Walt Disney and Cartoon Violence

 by Annabel Heaton

I have recently been looking at the effects of cartoons and children’s entertainment in childhood cognitive development, and have been focussing on my childhood classics, ranging from Peter Pan all the way to Snow White. I wanted to look into the background of the famous Walt Disney with his emotional experiences and upbringing, seeing how these featured in his famous works. 

Walt Disney’s father was a socialist, partially influenced by his family’s English and Irish roots. Despite copying cartoons from Appeal to Reason, Disney soon deviated from his father's socialist persuasions and became increasingly conservative, in the American political tradition, as he got older. He became staunchly anti-communist, as Hollywood, of which Disney was now a part, was affected by labour strikes and struggles with perceived communist ideologies. Although Walt felt he would be a political cartoonist, he ended up pursuing a genre that, in the early 1920s, was gaining popularity: children's cartoons. 

Walt Disney was not a purist when it came to artworks, neither was he an idealist: "give the people what they want," he once claimed. Walt Disney’s driving ambitions were success-oriented; popularity and commercialism played a vital role in his choices. He, allegedly, was encouraged by a young artist to abandon pure art in favour of money and popularity. This was especially true during the making of such movies as Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, when the company was under much financial pressure. Action-packed, violent scenes were deliberately added and accentuated to hook the audience and draw crowds, particularly in Peter Pan. 

The need for commercial gain has undoubtedly contributed to increasingly violent scenes within cartoons, a problem which has long-since attracted popular debate and continues to provoke controversy today. It was found in a survey done by winmentalhealth.com; it was revealed that 8 out of 10 Saturday morning children's cartoons contained violent characters. Exposure to violence, even in cartoons, can affect a child's mental, emotional and neurological development. Children's mental health disorders, such as anxiety disorders, sleep disorders, some attentional problems and childhood depression, might be connected to exposure to frightening scenes in movies. 

Some children have nightmares as a result of feeling terror having watched scenes in such movies as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Due to this, many children see children's movies such as Disney films or TV cartoons hundreds or thousands of times during their childhood years; it can have a significant impact on a child's cognitive and emotional development, establishing thought, emotional, and even behavioural patterns, which can be carried with them into adult years.