10 Surprisingly Dark Children's Movies From The 80s

All Dogs Go to Heaven, a weird film with a strange sense of priorities. Released in 1989, the film is about a cartoon dog – who having been violently murdered by his former friend – refuses a place in the afterlife in order to enact his revenge, befriending a superhuman orphan girl capable of predicting the outcome of rat races, and manipulating her abilities to help construct his very own casino.

The dog is actually sent to hell for his deceptions, but regains his place in heaven after sacrificing himself to save the girl.

Throughout the course of the film, the dog defies mortality, manipulates a child for profit and inadvertently gives an orphan pneumonia, yet is redeemed in the closing moments of the film after rescuing her from a fire which he was careless enough to start.

Besides that, the image of a cartoon dog in hell is just disturbing, and – while there’s nothing inherently wrong with religion in movies – these elements have no place in an animated film about talking dogs, in which the plot is solved by a talking alligator named King Gator. In fact, it just makes the whole experience unsettling, terrifying your children rather than teaching them anything meaningful, which was likely the intension.