Have you ever sat down to watch a kids movie and thought, for one reason or another, that it didn’t feel entirely appropriate for children?
Well, you’re not alone. Reddit user u/FighterAtHeart24 recently asked the community, “What kids movie made you think ‘This is NOT for kids”? leading people to share dozens of titles. Here are 16 of the ones they named.
1. “Rango. The kids will enjoy it, but there are so many references to other movies in the film that only adults will understand. I think the filmmakers really made it for the parents.”
—u/Fullback70
2. “Who Framed Roger Rabbit is rated PG. The themes of this movie are: blackmail, cheating on your spouse, HEAVY drinking, developing young minds to have an early desire for redheaded [curvy women], and watching several cartoons die in horrifying ways.”
—u/Dradawn
4. “Watership Down.”
—u/PeksyTiger
“This and The Secret of NIMH were my immediate thoughts.”
—u/smileymom19
“The book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is a downright reasonable piece of children’s science fiction, and the movie is a sentient acid trip that hates kids.”
—u/ThadisJones
5. “Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. I loved them but seem scary looking back now.”
—u/Verlorenfrog
6. “All Dogs Go to Heaven. Seriously, I watched that earlier this year and couldn’t believe my parents let me watch it as a kid.”
—u/Snaid1
9. “I feel like the Harry Potter books got more intense as they went on, basically as their original audience matured in later years and was able to handle the grimmer stuff. (Similarly, the Little House books also become more difficult to read and all the locusts and long winters are in the later volumes.) So do the movies, with increasingly darker tones all around. Recently, someone posted about how sad their 5-year-old was when Dobby died in Part 1 of Deathly Hallows, and I thought: ‘That’s really not meant for a 5-year-old to see.’ Kids who were 10 when they read the first HP book were 20 when they read Deathly Hallows.”
—u/Travelgrrl
10. “I took my niece to Gremlins when it came out. It was way too scary!”
—u/Noninvasive_
11. “Blank Check.”
—u/KingBrunoIII
“I saw that in the theater. While it has its moments, the main character romancing an adult woman is creepy. It’s actually rather adult to think of that part in a detective story, with the adult having to pretend to go along with a child’s naivete.”
12. “The Incredibles. That movie is rather dark when you stop to think about it, and really adult. It deals with suicide, genocide, intense action scenes with high death counts where other people are trying to murder the main characters, politics, marital problems, possible affairs, sexual themes, and characters willing to let other characters die for their own gain. Not to mention Syndrome was willing to (and attempted to) murder children, and took pleasure in thinking Bob’s entire family was dead and watching Bob’s face as he learned the supposed news too.”
14. “Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. And it was pretty tame compared to the original. Everything about Frollo felt so icky, from the way he takes in Quasimodo just to treat him like less than shit, to the horrible implications of the things he says to Esmerelda, to the way he rightfully burns alive at the end.”
15. “Cat in the Hat.”
—u/Small_snake
“My favorite scene in that movie is when they’re running through the yard and the cat steps on the rake and says ‘Dirty hoe!’ runs off and comes back to say, ‘I’m sorry baby, I love you.’ Top tier.”
“Or when the cat looks at the picture of the kids mum and his hat gets taller.”
16. And finally, “The Land Before Time for me. When I rewatched it, I almost turned it off. I’m 32.”
What are some other kids movies that feel more adult? Tell me down in the comments!
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
