What Do You Mean Its For Kids / Film

Films — Animation

• A Christmas Carol (2009) happens to be an animated Disney film with the collaboration of Disney and ImageMovers (the same guys behind The Polar Express) so maybe this should be a good watch with the kids especially since the trailers made it look like a typical comedic Jim Carrey film mixed with a classic tale. Well then, wait until you see the entire film which is very faithful with the story to the point of having nightmare fuel and we mean a lot such as Ignorance and Want, Jacob's corpse, The Ghost of Christmas Future, the death of the Ghost of Christmas Present, the list goes on! Boy, how is that for a kid's movie?
• The Adventures of the American Rabbit, aside from some of the violence, is rather tame, although the political attire the film points out would probably confuse kids about its message.
• The Adventures of Mark Twain, a G-Rated Claymation romp from the creator of the Noid and the California Raisins, about Mark Twain chasing Halley's Comet in a custom-built dirigible — as Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Becky Thatcher tag along for the ride. Beyond that rather meta premise, the entire reason for Twain chasing Haley's Comet in the first place is because he "came in with the comet and intends to go out with it" — a big metaphor for Twain's death wish, which only becomes more obvious as the movie progresses and some of Twain's more melancholy and eccentric stories, such as the diaries of Adam and Eve and "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven", are dramatized. And that's not even getting into the absolute existential terror that is the encounter with The Mysterious Stranger.
• The Adventures of Tintin (2011), despite being based on the comics by Hergé and being rated PG by the MPAA, is itself very mature and violent, featuring swearing, drunkenness, smoking, gun violence (the three last are all present in the comics, though), and onscreen death. The animation can fall into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley due to the almost realistic faces of Tintin and Sakharine in contrast to the other characters, who retain their cartoonish faces from the comics.
• All Dogs Go to Heaven remains Don Bluth's darkest film (with the possible exception of Titan A.E.), with relatively small "kid-friendly" scenes in between the controversial themes of gambling, first-degree murder, theft, drinking, terrifying images of Hell and Satan, and the real clincher, the killing of the main protagonist at the end, something virtually unheard of in Western animation for children then and now.
• An American Tail: In 19th century Russia: A Jewish family's house is burned down in a pogrom, forcing them to flee to America. During their voyage, a storm strikes the ship and the family's young son is swept overboard and presumed dead. But he survives and ends up on the mean streets of New York, facing all kinds of dangers, at one point sold to a sweatshop by a villain pretending to help him, and all the while trying in vain to find his family, who mourns his "death" and faces the same kind of oppression they thought they were escaping. The only thing that makes this a kids' movie is the fact that it's an animated musical starring anthropomorphic mice.
  • An American Tail: The Treasure Of Manhattan Island features loads of Police Brutality, including officers being paid under the table by corrupt factory owners, deliberately starting a race riot and burning every "mouse house and rat hole" to find someone they're after. It doesn't really help that the movie is set in a time of racism and the one everyone is out to get happens to be a Native American.
• Anastasia is another one of the darker films from Don Bluth, with moments of death, extreme violence, Stuff Blowing Up very realistically, ghostly spirits, and corpses, not to mention the death of Rasputin, who melts into a skeleton before crumbling into dust. He also literally sells his soul to kill Anastasia's family and constantly randomly falls apart, at one point having his head land inside his own stomach, with visible ribs around him.
• Bolívar, el Héroe was intended for kids, but has amounts of heavy violence and brutality.
• Many people wondered how Cars 2 was rated G by the MPAA in spite of having frequent explosions, missile firing exchanges, murder attempts, all sorts of child-scaring peril, and two Family Unfriendly Deaths^note This could be because the MPAA saw the violence as happening towards non-human things, while those things are clearly meant to be stand-ins for humans, particularly Rod "Torque" Redline, who gets tortured for information by the villains, and then blown up. While his actual death is partially obscured as a reflection on a screen that's showing a picture of Mater, the audience gets to see the explosion and the flames rising from his body.
• Coraline is infamous for this. Yes, despite being terrifying, it is technically appropriate for kids, so long as they can handle a good scare every now and then. Oddly enough, the ABC Family airing slaps it with a TV-14 rating despite it being originally rated PG.
• Dot in Space (the last sequel to Dot and the Kangaroo) has never been released outside of its native Australia, meaning the best place to find it these days is the internet. Why is that? Could it be that Dot is just a little girl and just wanted to save the life of a stranded dog yet over the course of the film, she was almost electrocuted by a perimeter fence and narrowly escaped Whyka's rocket after rescuing her before it blew up in which the resulting shockwave caused some metal piping to fall and almost crush Dot and threw her off course, resulting in her crash-landing on the wrong planet where she was ambushed and captured by Scary Dogmatic Aliens who subjected her public humiliation and persecution, interrogation, imprisonment in a slave labour camp and abuse for not being round?
  • Even after Dot escapes, she encounters quicksand, hostile trees and active volcanoes then is recaptured and left at the mercy of an alien dinosaur after unintentionally revealing her location. Luckily, said monster spares her life.
  • Also, there's no telling what could have happened to Dot if she'd been discovered at the space center.
  • On top of all the above, we don't even see Dot and Whyka return to Earth though Word of God says they do.
  • Also, how Dot has not been traumatized after everything she went through remains a mystery.
  • The planet Pie-Arr-Squared is shown to be a particularly hostile world. In addition to devastated villages and a dictatorship influenced by Fantastic Racism, there is also the numerous aforementioned dangers Dot encounters, all of which have deterred the Squaries from trying to escape from prison and which they will still have to live with even without Papa Drop's tyranny.
  • The film also has heavy references to Nazi Germany, such as the main villain Papa Drop behaving in a similar manner to Adolf Hitler, one of the Roundy interrogators doing a Nazi salute, and the Squaries being persecuted and imprisoned in slave labor camps, which is eerily similar to how the Jews were treated during the Holocaust. We should be thankful we never find out what Papa Drop's version of the Final Solution was (From what we see in the film, it appears to be nothing worse than working, starving and beating the Squaries to death, though it's possible it would have been much worse if the film hadn't been aimed at kids and would have had to be toned down accordingly). This (and everything Dot goes through throughout the course of the film) may be the most likely reason why this film is seldom seen outside of its native country of Australia (and even there, it's hard to find as the only time it has ever seen the light of day on home media is on VHS and as a bonus feature on the DVD release of the original film alongside Dot and the Smugglers.) In Germany, this film would be automatically banned for the same reason due to references to Hitler and Naziism being outlawed after World War II.
  • Even the theme from the Opening Scroll emphasizes the foreboding nature of the film.
  • Not that he doesn't deserve it of course but Papa Drop gets overinflated enough to float up into space where he would most likely die from either starvation and dehydration, suffocation or hypothermia or be burned by rays from the nearest star or even the Sun (which might even cause him to expand until he explodes) or in the atmosphere of the nearest planet if he doesn’t get hit by floating debris or even Dot's rocket, or even spend the remainder of his days as a living planet if he's lucky.
  • The very worst part of all that Dot goes through over the course of the film is that, like she says to Whyka at one point, she's going to have a hard time explaining it all because no one is going to believe her.
• El Arca is a Spanish animated film loosely based on Noah's Ark that mostly focuses on the animals on Noah's Ark. The film contains a sex scene (not an implied one at that), a strip club, a big breasted panther named Panthy, and a fight scene which at one point shows visible blood (only a little, but still). This was a kid's film.
• Where to begin with Fantastic Mr. Fox? Let's start with the fact that they manage to get away with saying any swear word by simply exchanging it with "cuss" ("The cuss you are", "Clustercuss", "Scared the cuss out of me"). From there, it just gets better. Mr. Fox is a thief and the farmers want to kill him using switchblades and guns (which leads to him having his tail shot off) and eventually excavators and explosives; there's incessant smoking from Mr. Bean, who makes alcoholic cider (and eventually goes totally insane); there are multiple injuries sustained by characters varying from scars to burns; Rat implies that Felicity is a slut and is later electrocuted and killed by Mr. Fox; and the ending is of the bittersweet variety in which the animal's homes have been destroyed and they now live in the sewers, even though they have a food supply that could last them for decades.
• Frankenweenie, an Animated Adaptation of a short film Tim Burton made back in the mid-1980s, has some pretty horrifying, violent, disturbing scenes–which is to be expected in a Tim Burton movie, but none of his other animated films are anywhere near as violent as this one. And this got a PG rating from the MPAA and was marketed toward kids at Subway through mainly making it about a boy and his undead dog.
• Foodfight! is about Putting on the Reich soldiers of "Brand X" taking over a supermarket, and is full of murders and sexual references. Let's not forget that the animation is so grotesque that it often presents horrifying images and characters that are a good example of Nightmare Fuel.
• Disney's The Great Mouse Detective has the villain's Mooks cheerfully singing about murdering widows and orphans (by drowning them, no less), a 19th-century version of a striptease, and the villain going Ax-Crazy when his Evil Scheme falls through, and he straight up tries to kill the hero with his bare paws. Not to mention that opening jumpscare of the film belongs to the comic-relief henchman.
• Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is still a family-friendly adaptation of the timeless fairy tale just as Del Toro wanted it to be. However, this version of Pinocchio talks about Fascism, had Gappetto getting drunk at one point, and had a tragic death scene albeit no blood anyways but still. Heck, you can tell that Del Toro stated that animation is not a genre for kids and his movie proves it. Del Toro does not consider his version of Pinocchio a babysitter film.
• Gummibär: The Yummy Gummy Search for Santa has a scene in which several reindeer drink alcohol and gamble. Also, Kala's design looks a bit sexualized for a kids movie.
• Despite receiving a U rating (or a G rating in the United States), Help! I'm a Fish contains some Family-Unfriendly Violence. For example, a shark character eats sapient fish, which is Played for Laughs; a crab injures Fly to the point of blood; and Joe dies by getting a Death by Irony when he drowns after turning into a human. This can be partially chalked up to Values Dissonance, where Danish values for media aimed at children are lower.
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame is rated G but is one of Disney's darkest films. Frollo murders Quasimodo's mother and almost throws him in a well, and that's just in the beginning. Then Esmeralda is shown pole-dancing, Quasi's tortured by a crowd, Frollo sings a Villain Song about his lust for Esmeralda and how she will burn if he can't have her, later starts burning Paris down, even setting fire to a home with the family inside, and almost kills Esmeralda at the stake. There's also the way he dies, which is more frightening than your average Disney Villain Death.
• Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie focuses on a man who wants to see God kill everyone in a city he despises. It also contains a scene where the main characters nearly get executed and keeps the Downer Ending of the original story, unlike most retellings of Jonah aimed at children and most VeggieTales retellings in general. It says something when Amazon's print of the movie rates it for ages 7 and up.
• Joshua and the Promised Land:
  • Joshua's parents have a fallout and it's implied that Joshua's father was going to beat Joshua's mother.
  • This movie has a lot of brutal violence, or at least references to it.
  • In a deleted scene, two of Moses' spies infiltrate the city of Jericho and make a deal with a prostitute named Rahab, with Joshua and Chris overseeing the whole affair. Considering the film's target demographic, it's easy to see why this scene never made the final cut.
• Legend Of The Guardians The Owls Of Ga Hoole, despite being a PG-rated film, is directed by Zack Snyder (known for 300 and Watchmen which are R-rated), and as such, we're treated to the pleasant sight of owls clawing and slashing each other apart, characters dying, bats tearing apart owls, and impalements. And yet, it was aimed at kids. Then again, so were the books that this film was based on.
• Mumfie's Quest was aimed at children ages 2-7, but has a whale who's an ocean liner not getting any passengers on board because his slogan was misinterpreted for something sexual, an island that's been turned into a prison where a baby pig's mother is trapped in which the main character himself gets trapped in, and the Secretary of Night, an antagonist who would scare a lot of kids in the target audience (which he did, according to thoss who watched this movie as kids).
• NIMONA (2023): The movie, despite having a PG rating, has an amount of blood, an onscreen death, a main plot talking about Fantastic Racism, Nimona's backstory being about how she was mistreated for being seen as a monster by society, and later trying to commit suicide in the film's climax before being stopped by Ballister.
• At one point in time, Amazon classified the movie Only Yesterday under "Kids and Family", leading to some of the sponsored items featured on the page to be stuff like PAW Patrol DVD box sets and the Edutainment Show Meet the Letters. At first glance, Only Yesterday may seem like a movie about a woman remembering her childhood experiences, but most Studio Ghibli fans would know that the film was disowned by Walt Disney Home Entertainment for featuring a Running Gag of school-aged boys peeking at girls' skirts to see if they are menstruating. Despite this, the film was aimed at all ages in Japan, like most of Studio Ghibli's works, and carries a PG rating in the US.
• Osmosis Jones has a rather dark villain and some not too subtle sexual innuendos for a PG-rated movie set in the human body. Said villain happens to be an anthropomorphic virus who enjoys murdering cells and gloats about killing all the human hosts he's encountered (including a little girl). His introductory scene involves murdering a cell who is shown graphically deteriorating and squirting liquid while screaming in pain. Not to mention that there are several references to sperm cells and jokes about "division". In fact, the movie was to be rated PG-13 at first.
• Princess Mononoke was given the equivalent of a G rating in Japan despite being the most violent and darkest of Studio Ghibli's films, but netted a PG-13 rating in the US and a 14A rating in Canada (though the film has since been re-rated PG in Canada for the Blu-ray release).
• This is one of the main factors influencing The Queen's Corgi's negative reception. It's meant to be a family movie and has a The Secret Life of Pets-esque premise of Queen Elizabeth II's top corgi getting lost and trying to find a way home, but has lots of mature humor and themes no one would expect for a kids' movie: mild profanity throughout, Charlie's attempt to murder Rex, the said corgi, the intense dog fights, a dog addicted to cocaine (actually shoelaces), Wanda used as a stand-in for an exotic dancer in an abusive relationship with the fight club owner, and most egregiously, Donald Trump's lewd portrayal and Rex being sexually harassed by Trump's corgi as a reference to Trump's sexual assault allegations. However, it should be noted the film was produced in Belgium, where standards for family-friendly content are lower.
• Rango seemed to incite some parents upon release (if the numerous one-star Amazon reviews filled with parents complaining about it not being suitable for kids wasn't enough) due to a load of bizarrely adult content matter, with several instances of swearing, smoking (which almost earned it a PG-13 rating), gun violence (with characters shot onscreen), on-screen death, tons of Black Comedy, and the presence of Rattlesnake Jake, who heralds almost all of the movie's darkest scenes. Complimented with an art style many kids would find unflattering and creepy, it pushes its PG rating as far as it can go.
• This was a contributing factor to the American release of Robotech: The Movie not going any further than it did. Midway through the film, a rape is nearly being depicted (to say nothing about the violence also present in the source material).
• Rover Dangerfield was Rodney Dangerfield's attempt at making a movie for kids, but had Las Vegas showgirls, drug-dealing mobsters, and a comic relief character's onscreen death, for which the title character is framed and nearly shot.
• The Secret of NIMH is scary no matter what age you are, but it's still marketed toward kids. Bizarrely enough, it was given a G rating despite Don Bluth and company deliberately aiming for PG. It's been pretty amusing seeing cheap reprints of the DVD with nothing but cute and cuddly box art.
• Sheep & Wolves starts off like a comedic animated movie with a foolish wolf who gets turned into a sheep, but it gets darker later on, with its antagonist intentionally killing his ailing leader to take his position. And the female wolves, including the main characters' Love Interests, are heavily sexualized.
• Sherlock Gnomes seems like an easy lighthearted fair, being a sequel to a work which portrayed garden gnomes in the roles of familiar literary characters, but it has its fair share of darker moments than its predecessor, with characters being kidnapped, characters seeming to die, and the film's rendition of Moriarty wanting to commit genocide on all the gnomes in London.
• Despite Sir Billi supposedly being for kids, there's an excessive amount of inappropriate humor and sexual innuendos, and references to older media that younger children probably won't get.
• Spirited Away was intended for kids in Japan, and several parents bought the VHS for their kids thinking it was a story meant for children of all ages; some were fooled by the fact that Chihiro was voiced in the English dub by the same girl who played Lilo. However, the film is known for including several story elements that could be considered Nightmare Fuel for younger viewers, like Chihiro's parents turning into pigs before her eyes, No Face eating people after being given money, and an injured dragon who almost dies a few times (accompanied by on-screen blood).
• Summer Wars was a G-rated movie in Japan that spawned merchandise aimed at that demographic, like picture books and plushies of the cute animal critters from the movie. But it has instances of blood, tragic death of a family member, swearing, child nudity, a doomsday scenario, and so much more.
• The Transformers: The Movie surprised a lot of parents (and children) who expected the same lighthearted tone as the TV series, only to see hordes of Autobots die in the first ten minutes, including Optimus Prime. And then there's the infamous scene where Spike says "Oh shit!"
• The True Story of Puss 'N Boots seems to have some kid-unfriendly elements. The female characters (at least two of them) have more detail to their bodies, and the royal family's punishment for people who lie to them is grinding them up into hamburger meat and possibly eating them.
• Turning Red, while still kid-friendly, is more overt about puberty and pubescent sexuality than you might expect, even from Pixar. An early plot point has Mei excitedly doodling shirtless drawings of a seventeen-year-old clerk working at the local convenience store, which her mother discovers and misinterprets as a sign of said teenager having taken advantage of her. The film also notably averts the idea of No Periods, Period, where not only does Mei's mom assume Mei is menstruating (with the Unusual Euphemism of "the red peony blooming") and bring her maxi pads, but she also mentions that Mei should "clean" her "petals" regularly. There's also brief references to drugs and "stripper music," both of which are surprisingly explicit for a PG Disney film.
• Watership Down is often used as an example of mature animation, but like the book it was based on, it was intended for all ages, despite the mutilations and disturbing imagery. For example, a rabbit gets caught in a wire snare and nearly dies, another rabbit gets its ears shredded as a punishment, a rabbit tells a story of how its warren was wiped out by poison gas, and two rabbits are shown fighting each other with blood on their mouths and paws. And that's without the scene where a dog comes and kills a rabbit.
• Many people who did the English dub of The Wind Rises did so because they wanted a film that they could show their children, many of whom were toddlers at the time the film came out. Like Only Yesterday, it's more of an arthouse film than the fantasies that Studio Ghibli is known for, and has a few scenes of war in it. It even caused controversy in Japan despite being rated that country's equivalent of G, and many people were against seeing the movie because it had many scenes in which characters smoke, since cigarettes were (and still are) a taboo topic in Japan.
• While Wolfwalkers is a family movie with some funny and lighthearted moments and its violence is usually bloodless, it still doesn't shy away from the fact that it takes place during a particularly brutal period in Irish history (specifically during the Cromwellian conquest of the 17th century). Robyn's father Bill attempts to kill her twice when she's in her wolf form since he doesn't recognize her, Bill himself has to deal with his fear of potentially losing his daughter to either wolves or the Knight Templar Lord Protector, and Mebh worries about her missing mother Moll and witnesses Moll getting shot mere moments after reuniting with her, which comes out of nowhere in a major Gut Punch.
• Wonder Park, may seem like a cute movie about a theme park imagined by a young girl at first glance. However, the main premise is kicked off by her mom having to go to the hospital because she is ill, causing June to become depressed and abandon her park. And that's not all: when she discovers that the park is actually real, we learn that her depression caused a dark cloud inhabited by plush monkeys that have turned evil and kidnapped Peanut, the leader of the park, inside of it. Many parents went online to complain as a result.

Films — Live-Action

• The Ah Boys to Men films have moments of this. People getting shot, swear words, sexual innunendos (such as "whore"), etc. Yet Singaporean kids were okay with that.
• Alice in Wonderland (1985) is for kids, but as it's one of the more faithful adaptations of the books has a lot of Nightmare Fuel (i.e. the White Queen's transformation into a goat) even without it turning the Jabberwock into an antagonist Alice must face down in the second half.
• Back to the Future
  • The original Back to the Future had a scene where the second lead is gunned down by Libyan terrorists. On the other hand, when Marty found himself in 1955, he made it a point to try and save Doc from his future fate... and succeeds; it was more of an extremely delayed Disney Death. There's also Marty's plan to get George and Lorraine together at the dance involved him faking a rape attempt on his own mother, which was then broken up by a real rape attempt from Biff.
  "If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious shit!"
  • As such, it was refreshing to see that line appear in the Telltale video game intact.
  • The first sequel isn't much better, starting with a Groin Attack on Marty Junior. Of course, the cherry on top is the alternate 1985 where Biff is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who murdered George in cold blood, forced Lorraine into marriage and breast implants, sits in a jacuzzi with naked women, and has turned Hill Valley into a hellhole.
  • Part III has Buford hanging Marty, threatening Clara with rape, and attempting a slow death by bullet on Doc. Plus there's Doc's (implied) one-night stand with Clara.
  • Amusingly, this trope was why Disney turned down the chance to produce the first film, as they thought it was too raunchy for them (primarily the subplot with Lorraine becoming infatuated with Marty), whereas other studios thought it wasn't raunchy enough (this was the era of teen sex comedies such as Porky's and Revenge of the Nerds).
• Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, the Darker and Edgier sequel to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Take a lighthearted, family-friendly Totally Radical comedy and add lots of terror along with a Played for Laughs—yet still effectively morbid—Disney Death plotline, heavily ramped up profanity, sexual dialogue, and incest references, and you've got something that probably didn't sit nearly as well with the original film's target audience.
• Camp Nowhere had talk of the titular camp being a former hippie commune, complete with a laughing mention of all that it entailed. The movie also had kids cursing, buying beer with an adult's help, lying to their parents and the authorities, and stealing money. In the end, it never makes it clear what the lesson is, and the promotional posters were ridiculously risque compared to the movie proper.
• The director and crew of the Mystery Science Theater 3000-riffed movie Carnival Magic set out to make it a kid's flick...but as their filmmaking experience came from making Exploitation Films, it features such plot points as the film's comic relief character (Alex the talking chimp) attempting suicide to avoid being operated on and a brief yet shockingly realistic depiction of Domestic Abuse as the antagonist beats his girlfriend. Reportedly, even at the time of the film's release, viewers were left confused at the unintentional case of Uncertain Audience that the film presented.
• The Live-Action Adaptation of The Cat in the Hat definitely qualifies: Despite it being based on a book meant for kids, the movie dealt with a lot of extremely crass humor (examples include the Cat calling a soil-covered gardening implement a "dirty hoe" and the original name of the S.L.O.W., the Super Hydraulic Instantaneous Transporter) and rather dirty things that should not be exposed to kids. The fact that the writers also made EuroTrip, an R-rated sex comedy explains a lot. Sadly, it was also a point of contention for Theodore Geisel's estate. The film was such a slap in the face to the original story that all plans on making live-action adaptations of the Dr. Seuss stories have been barred. The animated stuff, however, is still acceptable.
• The movie adaptation of the musical Cats, despite carrying a PG rating, has a strange current of eroticism, between the weirdly sensual way the cats move and rub against each other and the fact that they look like naked humans covered in fur, which isn't helped at all by the constant presence of the Unintentional Uncanny Valley.
• Clash of the Titans (1981) is an adventure film for kids and with cool special effects, brief scenes of a woman breastfeeding, another emerging from a bath full frontal, and Medusa getting gorily decapitated and oozing blood everywhere.
• Cloak & Dagger (1984): You'd think that a PG spy caper about two kids keeping a video game away from villains would be a kid-friendly romp, but it's filled with a surprising amount of bloody murder. Our kid hero is stuffed into a car trunk with a corpse on two separate occasions and even has to gun down one of the villains.
• Cop Dog, described in its summary as "a heartfelt tale about a boy and his dog who set out to solve the death of the young boy's father." The cutesy cover and PG rating must signify that it's targeted to a younger audience, but not even a quarter of the way through the movie, the dog is run over by a car, and it's not one of those things where the kid comes home from school and the mother has to break the bad news to him, but a chase scene in which the dog dies. The whole movie is about fulfilling the dog's final desire, which is solving his master's murder so that he can cross over.
  Amazon user Kathy: Heartwarming...yeah right. My daughter who is 10 freaked out when she saw Marlowe get hit by a car and killed - especially since that happened to one of our dogs a few years ago. THEN the dog is a ghost and there's some sort of time limit before something bad happens? Now she's freaking out again afraid she'll have nightmares. I didn't read very far into the plot synopsis so I didn't realize the dog got killed... Had I known that I would have never rented it. PG doesn't necessarily mean "good sense" or actually appropriate for sensitive kids! Motherfucker!
• While not as egregious as fellow MST3K movie Carnival Magic, Cry Wilderness does feature clearly intoxicated bikers, a joke about eating baby raccoons, and the antagonist is defeated by getting his eyes ripped out by a hawk (in front of the kid protagonist, no less), hardly things you'd expect to see in a film that was otherwise clearly meant for families.
• The Dark Crystal, a fantasy flick with a dark atmosphere, creepy monsters, Family-Unfriendly Violence, lots of scary moments, and yet it was aimed at kids.
• Dora and the Lost City of Gold is based on a popular preschool show, but it has some elements that would seem out of place in the series it was based on, like Dora's parents being kidnapped, several scenes involving Dora being in near-death situations, Dora and her friends being trapped in a box and sent to Mexico while on a field trip and scenes involving drug-like references. The trailer was even screened with several movies aimed at mature audiences, such as After and Little.
• In Ernest Goes to Camp, the scene where The Dragon beats up Ernest is a bit too brutal for an Ernest P. Worrell movie.
• The Disney/Amblin co-production A Far Off Place was marketed as a PG-rated family-friendly adventure...featuring an orphaned girl and her friend trekking 1,000 miles through Africa with cold-blooded poachers hot on their trail for witnessing their massacre on her parents' reserve. And on top of that, a Roger Rabbit cartoon played before the movie in theaters. Never was there a more jarring case of Mood Whiplash than zany cartoon slapstick being followed by the horrific slaughter of a teen's parents.
• Like other infamous children's films from the 1950s to the 1970s like Santa Claus (1959) and Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, Fun in Balloon Land itself isn't violent or raunchy, but it fits this trope unintentionally due to ultra-saccharine elements of the film coming across as unintentionally creepy, with the balloons having absolutely horrifying faces that children would most likely be terrified by.
• The Gamera series has some of the most graphic "monster vs. monster" violence in movie history and truly gruesome moments such as this, despite being geared towards children.
• The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. While the film is rated PG, the titular Garbage Pail Kids are abominations who vomit on people, wet themselves, fart in people's faces, get into fights, steal and damage property, and one of them is even willing to threaten people with a switchblade. There is also a subplot of a young man who looks to be at least 12 being in a relationship with a young woman who is clearly in her 20s. It is filled with violence, drinking, near-nudity, and scatological scenes; and infamously contains a Broken Aesop that people should be judged on their behavior, not their appearance; despite all the Garbage Pail Kids' hateful and near-criminal actions. The Moral Guardians of the time protested the film and successfully managed to get it pulled from theaters because of all this.
• George's Island: A late 80's Canadian family film about a young boy and his grandfather who ultimately go searching for Captain Kidd's buried treasure on the titular island, but not before getting embroiled in a custody battle that involves George temporarily going to live with a horrendously abusive foster family who take on foster children solely as a second form of income, George and his friend escaping the family by means of his grandfather hiding them in his Halloween costume which is a giant bloody eyeball, and then very nearly getting murdered by the band of ghost pirates after digging up the treasure. Heck, the prologue of the movie shows the burying of the treasure itself along with the decapitated corpse of one of Kidd's crew. Said decapitation is shown on-screen, along with both the head and body tumbling into the hole, after which Kidd then shoots his remaining crew.
• Ghostbusters II was made deliberately Lighter and Softer than the original by toning down things like adult humor and smoking. On the flipside, the horror elements are considerably ramped up in comparison, with a bigger emphasis on frightening imagery and immediate peril that makes the more "family-friendly" movie much more likely to scare the hell out of younger kids.
• The Golden Compass, the film adaptation of the first book of His Dark Materials trilogy was marketed to children and is considered a family film. But despite the Disneyfication process that the adaptation suffered (like removing most of the hardcore atheist rants), it still had a lot of dark elements, like a very violent polar bear fight, people being shot, lots of killings and many other things, such as the ending scene which was left off the theatrical release.
• The same can be said about The Great Yokai War: A kid's film directed by Takashi Miike (the director of Ichi the Killer). Despite being clearly aimed at kids (many people compared the film with movies as Time Bandits or The Never Ending Story) it still has lots of creepy moments, some innuendo, Family-Unfriendly Violence and lots of Black Comedy.
• Gremlins: This movie, along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, led to the creation of both the PG-13 rating in the USA and the 12 rating in the UK. The trailers presented this picture as much more lighthearted than it was. Reviewing it for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Harlan Ellison described it in terms more suited to Nightmare Fuel. He deplored its many instances of wanton cruelty played for laughs and said he "heard little children scream and cry" in the theater. The manager later told him he'd never had so many patrons walking out and demanding their money back. There's also a scene in which one of the characters gives a 2-minute speech about how they found out Santa wasn't real, which isn't something one would expect to be discussed in a children's movie. Ellison even felt that having Phoebe Cates in a family movie was a mistake because of her sexy roles in the miniseries Lace and films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, is far Lighter and Softer than the first movie, taking a more openly comedic bent and dialing back the violence (only one gremlin death is anywhere near as gruesome as in the first film, and it's played more for laughs than for horror), but it was hit with a PG-13 regardless.
• The Disney film Hocus Pocus is supposed to be a family-friendly film, but includes buttloads of crap, both sexual and otherwise:
  • Fifteen-year-old Max's virginity was a plot point. Consequently, somebody gibes Max about his virginity every few minutes.
  • Max's eight-year-old sister Dani mentions Max's virginity three times. She also mocks Max's attraction to his classmate Allison and her "yabbos".
  • Sarah (one of the witches) flirts with every male she meets. She offers to help Max take care of his virginity.
  • Within the first ten minutes, a girl, about eight years old, dies onscreen.
  • Binks the cat, gets run over and is seen flattened on-screen. By that time, Binks has become Dani's pet. This has freaked out many people.
  • The witches' plot is to make themselves immortal by sucking out the lives of children. Mary in particular views children as dinner.
  • The film has incidents of potential Nausea Fuel, such as a potion ingredient being "a piece of thine own tongue", Sarah munching on the occasional spider, and Sarah gleefully retrieving her "lucky rat-tail" right where she left it.
  • At a Halloween party, Dani encounters her mom dressed up as Madonna in her iconic outfit of the early nineties.
  • Perhaps the most brazen exchange is this one with the bus driver:
    Bus Driver: [On the bus's purpose] To convey gorgeous creatures such as yourselves to your most... [cracks knuckles] forbidden desires.
    Winifred Sanderson: [laughs] Well, fancy! We desire ... children.
    Bus Driver: Hey, it may take me a couple of tries, but I don't think there's gonna be a problem.
• Lucasfilm's Indiana Jones series received some criticism due to the level of violence in the movies (particularly Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which, to be fair, features a guy getting a heart ripped from his chest), resulting in the creation of the PG-13 rating.
• The Journey of Natty Gann: There are heartfelt themes and character relationships, but the movie is rougher than most Disney fare, featuring a dogfight to the death, an Attempted Rape, and the teenaged protagonist smoking in one scene and saying "Shit" in another.
• Roger Ebert bashed Jumanji only because he found it too scary for family entertainment.
  • Ironically, he found the film's spiritual sequel, Zathura, to be perfectly okay for kids to handle, despite the fact that it contains giant, humanoid, man-eating lizards, a killer robot, and the very real possibility of the main characters getting sucked into a star/black hole (which does happen to their sister in the climax)
• The 2016 adaptation of The Jungle Book has a very serious plot (although not without its humorous moments), some very frightening scenes (including more than a few jump scares), and quite a bit of violence, especially the emotionally upsetting death of Akela, which has caused some people to question why it wasn't given a PG-13 rating.
  • Before that there was the 1994 movie which has some real graphic deaths for the villains from one soldier's death in quicksand to another is the victim of a trap in a tomb burying himself alive. Roger Ebert's review found the PG rating of the movie "laughable".
• Kangaroo Jack has had a "hard PG" rating due to that it was originally an R-rated mob comedy that got retooled so that the title and trailers would market it as a movie about a rapping kangaroo. In 2004, it had a direct-to video animated sequel that was family-friendly from the start.
• Labyrinth has frequently been cited as this. Despite the film being a kids' film, there are three instances of the word "damn," the heroine almost getting killed by many sharp, rotating blades coming at her down a tunnel, beings that can (and do) gleefully dismantle themselves before trying to decapitate said heroine, a "villain" twice the heroine's age trying to seduce her, and Bowie's Magic Pants.
• The 2007 Indian film Like Stars on Earth is about a dyslexic boy who has problems with his school life, so he then has an art teacher tutoring him. So it's a kids film, right? Wrong. It has by far the creepiest scenes in kids film history, such as the opening scene with distorted letters and horrific music, or the infamously disturbing Bheja Kum scene with spiders shaped like letters and numbers and a snake jumpscare that happens out of nowhere. It also tackles parental abuse and dyslexia, which is depicted as an extremely serious problem. The fact that Disney of all companies distributed the film internationally and it was rated PG didn't help matters.
• Over in Italy, Malèna is considered a family film. The uncut version has gratuitous female nudity in half the scenes, has plenty of scenes of the young boy masturbating, scenes of domestic violence, the 12-year-old protagonist sleeping with a prostitute twice his age and the climactic scene of the women in the town graphically beating up Malena in the street.
• Matilda has a bunch of kids getting hammer-tossed out of windows, first-graders getting packed into a closet with rusty nails and adults downright insulting children's intelligence and calling them hurtful names. Then again, this is a Roald Dahl adaptation we're talking about. On the upside, the abuse isn't that severe and the protagonist does win in the end. On top of that, it's a family film, so the violence is mainly for the adults, no matter how cruel it may seem.
• MirrorMask: Many people compare this film with Labyrinth: Being written by Neil Gaiman is not surprising that most of the story is a complete Mind Screw that even the adults will find confusing...Also, it is filled with some creepy moments.
• Mission to Mars is a PG-rated Disney production. Now try telling someone that with a straight face after showing them the opening scene out of context, which features one of the most unpleasant and gory deaths ever put to film, where an astronaut gets violently spun around and ripped to bits by a sentient Martian storm. Which isn’t even an exaggeration; even obscured by dust the blood and gore is very clearly visible. The whole thing looks more like a Fatality in a Netherrealm-produced Mortal Kombat game than a Disney production, and how the hell it didn’t earn the film a PG-13 rating, much less an R-rating, is anyone’s guess.
• MouseHunt features, among other things: an instance of The "Fun" in "Funeral" in the first five minutes with a corpse falling into a sewer, a man getting stripped naked by machinery and then seduced by his estranged Gold Digger wife, almost an entire minute's worth of Thanks for the Mammary, an onscreen death (again, early in the movie), and boatloads of Family-Unfriendly Violence. And yet this was marketed as a lighthearted Slapstick family movie.
• Several of the films watched on Mystery Science Theater 3000 fall into this trope:
  • Infamously, Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders made the mistake of putting a crappy horror movie into a crappy children's movie package, and then forgetting to take out the horror. Thus we get a creepy monkey doll, a man's wife becoming his mother, and gratuitous violence in a movie supposedly meant for kids. Hilariously lampshaded:
    Servo: (as the kid) No, Grandpa Borgnine, leave light and hope for me! Please!
    Crow: (as Grandpa Borgnine) Get out from behind that cushion, Billy! It gets worse!
  • Pod People made a similar mistake. It had its script altered in pre-production by executive order to add a subplot of a boy befriending a cute alien to capitalize on the success of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Unfortunately, it was originally intended to be a straight horror movie about a killer alien, and none of the horrible deaths or sexual innuendo were removed. The Mood Whiplash never settles.
• Nine Lives (2016) is rated PG, even though most of its runtime consists of business meetings and other similar things that children wouldn't care about, and also includes a scene with two security guards who decide to tase a cat for laughs and a scene where a character decides to commit suicide.
• One of the biggest reasons Roger Ebert loathed North was for featuring jokes that were completely inappropriate for young audiences, such as the governor of Hawaii joking about his wife being barren while she's standing right next to him.
• Nukie: The plot is too complicated for its own good, the aliens look disturbing and creepy, and children are exiled from their tribe with the expectation that they would die in the wilderness. Kids would be scarred for life watching this movie; that is, if they aren't falling asleep in the first place.
• The 2018 South Korean film On Your Wedding Day is rated 12+ within South Korea but it contains lots of potentially explicit content that a 15+ television drama would not be afraid about.
• Given the violence and Nightmare Fuel present in Pacific Rim, some people find it hard to believe that Guillermo del Toro designed the film to be for children. In interviews, Del Toro was even upfront about how he wanted to make a positive film for kids, and that Mako Mori was designed as a feminist role model for young girls.
• The Peanut Butter Solution is a Canadian kids movie from the 1980s. Some of the plot points include the ghosts of homeless people who died in a fire, an art teacher kidnapping children and forcing them to work as slaves, and a kid using hair tonic to grow pubic hair.
• Pokémon Detective Pikachu is based on a children's videogame franchise, but seems to be Darker and Edgier than what it adapts, the word "shit" gets said twice (though it's easy to miss without subtitles on), with a plot about a gas that turns Pokémon into rabid creatures and fuses everyone with their Pokémon, which left some child viewers terrified.
• Return to Oz is meant to be seen as a kids' adventure film, yet there are the infamous scenes such as shock therapy, the disembodied heads of the Lollipop Guild, and of course, the Nome King.^note Return to Oz follows Baum's spelling of Nome. Ruth Plumly Thompson changed the spelling to Gnome in her Land of Oz novels.
• The 1991 sequel Return to the Blue Lagoon was a bizarre case of marketing creating confusion as the original home video release of the film was promoted as being "family entertainment" despite the film having sex scenes and nudity (not to mention being a sequel/remake of one of the most controversial films of the 1980s, controversial for the exact same reasons).
• Rolli – Amazing Tales is based on a children's television show, and features an evil cult, the main character drinking whiskey and getting violently drunk, and the villain trying to kill the heroes with a knife, only to be killed himself.
• School of Rock: Despite the PG-13 rating and some instances of the characters cursing, this film was aimed at kids, and even played on kid-oriented channels like Cartoon Network in the 2000's, but with the offending language censored.
• The Scooby-Doo (2002) live-action movie is rated PG — and a very "hard" PG, at that, with a number of thinly-veiled sex and drug references and generally rather ribald humor. This makes sense once you realize that the film was originally meant as a parody of Scooby-Doo aimed at teenagers and young adults who grew up with the show; according to the film's writer James Gunn, the first cut of the film submitted to the MPAA was returned with an R rating. The content was heavily dialed back in order to slide by with a PG (the deleted scenes are chock full of raunchier gags and one legitimately scary moment), while the sequel Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed was written as a family comedy from the start with a tone much closer to the cartoons.
• The Short Circuit movies are family movies about a war robot who gained awareness after getting struck by lightning and is very friendly. But the movies have things that would probably not fly by today as PG, such as some of the swearing (The biggest offender was a magician in the second film saying "motherfucker"). The first film has the title character accidently spotting a woman naked in the bathtub. But the worst was in sequel as Johnny was getting slaughtered by Oscar's goons, especially the bleeding. This also gives stakes to Johnny to the point of almost dying at the end.
• Sixteen Candles, combined with its Values Dissonance would probably be a PG-13/R, due to the main character saying the F-word and a One-Scene Wonder of a naked girl in the shower.
• George Lucas has maintained that Star Wars is intended for children. Some people point at the severed limbs, convoluted politics and economics, Techno Babble, bio-babble, and other kid-unfriendly aspects to counter those claims.
  • Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope even managed to get a U rating from the BBFC in the UK, despite having numerous on-screen deaths, a close-up of a bloodied and severed arm (admittedly a non-human character), a brief shot of burning corpses (Luke's aunt and uncle) and even implied genocide when Alderaan gets blown up. Admittedly other countries' rating agencies tend to go higher.
  • Return of the Jedi frequently gets derided as being too "kid-friendly", despite Princess Leia being turned into a pleasure slave, wearing next-to-nothing, when she's captured by Jabba the Hutt.
  • Revenge of the Sith features, among other things, almost every major heroic character dying, most of them onscreen, and a beloved hero murdering children and strangling his pregnant wife nearly to death. Not to mention a prolonged scene of a character screaming in agony as he almost burns to death in a scene that can be hard to watch even for adults. While it earned a PG-13 rating in America, that didn't exactly stop the film from being marketed towards kids under 13. Despite the more graphic and adult elements, the film is generally pretty well received among children.
  • With the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney, Star Wars as a franchise has become (ironically) more adult-oriented, with fewer overly whimsical elements and less comic relief in favor of a slightly less idealistic tone, deeper characters, and gratuitous original trilogy nostalgia. Rogue One, while still watched by many kids, is often cited as the opposite of this trope.
• Time Bandits, from Terry Gilliam, an adventure/fantasy flick starring a child. It features scenes of firing squads, a man getting crushed to death, nightmare creatures, and ends with the kid's parents exploding, all because they were idiots for touching the evil microwave and not listening to the child.
• TRON itself came out before the PG-13 rating (1982), and while it was technically aimed at kids, it was much Darker and Edgier than the usual (at least at the time) Disney fare. On its roster; brutal on-screen deaths (including a Boom, Headshot! with some gibs), Electric Torture (Clu 1.0 is tortured to death, Dumont and the other Tower Guardians come close to it), overt religious themes (more blatant than the second film's), snarky innuendo and a Shirtless Scene... Then there's the Deleted Scene that was ostensibly cut for pacing but was quite obviously sexual in nature.
• TRON: Legacy. Considering that the 2010 sequel has a Darker and Edgier plot and much more brutal deresolutions than the 1982 original^note Many of the arena deaths, for example, dismemberment and splatter easily compare with similar scenes in Gladiator, possibly being a nod to Scott's epic, only swapping dissolving luminescent cubes for real blood and gore., one could easily be shocked that this film was intended for kids. This can't possibly be stressed enough. The movie is about as close to Gorn as you can get without showing any blood, the villain is essentially Hitler, and somehow it still managed to get a PG rating, with Disney somehow not realizing that their movie was very kid-unfriendly and marketing it to young children. Its promotions on Disney Channel, as well as its Adidas apparel line, and its large collection of toys, all of which are made and meant for children.
• We Bought a Zoo is perhaps the only PG-rated film since the 80s (when the PG-13 rating was introduced) to shoehorn in at least three uses of "shit" and one of "asshole". However, it was marketed as a light-hearted family film.
• The Wizard was definitely made and marketed with Nintendo-loving kids in mind... but the scenes of upsetting family drama, the incestuous Accidental Innuendo in the hotel scene, and Haley's cry of "HE TOUCHED MY BREAST!" make one wonder.
• Yankee Zulu appears to be family-oriented and has been rated PG in the States and equivalents overseas, but the plot involves the protagonist's vindictive ex-wife and her fascist husband chasing down the hero and his friend for a check with both antagonists running a white supremacist organization, not to mention the two main characters resort to disguising themselves as a black and white man which is Played for Laughs (the movie was made in post-apartheid South Africa). Also, there's quite a bit of mild cursing and a heap of slapstick violence.
• In the same line of the last example, the live-action film of the anime Yatterman made by Takashi Miike, was aimed at kids in Japan, but it was filled with innuendo, sex-related humor, profanity and one scene where one female-shaped robot starts acting like it was having an orgasm.
• Most superhero movies, in general, tend to be rated PG-13, and are often designed to appeal to a cross-section of kids and adults. This causes some debate (such as the sister trope's section on superhero movies about whether or not these movies are actually appropriate for kids, even though they obviously enjoy immense popularity among children. The rise of R-rated superhero films (and TV-MA-rated superhero TV series) with heavier violence and sexual content has made the debate even more complicated.
  • Since The Avengers, every Marvel Cinematic Universe movie has featured at least one character losing a hand, in homage to the above-mentioned Star Wars. This is usually Played for Laughs, though exceptions exist (such as Doctor Strange where it is the impetus of the entire plot).

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