8 Surprisingly Scary Animated Films That Scarred The Kids

4. Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

There were a few images that wretchedly ground themselves onto my adolescent mind the first (and usually only time) I saw them: I'll probably never get over the vision of the clown in Poltergeist, or shake the thought of Pennywise the Clown stalking his prey, and I will certainly never forget the image of Christopher Lloyd, manic and villainous first being run over by a steam-roller and then being melted in a vat of Dip.

Because like the two other instances I mentioned in the same breath, Who Framed Roger Rabbit's screaming, toon-hating fiend completely messed with the innocent fundamental principles of my young brain. Cartoons could survive silly violence, without a scratch and without any emotional impact on the childish audience, other than perhaps naughty glee, but the cartoons tortured by Judge Doom, and the idea that they could really die was astonishingly affecting. And then, even worse, the film (which only partly qualifies as an animation, admittedly) "kills" Doom in spectacularly grim fashion, throwing him under a steam-roller in a fairly harrowing sequence that obviously served the purpose of outing the villain as a toon himself.

But up until the revelation, we've effectively just watched a real man squashed by a steam-roller, without the cartoon violence conventions that would soften the blow, and then as soon as it's revealed he wasn't really hurt, and all is well, he's revealed to be something more menacing and more ghoulish than he had been before. A brilliant villain yes, but a difficult sequence to watch for impressionable young minds.