You say robots dont count, but count to who? The censors or the children's?

I remember when the first animated transformers film came out, it was released in the uk after the USA. There was so much outcry from parents about traumatised children who were utterly shattered because they killed off Optimus prime, that when it was released in the uk they had to change the ending and they got Peter Cullen (primes voice) to say at the beginning of the end credits 'and don't worry, the greatest autobot of them all, Optimus prime, will return.'

I wasn't traumatised by this honest, I just remember that line from a film I saw when I was 6... 28 years ago... Honest....

But back to my point, kids don't separate things in the way adult do, they are just attached to a cartoon character as they are to a real person, yet there is an artificial divide that says 'real violence will upset them, cartoon violence won't...'

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I assume you are talking about the transformers movie. That actually stuck with me too. Not just Optimus getting killed, but that first section is a transformer bloodbath. I remember it being crazy violent, and it did have an impact on me. Not so much for the violence itself, I mean there were other more violent things I had seen, but the fact that transformers went from the cartoon TV show that was very safe with limited "lasting" violence to "holy shit, things just got real".

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Aye, glad it wasn't just me. What you say is true, it went from cuddly cuddly violence in the cartoon where they beat the rap out of each other with guns rather than shooting them and then megaton runs away yelling at stars cream, to a scene in the first few minutes where megaton kills half the cast of the tv series in 30 seconds, then about 15 minutes later prime does exactly the same thing and burns his way through most of the remaining cast.

It's a show where the bad guys were almost as popular as the good guys and killing them was just as upsetting as killing the good guys.

I think it's what made the show and the franchise long term, it stopped being just a kiddie toy line and moved much closer to a Japanese manga show (not in animation, but that in it wasn't just for kids anymore) because of that it stayed with kids for a lot longer in their imagination and now those 'kids' are in their 30's and 40's it's still important.

If it had stayed as the kiddie friendly event the tv show had been, then I don't think there would have been 3 films grossing over 2 billion between them.

In a round about way I'm saying graphic cartoon violence to non humans is good for children...

I think :s

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I think the cartoon movie has no connection to the 3 live action. Hollywood would have still made them, because they were a known name before the animated movie.

If I remember there was a notable gap between the show and the animated movie...

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No you misunderstand (or I'm crap at explaining).

The kids that saw the film in the 80's ended up with a much greater emotional attachment to the franchise because it was likely to be the first film they saw that made thm go 'W T F you just killed my hero'

Roll on 20 years and those kids are now adults, some like don murphy are film producers, and others are adults with youngish kids, that combination got the film made, and got people to go and see it in a way that they didn't for similar films like gijoe.

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And the reaction to the death of op prime is why they backed off killing Duke in the gi joe motion pic. Robotic violence isn't the same. That's why you can have more violence there than in cartoons with human characters. Someday the AI will judge us for this.

About boy cartoons having ultra-violence: admit I haven't seen a new one lately. Yeah there's gunfire and explosions, but very rarely does anyone get hit or hurt. The phenomenon where you always saw parachutes everytime a plane got shot down. Depends on definitions, but victimless cartoon gunfire doesn't equal violence to me.

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This was the world that I had created. I know what I have to do to fix it...to make things right. There's no problem that can't be solved.

Clarification robots with or without personality. C3p0 or a tf, kids cry. Really more about mindless fodder, which could take many forms.

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This was the world that I had created. I know what I have to do to fix it...to make things right. There's no problem that can't be solved.

Yea, I also draw a difference between personified robots and 'drones'.

I don't know if the human mind sees a difference between implied and explicit violence. Reservoir dogs has that scene where the guy cuts the other guys ear off with his knife. Yea?

Wrong, it has a scene where a man is strapped to a chair, then an off scene scream, then a man holding a bloody thing in his hand.

That's why I think people have the whole violence in films wrong. Sure you can have gorefests, let's leave those to one side as they are pretty much the pornography for sadists, but consider 'normal' on screen violence.

From what I've seen the violence is from the intent, rather than the effect. I guarantee that if you showed the first scene of saving private Ryan cut for a pg film (removing red blood and other minor bits) that no one other than the censors can film geeks would notice the difference. Whereas watching a man slap his wife around is a lot less 'violent', there no blood and no one dies, but it's a heck of a lot more 'traumatic' than watching 50 nameless soldiers being shot.

For me it's the same in children's cartoons, adults wrap themselves up in a bubble that says 'oh this is ok because everyone gets up and runs away afterwards, or theres no blood, it's not real violence.'

Whereas the kid sees people knocking 2 kinds of crap out of each other with utterly no consequences. For me this is actually more damaging than showing at least some of the effects of that violence. Kids get the impression that they can beat the crap out if someone and it's ok, nothing happens, but it's not true in the real world, but we constantly show them things on their favoutite shows that says it is the case.

I don't think boys cartoons should be different, far from it, I just think that adults delude themselves that there is some magical divide in a child's mind between cartoon violence and real violence. Having a young child is teaching me that, she's only 2, but she copies tv, and she watched tom and jerry and then tried to hit me with a plastic hammer. Coincidence, possibly.

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What are we talking abou when we talk about modern boy cartoons? All I can think of is Young Justice, Clone Wars and maybe Adventuretime. I get some of what you're saying. Implied vs actual violence. To me results are still a factor. The guy's ear still ended up in Madsen's hand, whether we saw it get sliced or no. Complicated issue.

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This was the world that I had created. I know what I have to do to fix it...to make things right. There's no problem that can't be solved.

Modern cartoons = anything still shown, so 90s onwards?

There's plenty of marvel cartoons shown, clone wars is violent in extreme in terms of the level of fighting involved.

It's interesting to debate whether results are the important factor, would the scene in resevoir dogs have been as shocking/powerful if it had simply cut away after the scream, or if you never saw him holding something?

An example I often use, and it makes me look silly so it's all good, is the power of the human imagination is worse than reality. I saw robin hood prince of thieves on my 12th birthday, was the first '12' certificate I went to see (don't think there is an American equivalent of that classification, but it's obvious what it means...)

Now near the beginning of the film robin comes home and finds his dad rotting in a cage hanging from the ceiling. I was quite a 'delicate' child, I didn't like death or dead anything and I'd been warned I might not like that bit by a relative who'd already seem it. So I closed my eyes.

I've seen the film maybe 2 or 3 times as an adult and I always look away at that bit. I've never seen it. Rationally in KNOW I've seen things 1000x worse than it, heck I've seen part of the human centipede and that will live with me for a long time. The problem is that what my imagination filled in at that point is horrendous and thus I never look.

It's the same with implied violence in films just like that scene in res dogs. People's own mind fill it in. It's the reason why some of the scariest films are the ones where you don't actually see anything because the mind is better than any cgi.

So to come full circle, I don't think kids think that the violence in their cartoons is all nice and friendly, my little brother (second marriage, much younger) will often prattle on about how so and so got his head kicked right off or other nonsense that i know he didn't see, because his mind fills in the blanks.

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