They're usually thought of as being great for the kids, but there are some seriously
disturbing moments in these G-rated movies.
Get ready to revisit some of your favorite childhood nightmares.
If you haven't seen We're Back!
A Dinosaur's Story, there's a good chance you won't believe us when we describe the
plot.
If you have seen it, you'll be relieved to know that it's a movie that actually does
exist and isn't just some fever dream that you had back in the '90s.
Here's the plot: after kidnapping a bunch of dinosaurs from prehistoric times, a space
weirdo named Captain Neweyes gives them Brain Grain, a cereal that makes them smart and
friendly, and, in the case of a T. rex named Rex, gives him the melodic singing voice of
John Goodman.
He does this so that he can give modern-day kids the chance to meet real dinosaurs.
Unfortunately, he has a twin brother named Professor Screweyes, because one of his eyes
is a literal screw that's been driven into his face that he uses to hypnotize people
and dinosaurs.
Screweyes wants to steal the dinosaurs, revert them back to jurassic savagery, and put them
in a circus so he can scare his customers.
This will somehow make money.
There's some other stuff going on, too, but for a movie about singing, dancing dinosaurs,
it's kind of surprising that we spend about a half hour in a circus that's explicitly
designed to be horrific.
A lot of these movies get disturbing by accident.
We're Back does it all on purpose.
Even at its most basic, The Adventures of Mark Twain is a weird one.
The plot finds Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Becky Thatcher hitching a ride on their literary
creator's airship as he attempts to keep an "appointment" in space with Halley's Comet.
Even keeping in mind that the "appointment" is Twain's own death, it sounds like it could
be a pretty fun romp full of jumping frogs, river hooligans, and wry commentary.
It is not.
It is terrifying.
"What's your name?"
"Satan."
"Uh-oh."
"What's the matter?"
In addition to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, this movie decided to draw inspiration from one
of Twain's later works, The Mysterious Stranger.
This unfinished novel is the story of three teenage boys who meet Satan on the road, and
apparently, that wasn't creepy enough for this claymation nightmare, which ramps it
up to full-on horror movie.
In the original fragments, the story did not take place in a pocket dimension, and Satan
wasn't a headless nightmare monster with a twisting drama mask for a face.
That stuff is all exclusive to the G-rated film version, just for the kids.
Originally released as a short film in 1968, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day would
go on to win the Academy Award for Animated Short Film and would return to theaters almost
a decade later as part of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.
Both times, it got a G rating, which makes sense, since it's a charming story of stuffed
animals having some gentle fun.
Except for that one part where Pooh is wracked with nightmares and terrible visions of horrifying
creatures emerging from the shadows to mutilate and destroy their own bodies in an attempt
to steal the only thing in the world that he actually loves.
Oh, bother.
In all honesty, the "Heffalumps and Woozles" song isn't actually scary, and even "disturbing"
feels a little off.
It does, however, follow the extremely weird logic of a dream where elephants, or as Pooh
says, heffalumps, drink honey through their noses until they explode, and where dancing
creatures get furious with the viewers for watching them before they casually go back
to having their twisted fun.
Frightening?
Maybe, maybe not, but it's definitely the kind of dream that leaves you feeling uneasy
for the rest of the day.
Winsor McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strip is often regarded as one of the
earliest high points of the medium, and served as the inspiration for everything from a full-length
opera to a weird NES game.
Oh, and also a G-rated anime film from 1989 that opens with every major nightmare you've
ever had, all happening at once.
Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland kicks off its charming tale with the title character
flying on his bed through the shattered towers of a ruined city.
If the sight of what looks like bombed-out ruins from a Fallout game weren't bad enough,
there's also the added creepiness of a backwards-running clock tower that appears just in time for
Nemo to drop out of the sky.
The poor kid plunges into the same kind of seemingly endless fall that's synonymous with
nightmares.
Then, just for a little extra fun, he's chased by a terrifying train that he can't escape,
hounded into a vaguely disturbing version of his own house where his mother won't look
at him.
Later on in the film, a few of Slumberland's residents are attacked by a formless mass
of shadows with a thousand glowing eyes, but honestly?
Compared to the all-too-familiar night terrors of the opening sequence, Lovecraftian horrors
are downright pleasant.
If it's been a while since you've seen it, it's worth noting that Chitty Chitty Bang
Bang is both way weirder than you'd expect a Mary Poppins style romp about a flying car
to be, and exactly as weird as you'd expect from a children's story written by the creator
of James Bond.
Seriously, the romantic lead is named "Truly Scrumptious."
Ian Fleming was many things, but "subtle" was not one of them.
The most bizarre set piece is the trip to the vaguely Eastern European country of Vulgaria,
which is somehow even less subtle than poor Miss Scrumptious.
This particular sequence takes up the last quarter of the film, and the conflict is mostly
based around Vulgaria's counterintuitive decision to literally outlaw children.
It's a goofy idea, but it's made incredibly creepy with the introduction of the Child
Catcher, a character created for the film by screenwriter Roald Dahl because why not
terrify as many children as possible?
This weirdo brings plenty of upsetting imagery along with him, like the entire main cast
disguised as dead eyed toys wobbling on springs, but it eventually involves him quite literally
luring children into his van, or, uh, horse-drawn wagon, only to reveal that it is a cage.
The weirdest part, though, comes right after his introduction.
In addition to telling the toymaker he's going to make earrings out of his eyeballs, he also
describes his method for finding children in exactly the same terms that Christoph Waltz's
character uses in the opening of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.
No, really.
"Like cockroaches, they get under the floors, in the cracks in the walls."
Oh, and he's also waving around a giant metal hook the whole time.
You know, for dragging children off to a fate worse than death?
It's fun!
Speaking of Mary Poppins, most of us remember that film for its delightful, charming adventures,
like jumping into a chalk drawing or gallivanting on rooftops with a troupe of filthy chimney
sweeps.
What's far less remembered, though, is Mary herself full-on gaslighting the Banks children.
After they get back from a day spent tap-dancing with penguins and watching Mary win a race
on a carousel horse that she brought to life with her boundless magical powers, the Banks
children are understandably excited.
Mary, however, is all business, telling them to chill out and go to sleep, saying that
nothing of the sort happened while they were out that day, and then chiding them for their
overactive imaginations.
When they plead with her to acknowledge that their experiences, the experiences that we,
the audience, also saw, she insists that they're lying and says she'll punish them if they
continue to speak what they, and we, know is true.
"A respectable person like me in a horse race?
How dare you suggest such a thing?"
"But I saw you do it!"
This is classic gaslighting.
To be fair, though, it's not as bad in the movie as it is in the book.
At least here, outright denying the evidence of the children's senses is an isolated incident.
In the original, it happens all the time, and is usually accompanied by Mary acting
completely disgusted that the children would even suggest that they'd seen something weird.
Like, say, a grown woman flying through London on her umbrella.
Disney's 1996 animated Hunchback of Notre Dame stands out as the weirdest oddball in
the Disney Renaissance era that's full of animated classics like The Little Mermaid,
mostly because it has what might be the greatest extremes of tonal whiplash ever committed
to film.
This is a movie where Jason Alexander plays a talking gargoyle who cracks fart jokes…
"Alright alright!
Pour the wine and cut the cheese!"
...and where the villain's driving motivation is his fear that his uncontrollable lust will
result in being damned to an eternity in Hell.
It's a weird one.
It sets the tone right up front, too, in the sweeping musical number that literally kicks
things off and gives us the backstory for… whatever this thing is supposed to be.
This is the origin story, where Frollo chases down Quasimodo's mother and puts the boots
to her, causing her to crack her head open on the steps of the Notre Dame cathedral.
He then attempts to drown an infant before being stopped by a priest who bellows at him
about how no matter what he does, he cannot hide his sins from "the eyes of Notre Dame,"
represented here by a statue of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus.
You know, a mother and child, like the ones Frollo just straight up kicked to death and
then tried to drown?
Like that, but with the judgment of the almighty.
The death of a parent isn't exactly a rarity in a Disney film, it's more like a requirement,
really, but those deaths are often more abstract.
Dropping a brutal killing on the steps of a church into the first five minutes of a
cartoon for children?
That's some next-level stuff.
The PG-13 rating wasn't introduced until 1984, when someone at the MPAA saw Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom and decided that maybe you should be a teenager before you were allowed
to see someone get their heart ripped out.
As a result, there used to be a lot more movies rated G, even if they had content like, say,
apes driving humans off a cliff to their deaths while hunting them for sport.
That's right: 1968's Planet of the Apes was approved for General Audiences.
Looking back, that's not terribly surprising, what with all the corny costumes and scenery-chewing
acting.
Until, that is, you remember that the movie ends with someone shouting in absolute horror
at the revelation of complete nuclear annihilation of the human race.
"You blew it up!
Agh, damn you all to hell!"
You, uh… don't want to throw some parental guidance on that one?
Not even when someone is having a nervous breakdown about the endless horrors of apocalyptic
warfare?
No?
Okay, MPAA.
Your call, not ours.
The fact that Anastasia exists at all is pretty surprising.
You have to admit that it's pretty weird that there's a kid-friendly animated musical comedy
with a funny talking animal sidekick that starts with the brutal execution of Tsar Nicholas
II and his family during the Russian revolution.
And don't forget that the heroes are running an elaborate con and the villain is the 20th
century's most sinister mystical figure.
That is a premise that had to be approved by so many people before it was made, and
every one of them signed off.
The actual execution of the Tsar and his family is only vaguely hinted at by the presence
of a genuine, torches-and-pitchforks mob assaulting the Winter Palace while singing a jaunty tune.
Instead, the movie builds to a straight up insane climax in which we get to see a man
dragged to Hell to face eternal torment.
Early on, the movie shows us Rasputin selling his soul to the Devil in exchange for mystical
powers, and at the end of the movie, the bill comes due.
When Anastasia stomps on Rasputin's amulet, the source of his hell-born power, it shatters,
leading to a quick but horrifying sequence where his flesh liquifies and melts from his
bones, leaving behind a glowing green skeleton that crumbles to dust.
Watch closely, and you can even see his eyeballs falling out.
Sleep tight, kids!
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