10 Disney Animated Deaths That Scarred You For Life

5. Coral (Finding Nemo)

Coral Finding Nemo
Pixar

We never really got to know Coral - Nemo's mother - before she was cruelly snatched away by the teeth of a barracuda, and that makes her death all the more agonising - because the few glimpses of her personality we do get made her seem charming, warm, and friendly, causing her death to hit home extremely hard because you knew she had so much more to give.

At least she went out like a champ, attempting to shield her baby eggs from the aforementioned, slightly peckish, barracuda. Coral only got two minutes of screen time but in that time, she was able to demonstrate numerous likable traits - love, bravery, humour - and this meant that her death felt like a real loss.

Even more saddening is the fact that Nemo never got to know such a fantastic mother, and in a way it almost feels unfair that we got to see her at her very best and he never got to see her at all. On top of that, it's quite depressing to see that Marlin never really gets over her death even when Nemo is all grown up - he's constantly nervous, living in a perpetual state of fear and doubt, the rest of his adult life defined by a few brief, horrifying moments.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!