10 Most Traumatic Moments In Disney Movies

Walt Disney Studios has long been the purveyor of heartwarming sentiment and sickly sweet storytelling.

No matter your age, Disney has always been a constant in the field of offering up lighthearted and easy-to-watch movies. Their stories teach you about friendship, love, loss, and how important it is to just keep swimming.

But for all the moments of romance and redemption there are scenes that take a far darker turn. The loss of a parental figure is a consistent fallback for Disney whenever they want to induce a few tears. Rarely do they depict death as a peaceful fade away into sleep, though, usually something horrendous triggers these moments.

But trying to teach kids about death in a heavy-handed way isn't Disney's only way of inducing future, unresolved trauma. They are just as likely to turn up the terror factor, bombarding viewers with sinister villains, doing something horrendous, set to hauntingly evocative music.

Yep, Disney has a lot to answer for. At the very least these movies are responsible for half the deep rooted psychological trauma in the world today.

As a way to recoup loses after the box office flop Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo was churned out quickly and on a shoe string budget. Coming in at just over an hour, it's one of the shortest features in the Disney back catalogue.

But boy did they pack it with harrowing content.

To start with, Dumbo is torn away from his mother after she goes into a protective rage. Tormented for his giant ears, he spends a significant portion of the film being the subject of ridicule and pining for the loss of his only parent. We eventually get another heart wrenching scene, in which Dumbo visits his imprisoned mum, and weeps as they intertwine trunks through the bars of her cage... , it's rough.

But all the family tragedy aside, the most unnerving moment comes when Dumbo drinks a bucket of booze and begins hallucinating. He's tormented by a nightmarish parade of elephants in a scene more reminiscent of a Hunter S. Thompson novel than a kid's movie. Presumably the booze was laced with something dodgy, because Dumbo has one bad trip.