Holy Shit! This is a Children's Movie?

The world is a different place in the human larval stage of development. People like to say that it's a time of innocence and purity, before the world corrupts and jades each of us. Buuuulllllshit. Why do I say this? Because anyone who spends a decent amount of time with a child will realize that it isn't that they're innocent and pure, it's that they simply have not been ingrained with the societal teachings to feel guilt and reservation about things. To realize that things are off or dark. I mean come on, little boys are violent as hell, and little girls rarely even question the materialism that is just accepted as part of being a little girl. It takes age and exposure to society to realize that some things are bad.
Now this brings me to the greater point of this entire post. Children's movies. Specifically musicals. We all watched them when we were little and absorbed their simple black and white messages like happy little sheep, rarely questioning or thinking about the implications of the movies, and just enjoying the songs. Sometimes this was ok! I'll admit most of Disney's early stuff that really made them famous was pretty tame and happy. However, when you go back and really watch some of the more recent disney stuff, things look different as an adult. Remember teh songs and characters who gave you nightmares or who you hated because they were evil? Those songs were often seriously disturbing or mature in nature. They were the sort of songs that make you say "Fuck! This is a children's movie?"
I have gone through the trouble of dredging through the thick pasty lake of useless trivia mud in the back of my head and pulling out the ten songs from my youth that really seem alot darker when I look back at them. I won't lie, alot of these songs are awesome. But when you really think about what they're saying and what they're about, it just makes you realize how little you queston as a child.

1 Fantasia - Night on Bald Mountain

I was a little conflicted as to wether to list this as a song in a children's movie, because arguably Fantasia is not a children't movie as much as an exercise in putting animation to music for anyone to watch. Still, this was a movie I watched when I was little that left me twitching and sweating and completely unable to sleep for the rest of the week so I put it in. I mean come on, basically the entire thing is full of demons and skeletons erupting from the ground to cause havoc and bask in the unholy light of the moon, while the greatest and most powerful demon of all oversees them like a sick and twisted conductor of darkness. It's a truly beautiful and scary scene when you're little, and frankly it surprises me that they put it in the movie with all the other relatively tame sequences. Still, I'm sure as hell glad they did, because I fucking loved this movie as a kid.

2 Anastasia - In The Dark of the Night

I really regret the fact that I couldn't find an actual video of this song, and instead have to provide you with this. I don't really regret it for your sake, since there are probably two or three of my bored friends reading this at the very most and I don't give a shit wether this entertains them or not. No, I simply regret that I can't remember exactually what's going on visually in this little sequence, and it's hard to judge the overall darkness of a scene without the visuals that go with it. Still, from the lyrics alone and from what I can remember, this song deals with some pretty heavy stuff.
I mean basically this is a song about a guy who has sold his soul to kill a woman, and now he is preparing to literally reattach the peices of his rotting corpse and rip her from the world of the living with dark magic. Shit man. Sucks to be her.

3 The Great Mouse Detective - Ratigan

"WORSE THAN THE WIDOWS AND ORPHANS YOU'VE DROWNED"

Need I say more?

Yes.

For a song so upbeat and celebratory, this is one of the most gruesome and dark songs in disney history. Hell, Ratigan stops the song mid chorus to KILL A FUCKING MINION. He does it in a calm and collected manner, and then beckons the others to CONTINUE THE FUCKING SONG. When I watch this today I am just astounded by how evil Disney was willing to make their villains. This is really just a precursor to what was, in my opinion, the scariest scene in any disney movie, where Ratigan basically goes full-on rat and rips his clothes off to tear the life out of Basil of Bakerstreet. Seriously scary shit.

4 Quest for Camelot - Ruber

What makes this particular song interesting to me is the fact that it's really just a completely unbalanced and dangerous pwrson talking about how much he likes people dying and killing each other. He doesn't want people to sleep peacefully because he thrives on war and destruction, so he is willing to rip the humanity from his horde of warriors and turn them into walking death machines who basically will never again serve a purpose in life other than to kill and maim fellow human beings. That's a pretty radical life choice there if I do say so myself.

5 Beauty and the Beast - Kill The Beast

Everyone in Belle's town, the mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, want this creature dead. They want to stab him to death and burn the body. What makes the entire concept of this song chilling is the fact that these people really think they are protecting themselves, they are truly motivated against something that someone they trust has told them is a threat, and yet they are entirely and undeniably the bad guys in this movie. Many of them die in the assult on the castle. DIE! They were trying to protect their families! They listened to Gaston because he's charismatic and forceful, and he made a good case for the danger of the situation. these are the people that the main heroine has grown up with and lived around her whole life, and they are turned into a slavering mob, thirsty for furry blood. Also there's a Shakespeare reference, and there's no way they expected kids to pick that up.

6 Dumbo - Pink Elephants on Parade

There's not much I can say about this that will emphasize how disturbing and twisted this segment in Dumbo is better than just watching the video. Dumbo and his friend basically get drunk and go on the weirdest trip ever set down in a Disney movie. I think the animators must have been on some seriously expensice acid when they made this segment. It would take me this entire post if I went through and listed every specific moment in this video that is somehow disturbing or scary. Even Dumbo's eyes-half-closed stoned-out-of-his-mind stare should have parents asking "what the fuck are they showing my children"

7 Fern Gully - Toxic Love

I don't think anyone but Tim Curry could make this song as sleazy and sultry as he could. The man's got a way with song. Still though, from the first image of a sludge-covered skeleton erupting from a mass of grime, to the final moments of the grime cloud monster locking himself in the boiler, this is a song with some great mature images and themes. I mean yeah, the entirely movie is ham-fistedly and unabashedly environmental, but the bad guy also manages to be genuinely creepy in this little bit. I know I thought it was scary. No way I was fucking around with tree cutting machines after that. Fern Gully taught nature preservation by traumatization. Hell, we should try that more often.

8 The Lion King - Be Prepared

Props to the people who wrote the lyrics to this song, because there is some sophistocated verse and terminology in this song that is just plain awesome. It follows the pattern of the "Kill the Beast" song mentioned earlier in that it's basically a song about how the bad guys are going to kill a protagonist, but it differs in a way that in my mind makes the whole thing alot more chilling.

Instead of a mindless crazy mob, an organized force of fascists is formed around the rallying call. Seriously, the fascism is all throughout the imagry in the song and noone with basic knowledge of Nazis can deny it. Holy shit man, holy shit. What I really wonder is how much of the power of the idea got through to me when I saw this at age 7 or whenever, because that's an image that should make people a little uncomfortable in my opinion.

9 The Prince of Egypt - The Plagues

This is what you get when you take a source material that's not meant at all to be for children and make a children's movie out of it. Awesome awesome awesome scenes with very dark and mature concepts. Under the command of god, Moses is killing and maiming and starving the people of Egypt until they bow down to his demands. The Pharoah on the other hand looks cruelly and coldly upon the death and destruction around his people and sees only the potential for personal shame, and so he lets them suffer and die for his pride. Not to mention the tone of the entire song is dark and confrontational, with chanting and verse being read in the background as the two main characters sing in counter point for their respective perspective. Powerful stuff indeed, and in no way "for children." Anyone who can't appreciate the power of this sequence is deaf and blind. Or maybe blind and non-english-speaking, which would amount to a similar level of non-comprehension, but then we're getting into technicalities.

10 The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Hellfire

Summed up: "You arouse me. I cannot have you. I will take you and rape you or I will kill you painfully." I know for sure that I didn't pick up any of the depth and subtlty in this song when I saw it in theaters, because I barely remembered it coming out. Looking back it's by far the best song in the movie. Even the visual mix of the demonic imagry and the holy symbolism is fantastically well set up. The shadows and flames writing in the different shakes on the walls just give a great impression of the raw passion and uncontrollable lust behind Frollo's actions. If only the entire movie had maintained such a dark tone. It would have been truly epic.

Basically those were the best ones I could remember, and they all fit the bill quite nicely. Those of you reading who were ticking off mental lists of your own (no doubt inferior to my list, which is definitive by nature of being on the internet) might comment that I left out any mention of any of the songs from Nightmare before Christmas. This is because I almost felt that putting that in there would be too obvious. I mean basically that whole movie is a children's movie that is way too dark for children. Why parents let kids watch that movie is beyond me.

At least scenes like these give the movies some rewatching value right? Any excuse to waste time on YouTube.

God'sLonelyMan out