Im A Humanitarian / Western Animation

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• The 'island-dwelling tribe of cannibals' stereotype appeared very frequently in a great number of theatrical shorts from the start of animation through the Civil Rights movement, after which the racist elements of its characterization were finally taken into account and became (after much lobbying) unacceptable for general airing. Episodes of Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny and Betty Boop among others which have plots revolving around tribal cannibals are often banned or heavily edited when they are shown.
• Adventure Time:
  • In the episode "Another Five More Short Graybles", Lemongrab 1 attempts to eat Lemongrab 2 in response to the latter accidentally destroying the doll they were using as a surrogate son. When they appear in the episode "Too Old", 2 is missing his legs and a portion of his head, and at the end of the episode 1 finishes the job.
  • Not to mention, the rainicorns, beautiful creatures that are like flying, elongated rainbow unicorns. They used to eat humans. Now they eat soy-people (but only because humans are almost extinct). Otherwise, they're quite nice.
• Takes place in the American Dad! episode "Vacation Goo." Upon finding out that all family vacations have been false memories due to "vacation goo," a memory-implanting technology from CIA, Francine insists that the Smith family go on a real vacation together. After a series of mishaps on a cruise, the family is trapped in a cave on an island with Becky, an attractive member of the ship's staff who is drawn to Steve, apparently being hunted by armed inhabitants of the island. Becky is killed in a cave in, and seemingly without food, the family decides to eat Becky's corpse—which became the first Sunday dinner they had together in a long time, after which they are discovered by the armed men who turn out to be part of the vacation. The family decides to sweep everything under the rug because "nothing bonds family together like a deep dark secret."
• Amphibia is populated by quite a few cannibalistic species. A case of Shown Their Work, as quite a few frogs and toads will engage in cannibalism.
• While in the literal sense this trope doesn't apply in Beast Wars (though Tarantulas probably would have eaten any hominid he managed to catch), the technical sense gets more than its look in. Tarantulas relishes eating living creatures, and is quite willing to add Cybertronians to the menu- a fact made terrifyingly clear in the third episode. In fact, in the first season, it was this literal appetite for carnage and bloody gluttony that was his defining trait, to the extent that his official season 1 profile talks mainly about his appetite and defines him as a "twisted gourmand", as opposed to the Mad Scientist and Machievallian plotter of seasons 2 and 3. Rampage, we are reminded regularly, (mainly by the Psycho for Hire himself), tortured, butchered and ate the entire population of no less then two Maximal colonies before ending up in the Beast Wars. In one of the first season episodes, Dinobot eats a psuedo-clone of himself (a biologically grown raptor with a cybernetic brain).
  • Now, in a more literal yet sinister sense. Megatron, in a way to become the perfect being on Cybertron he desires to be, tries to consumes all the sparks he has captured throughout the events of Beast Machines.
• An episode of The Brak Show had the family go to meet their new neighbors for dinner. Brak meets the overgrown baby of the family, who eventually reveals that he and his parents are planning to eat Brak and his parents (and now he feels guilty about it, because Brak is so fun). Nobody gets eaten, but apparently the family had trouble fitting in (and looking at them, it's clear why), and..well...
  We tried everything...clubs, outings, organizations—
  THEY DIDN'T WORK!
  And then our son suggested, why don't we try eating people?
  OUR SON IS A GENIUS!
• Codename: Kids Next Door:
  • Father tries to make a make a cake for The Delightful Children from Down the Lane out of other living children. Being a light-hearted kids show, he fails. Funnily enough, the newscaster kid commenting on it talks about how great the cake would be, without a bit of Squick to be found.
  • In another episode had Numbuh 5 comment that Father would rather grind kids into coffee and drink them than offer them help. Might seem like an exaggeration, but when you consider the above instance...
  • Another villain tried to feed kids to a bullysaurus as well.
• Reversal: In one episode, Count Duckula is sent into future, where he is captured by intelligent vegetables. He tries to defend himself by (truthfully) saying: "I am a vegetarian, a vegetable lover"; the vegetables aren't too amused.
  • Doubly reversed in the new Danger Mouse series when the Count returns to his evil roots— he implants a hypnotic message in television broadcasts which turns his viewers into living vegetables. As DM and Penfold watch in horror, Duckula happily takes a bite out of a comely female carrot. Fridge Horror comes into play when the vegetables are later turned back into people (well, funny animals), and you realize some poor producer is somewhere with a big bloody chunk of her head missing....
• An episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog featured an antropomorphic pig couple who were set up as this. It's eventually revealed that they only make food scupltures and Courage just misunderstood the situation.
• An episode of Eek! The Cat has Anabelle made the queen of some bizarre-looking savages on an island out in the middle of nowhere. The problem is that "In order for the queen to become a goddess, she must be cooked and then eaten by the king."
  The King: [tongue hanging out] I like... girls.
• Futurama:
  • An alien language sign reading "Tasty Human Burgers" can be spotting in the opening and in the episode "The Series Has Landed".
  • Parodied in "Fry and the Slurm Factory" when Fry half-jokingly suggests that the secret ingredient in Slurm soda is people. He's told that no, they already have a soda like that: Soylent Cola. The taste "varies from person to person".
  • There are also examples of sentient aliens eating humans, and the other way around, such as in "My Three Suns":
    Fry: [at a Neptunian deli] Wow, they have every kind of meat in here except human.
    Neptunian butcher: What, you want human?
  • In "The Problem with Popplers", Popplers are infant Omicronians that are eaten by humans by the billions and only stopped when the Omicronians threaten to attack Earth (humanity didn't know they were Omicronians, at first). The Omicronians demand an equal number of human children to eat in exchange, but settle for the one human adult who was responsible (and are placated by a hippie being eaten instead).
  • The CEO of Fishy Joe's notes that the only reason we don't eat people is because "it tastes lousy".
  • An ad for "Glagnar's Human Rinds" appears at the beginning of "I Second That Emotion".
  • The secret ingredient in the Iron Cook contest between Elzar and Bender in "The 30% Iron Chef" is Soylent Green.
  • As shown in "Spanish Fry", human noses in the 31st Century are equivalent to rhino horns in many alien cultures.
• Gravity Falls:
  • In the episode "Summerween":
    Soos: I ate a man alive tonight.
    [The entire cast looks at him weirdly]
    • For context, Soos ate a monster made up entirely of Halloween candy.
  • Alluded to in "Northwest Mansion Mystery".
    Preston Northwest: Now come into the panic room. There's enough mini-sandwiches and oxygen to last you, me and a butler a full week. [whispering] We'll eat the butler.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
  • It's implied at the end of the episode "Tastes like Chicken" that Mandy ate Irwin, and in "Which Came First?", you see Sperg eating Pud'n's arms and legs after having been stranded in the desert. Both get better.
  • The only way Pinocchio can become a real boy... is by eating the flesh of a human boy.
• The Hollow: The main reason why the other minnotaurs are scared of Toros is that he a cannibal willing to eat the other minotaurs.
• An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes had Jimmy and Beezy nearly get eaten alive by a tribe of cannibals. Fortunately, their shift ended in time.
• In the Justice League episode "Only a Dream", the kids in Flash's nightmare attempt to eat him, completely out of nowhere. Flash resorts to Super-Speed to get away from them, and...
• The cannibalistic baby killer from the season 2 premeire of Metalocalypse.
• The Milo Murphy's Law episode "The Island of Lost Dakotas" features an island inhabitated by one hundred paradoxical versions of Vinnie Dakota that stay hidden after each of them saved their partner Balthazar Cavendish from an untimely death by traveling back in time. This includes a Cannibal Dakota that is caged and watched carefully, to prevent him from eating all the other Dakotas. In addition, the Dakotas pretend to prepare another Dakota for cooking as a practical joke, because they get bored.
• In an episode of Mutant League, Razor Kid is threatened by the other starving players after a plane crash leaves them stranded in the mountains. With the help of his agent, he negotiates it down to his tail, which will grow back.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In "Owl's Well That Ends Well", which is a Season 1 episode no less (at which point the writers weren't even entirely sure there would be adult fans and things usually didn't get as intense until the Season 2 finale), a humongous but sentient green dragon tries to eat Spike (who's also a dragon) for stumbling upon his hoard.
  • In "Luna Eclipsed", an in-universe Historical Villain Upgrade ascribes this to Nightmare Moon. Particularly horrifying, no doubt, due to ponies being obligate herbivores, with all the revulsion towards eating meat that probably entails. This legend makes things awkward when Nightmare Moon is redeemed, returns as Princess Luna, and is confused as to why everyone is terrified of her. Her linguistics being a thousand years out of date don't help.
    Pipsqueak: Help! My backside has been gobbled!
    Princess Luna: 'Tis a lie! Thy backside is whole and ungobbled, thou ungrateful whelp!
• In one episode of The Powerpuff Girls (1998), the Girl fight a demonic motorcycle gang called the Dooks of Doom (evil and bad spellers, apparently) who are cannibals.
• During season 3 of Rick and Morty, Rick, Morty and Summer visit a post-apocalyptic Earth based on Mad Max where they befriend the local gang of raiders, known as the Death Stalkers, who are shown to be cannibals. Rick even chews on some human flesh as a way of avoiding having to run after Summer who's gone along with the Stalkers to raid the ruins of Seattle, but decides it tastes gross, so he spits it back out.
• The Sealab 2021 episode "Frozen Dinner" finds the crew answering a distress call from two men trapped on an ice station, one of whom has decided to resort to cannibalism and proves remarkably dedicated to following that course of action no matter what happens. He even asks the crew for vegetables... so he can make a proper stew out of his companion. They decide to eat Stormy instead when Stormy delivers the vegetables.
• The Simpsons:
  • Several Treehouse of Horror segments use this. The earliest, "Treehouse of Horror V", involves the school staff killing and cooking problem students (and eventually, all of them). Another, in "Treehouse of Horror XVII", is a parody of The Blob (1958) with Homer becoming a voracious Blob Monster. Yet another, "Treehouse of Horror XVI", is a parody of The Most Dangerous Game... although it isn't too necessary this time.
    Carl: Homer, Burns has only been chasing us for six hours and you've already resorted to cannibalism.
    Lenny: And there's bananas in that tree up there!
    Homer: Uh, they look a little green...
  • For a non-Treehouse of Horror example, "King of the Hill" has a reference to Abe Simpson biting his old mountain climbing buddy.
• South Park:
  • In "Scott Tenorman Must Die", Eric Cartman devises a complex plan to get his enemy to eat his own parents and succeeds. It's okay, though; later, he apologizes by giving the boy a fruit basket. Made worse by the (somewhat questionable) reveal that the father was Cartman's real father.
  • In another, a group of people are snowed in and trapped in a TV studio. Even though they've only been without food for a few hours, they decide they must draw straws and eat Eric Roberts (who'd miss Eric Roberts?) and his film crew to survive.
• In Stroker and Hoop, the two buddy detectives wake up in a bathtub full of ice and assume they've had their kidneys stolen by two beautiful women; but, no, they're members of an enlightened cannibal cult who eat vestigial organs safely harvested from their victims. They took the boys' appendices and tail bones. Later in the ep, the cult goes even crazier, and tries the old "giant kettle" routine on Stroker (though they claim it's because they don't like him). They had to wait a while, as 100 gallons of water takes a long time to boil.
• The goblins from Strange Magic have expressed the desire to eat one of the sentient fairies.
• Although the direct act of cannibalism is said to have been banned in the later seasons, Superjail! was infamous for its pilot episode, in which a bunch of maniacal lunch ladies butcher up inmates for their "Monday Mystery Meat"- itself made up of the unfortunate inmates by the end. The Warden and Jared are then shown feasting on said meat. A starving inmate that was denied food earlier even decides to eat some of the meat, but it eats him instead.
  • "Cold-Blooded" (the fourth episode aired, but last produced for the first season) featured a hulking monster-esque serial killer that instantly butchered and feasted upon an unlucky group of inmates.
  • Starting with season 2, any more direct references to cannibalism and deaths of small children became off-limits, so "The Budding of the Warbuxx" has the Twins cannibalize the Warbuxx bud, an infant alien creature who may or may not have actually been their own child with the justification that the "child" was simply a mere alien delicacy. "Superjail! Grand Prix" also features a room called "The Loafer" for the lunch ladies' ingredients, although piles of dead bodies are visible and the machines within the room proceed to slaughter some more inmates.
  • Season 3's "Sticky Discharge" has a quick background gag where the starving inmate from the pilot is shown looking nervous and awkward, as his cellmate is shown to be mutilated and dismembered, with his chest bitten and torn into.
• The owner and staff of the motel (an Inn of No Return) in the Taz-Mania episode "A Midsummer Night's Scream", who plan to eat Bushwacker Bob and Taz.
• In Teen Titans (2003), one of the villains is a block of sentient space tofu, selling his... essence as a meat substitute to the unwitting civilians as a cover for his alien invasion. This lands him in a pot of hot water when Beast Boy (who is a vegetarian due to eating whatever animal he can become being repulsive to him) finds out.
  New-Fu: [after a Smash Cut to Titans Tower mid-Evil Gloating] ...What is this?
  Beast Boy: Lunch. [New-Fu freaks out] And I happen to be in the mood for a delicious meat-free substitute.
  New-Fu: ...You're just trying to trick me!
  Beast Boy: Am I? Say hello to my good friend, Barbecue Sauce! [douses New-Fu in BBQ sauce]
  New-Fu: [spitting up BBQ sauce] Water! New-fu reverts to its original state in the presence of water! Please don't eat me!
  Beast Boy: That's more like it. [raises bottle of soy sauce] Now let's talk cows!
• In Teen Titans Go!, Raven isn't allowed to play dodgeball any more because, the last time she was allowed to play, she flipped out and ate the opposing team after being tagged in the head with a ball.
• Lockdown from Transformers: Animated is a robotic version of this. While he doesn't eat other robots he does strip them for parts to upgrade himself.

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