in the ending montage were using it as political ammunition to put conservation laws they'd already wanted into effect.
• In Hotel Transylvania, Count Dracula grew to believe this following an incident where an angry mob set his previous home on fire which resulted in the death of his wife. Dracula even appeared scared and tried to calm the mob down, but they still did it anyway. After meeting Jonathan in the 21st century, however, he begins to warm up to humans which is then solidified when he meets a whole town of friendly humans who proceed to help him even after he reveals who he really is. The following movies continue to subvert the trope, the worst humans are just insensitive jerks and any who are actually villainous like Van Helsing and Erika undergo a Heel–Face Turn.
• The Iron Giant is mostly a subversion. A pair of hunters shoot a deer that the titular Iron Giant had been watching, but they are not characterized negatively at all, and the scene is used to show the Iron Giant first learning about the concept of death. Most humans are either flawed but decent or reasonable. To drive the point home, the human protagonist is the Iron Giant's Morality Chain. This is however played straight with Kent Mansley, the only human in the movie who has no redeeming qualities.
• Monsters, Inc. is a Played for Laughs version. While the monsters don't show any signs that they consider the human race evil or malevolent, they are for some reason under the impression that humans are toxic enough to kill with a touch. They go to any lengths necessary to keep themselves safe from them when producing energy from them by scaring children. They basically consider the human race living nuclear power.
• NIMONA (2023): As much of a front Nimona tries to make as a Card-Carrying Villain, all she really is is a scared, lonely child who embraced a label that was forced upon her. The Kingdom, however, seems to have embraced a cultural identity of monster-slaying, despite no one having encountered a monster in a thousand years, with everyone's first instinct when they see Nimona being to declare her a threat. They are also neck-deep in Feudalistic ideas of class, the Queen wishing to make knighthood a profession based on merit being considered so radical an idea that the Director has her assassinated because she saw this break in tradition as an existential threat to their entire society, making Ballister her patsy in order to delegitimize the idea to the public at large.
• Zig Zagged in Once Upon a Forest. Cornelius, who was caught in a trap when he was younger, warns them about humans and is not surprised when toxic gas devastates the forest. The reason for the toxic gas is a human littering with a glass bottle blew a hole in a tank trunk. The truck driver, by contrast, has an Oh, Crap! reaction and runs to get help. At the end of the film, help arrives. Humans in scary Hazmat suits have come in to clean things up, surprising the elder.
• Open Season depicts open warfare between a band of beleaguered forest animals and a pack of obnoxious redneck hunters. Its zigzagged, however, since some of the humans are very friendly with the animals (if a bit ignorant of their actual feelings).
• The Movie version of Over the Hedge sums up everything that's wrong with humanity in one word: Suburbia.
  • The comic strip it's based on is this way too. Whereas the movie compresses most of its cynicism into a single sequence (which comes off more as good-natured ribbing) and a couple of recurring nasty characters, the strip has it as an underlying theme.
• Major threats in ParaNorman, another Laika movie, seem to be mobs of people acting out of fear and hatred above all else.
  • This culminates in a scene where the protagonists are being besieged by a frenzied mob of living townspeople, complete with arms grasping at them through broken windows. Meanwhile, the actual zombies calmly went in through the back entrance of the building to ask the protagonist to help put them back to rest.
• Peace on Earth: Humans are portrayed as warmongering monsters who drove themselves to extinction through their constant conflicts, to the point that they finally went extinct when the last two humans alive shot each other. The animal society that arose in their wake, by contrast, is peaceful and essentially utopian.
• The Plague Dogs, based on a book by Richard Adams of Watership Down fame (see below), is pretty Anvilicious about mankind's cruelty to man's best friend.
  • While both versions of the tale are as depressing as hell, it's interesting to note that the movie has an even more of a Downer Ending than the original book. In the film, the dogs are heavily implied to have died at the end, whereas they go live with a nice "Master" at the end of the book.
• Played With in Princess Mononoke. Normally, when films try to deal with the "humans vs. nature" conflict, it creates clumsy caricatures of both sides. However, Princess Mononoke presents the conflict in a more even-handed fashion. The Lady Eboshi is shown to be quite a complex villain with some good sides, and the closest thing to a true villain in the film is a genuinely nice and friendly guy. Meanwhile, the nature side has armies of massive, dangerous animal-gods led by an Animalistic Abomination with control over life and death and an absolutely alien morality. Some of the other human characters of the film, however...
• The final most dangerous threat of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish isn't the three large bears with immense strength working with Goldilocks nor is it the lupine bounty hunter who turns out to be The Grim Reaper himself, but rather "Big" Jack Horner, the monstrously apathetic and cruel normal human who is willing to do anything to get power (including causing the deaths of his own men) due to envy originating from wounded petty pride and a lust for power.
• The rats of Ratatouille believe this, exemplified in Remy's father. Remy himself thinks that opinion is rubbish and that the humans are just ignorant, since rats have traditionally been pests, and most of the humans aren't monsters.
• The Secret of NIMH is a tough case. It is harsh in its depictions of human scientists performing animal experimentation on rodents, who aren't even developed themselves as individuals. The biggest threat to The Protagonist and her family is a farmer plowing his fields, unaware that an adorable and bed-ridden young mouse lives there. However, one rat — Jenner —has the dubious honor of being the most evil character on screen.
• In the world of Smallfoot, Yetis used to live beneath the clouds until humans attacked them and forced them to retreat into the mountain. However, they soon find out that they were not acting out of maliciousness, but of fear. The ending, however, does imply that they will be able to live in harmony once again.
• Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron depicts a white man owning a wild horse as equivalent to slavery because The Protagonist is the horse and not the human. This human is a Graceful Loser because he comes to see the horse as a Worthy Opponent.
  • The Native Americans of the same film are shown in a more sympathetic light, but the titular stallion still doesn't like being trained. The other horses do but they prefer the Native Americans to the Settlers.
• Superman/Batman: Apocalypse: Batman forces Darkseid to return Supergirl to the heroes by threatening to destroy his planet. Darkseid commends him on such a ruthless maneuver, stating that it was believable coming from him (and would've failed were it done by a certain Kryptonian and Amazon) because humans are renowned for killing their own kind in order to win.
• Watership Down Holly's flashback to the first warren's destruction but reversed when the farmer's daughter saves Hazel from the farm's cat.

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