Carnivore Confusion / Animated Films

• In Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman, Theodore is stated to be vegetarian while his brothers aren't. They're all chipmunks, obviously, and are usually depicted as normal chipmunks who have picked up more humanoid tendencies (despite their abnormal size).
• In An American Tail, Cats are not only Mean, they represent the various hardships faced by the immigrants to the U.S. in the 1800s. The one "good" cat, Tiger, is a vegetarian.
• El Arca has a music number in which a panther sings about her right to eat meat in a parody of Gloria Gaynor's song "I Will Survive". The movie's plot involves this trope as well: the herbivores are afraid to board Noah's ark because of the carnivores.
• In Back to the Outback, animals eating other animals is only really briefly brushed up on a few times, first where the group clearly thinks they are going to be eaten by a shark (who turns out to be an ok gal), and then with Vlad the flying fox (which are actually herbivorous bats in real life) trying to fly off of with and feed on Pretty Boy while his colony helps the group get through the mountains, with Maddie telling him off for it.
  Maddie: No, Vlad! Get off his neck! Bad, bad bat!
• A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving: The ending has Snoopy and Woodstock, the latter of whom is a bird, sitting down to have a turkey dinner. Woodstock does look perturbed when Snoopy offers him the wishbone, but only for a moment. The bonus feature on the special's new DVD release has Bill Melendez admitting even he thought that scene was rather morbid. It really doesn't help that on several occasions in the comic, Woodstock and the other birds spent Thanksgiving hiding at Snoopy's place because they were terrified of becoming Thanksgiving dinners themselves.
• In FernGully: The Last Rainforest, Lou the Goanna tries to eat the tritagonist Zak after he was magically shrunk down. Lou is not portrayed as evil, only eating smaller animals because it's in his nature as a carnivore, and he doesn't recognize Zak as anything different. But he lets Zak go after Crysta the fairy tells him to.
• In Happy Feet, the penguins themselves eat fish, which are rendered realistically. The pair of orcas encountered during the film are also treated realistically; as playful, giant dolphins that try to eat the protagonists. The Skua that try unsuccessfully to feed on juvenile penguins talk, and are depicted like bullies or gangsters. A leopard seal can speak and is treated like an intelligent, evil monster, akin to a dragon. Top this off with heavy, Anvilicious doses of Humans Are the Real Monsters and you've got yourself a very mixed bag on predator treatment. In the sequel Happy Feet Two, the krill are able to talk (though not to the penguins) and realize how much life sucks on the bottom of the food chain.
• In How to Train Your Dragon (2010), the giant Green Death dragon swallows an unfortunate Gronckle who fails to give it enough food. This is hardly surprising, since a lot of animals have no qualms eating other animals related to them, such as cobras eating other snakes, lions eating cheetahs, et cetera.
• Ice Age:
  • Sid and Manny find a human baby, and decide to take it to the adults. The whole reason the baby got separated was because of an attack by saber-toothed cats, and the cats still want the baby. Enter Diego, who promises to help Sid and Manny deliver the baby to the tribe. They don't trust him, and for good reason. Throughout the film, nobody trusts Diego, and he threatens to eat Sid on several occasions. Indeed, the whole reason he's helping them is to deliver to his pack so he can eat them. He does a Heel–Face Turn, and saves them from the pack. This is all well and good, makes for a happy ending, but what is Diego supposed to eat? Diego's group of Sabre-tooths respected humans as fellow hunters; they were originally just after the human baby in revenge for the humans killing one of the sabre-tooths first; they weren't after it as a snack, per se, but only in retaliation. Apparently, if Diego just told them this, then Manny could have told him that the baby's mother was already dead, and Diego could go just home since they were even.
  • At the end of the first movie, and throughout the entire second movie, Diego is seen happily hanging out with the sloth and the mammoth. Either he's fine with never eating again, or they just look the other way when he kills and devours their friends.
  • The third movie also parodies the vegan carnivore option by having Sid try to teach baby T-Rexes to eat fruit. When the real mother drops off a piece of meat for her offspring, they instinctively devour it, prompting a smug smile from her.
  • Also in the third movie, Diego actually tries chasing a talking gazelle. He's too slow to catch it, and the gazelle actively mocks him and rubs it in his face.
  • Collision Course shows Shira, another sabretooth, chasing the same gazelle as a one-off gag. However, both she and Diego are depicted eating berries later on.
• Kung Fu Panda avoids the issue, since the Furious Five are carnivores or omnivores (Monkey and Crane), but all we ever see them eating is noodles. (Granted, it's the only thing the herbivorous Po knows how to cook, and coming from a village where all the denizens are prey species — rabbits, geese, pigs, sheep, etc. — kind of makes that a no-brainer, but still...) Even Tigress, who initially refuses Po's dinner thanks to the continued chip on her shoulder, instead eats a plate of tiny tofu. Po only eats things like cookies, peaches, and dumplings, hopefully not stuffed with meat (though, thankfully, not bamboo). The only character we can assume to truly eat meat, due to his size, personality, and mental state, is the villain Tai Lung... and rather having a bit more on his mind at the time, we never see him eat either. The fact that, according to Word of God, the villagers were deliberately designed to be prey species in order to seem more helpless and timid before Tai Lung's ravages, on the other hand, treads very close to crossing the cannibalism line of this trope — and purposefully so. Word of God has also stated that everyone in this universe is vegetarian, which completely averts this trope, but just raises more questions...
• This is played straight as an arrow in the original, Don Bluth-directed The Land Before Time film, in which carnivorous dinosaurs are the main villains. Petrie is an arguable exception — his diet isn't mentioned in the first movie, but he's a Pteranodon, which were fish-eaters in real life. Things get a little more awkward in the non-Bluth sequels with the introduction of Chomper, the friendly Sharptooth. The first few films where he shows up, it is made very clear that he could not possibly live with the main characters long term because of his dietary needs, particularly in the fourth sequel, with the song "Friends for Dinner", in which Chomper looks for leaves and berries to entertain his herbivore friends while said friends fear that he's going to eat them. However, in the spin-off television show, this is Hand Waved with him just surviving on insects, to justify upgrading him to main character status. Petrie is also revealed — along with the rest of the Pteranodons in the setting — to be an herbivore in the sequels, though since the sequels were made without the input of anyone involved with the first movie, it's unclear how canon it is.
• The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part: Some of the Systarians are living foods like the walking chocolate bar that looks at a chocolate fountain and laments how fragile life is. At one point Batman asks for ice cream to soothe his depression and Wa'Nabi's ice cream butler responds that he's not a thing to be used to fill emotional voids. Trope also taken to a hilarious extreme in the "intermission" pause.
• Leo: The bugs Squirtle and Leo are given as food are clearly just as sapient as they are, but neither has any qualms about eating them throughout the movie (and the bugs don't seem to care either way). One of the reasons Leo hates the yearly reading of Charlotte's Web is that repeatedly hearing about the spider just gets him constantly hungry.
• Madagascar:
  • The first movie addresses this directly. Alex, the main character, is a lion raised in captivity, who is used to being fed steaks, and is blissfully unaware that his friends are his natural prey. After being stranded in the titular island, and cut off from his beloved steaks, he slowly goes mad with hunger and reverts to his animal instincts. Now his best friends look like steak to him, and he exiles himself to the other side of the island. At the end, the situation is resolved by Alex becoming a fish eater. Meanwhile, Madagascar's native predators, the fossa, are depicted as dim-witted, Hulk-speaking brutes.
  • And then for some reason utterly ignored in the sequel, in which most of the animals live in harmony under the rule of a benevolent pride of lions, never minding the fact that a lot of the animals under their rule are a major diet source for lions in real life.
• Actually inverted in The Mouse and His Child when the two (clockwork) mice are captured by a hawk. The child asks, innocently enough, what the hawk intends to do with them:
  Child: Mr. Hawk, where are you taking us?
  Hawk: Lunch!
  Child: What's "lunch"?
  Hawk: Watch!
  [The hawk bites into Father Mouse, but quickly realizes that they're just fabric and metal]
  Hawk: You're not part of the balance of nature! [drops them unceremoniously and flies off]
• Once Upon a Forest, an otherwise cutesy and inoffensive movie, has a nightmarish scene in which the anthropomorphic-to-the-extreme (except for size) heroes are menaced by a terrifying, non-anthro owl. In the PC game, the owl speaks, but this doesn't make it less creepy.
  Abigale: What are you going to do with me?
  Owl: You'll figure it out...
• Open Season: It's never explained why the other wild animals in the forest never run away in fear at the sight of Boog, who happens to be a domesticated grizzly bear. Did the animals enter some kind of truce or something? There is a scene where Eliot's bully, a mule deer, actually taunts Boog in front of his face. Maybe they can sense his incompetence and know they're in no real danger; it's not like Boog has the skills to hunt and kill the animals even if he wanted to.
• The cast of Over the Hedge don't seem to take the source of all the food items they take into account. Vincent threatens to kill RJ and naturally is the only non-human antagonist. Interestingly, in the video game, he briefly sides with the protagonists and is still acknowledged as eating sapient creatures. RJ mentions 'bats on his breath', which could be an attempt to avoid this trope as we never see any actual bats in the film or game.
• Averted in Padak, which is about a fish who tries and fails to escape from the tank at a seafood restaurant. Even though all of the fish in the movie can talk to each other, real life predator/prey relationships are still very much in place. When the title character, a mackerel, is placed in a tank containing clownfish, the first thing she does is eat them. However, it should be noted that her situation was mostly out of uncontrolled instincts, as she had previously refused to eat fellow fish, and ultimately only ate the goldfish due to days of starvation and being too dazed from getting brutalized by King Crabs to think straight, and ultimately stopped herself once she snapped out of her feeding frenzy.
• Incredibly epic fail in Pride, which shows a vegan lioness doing pretty well until both plant and animal are depleted in the 'badlands' area where she lives after running away from her parents for them trying to force her to obey her carnivorous nature. It's essentially vegan propaganda aping the appeal of the flood of lion movies after The Lion King (1994). Also, Sean Bean as a big macho lion badass probably didn't hurt funding either. In the end the entire vegan subplot vanishes to make way for a more traditional good lion/evil lion showdown as the lions from the badlands attempt to take over the heroine's pride.
• In Ladislas Starevich's Le Roman de Renard (1928), Renard eating animals is viewed negatively by others, and it is mentioned that the current lion ruler is considered kind for banning meat eating except for himself, limited to a few pieces on a holiday even there.
• The scene where Mrs. Brisby, a mouse, must seek advice from the Great Owl in The Secret of NIMH is very up-front about this. The owl's home is littered with the skulls of mice the owl had eaten and the entire scene has an ominous air.^note In the book sequel, Rasco and the Rats of Nimh, the Owl nearly kills Timothy Frisby by snatching him up to eat until he realizes that Timothy is Mrs. Frisby's son. Timothy is hurt really, really badly. Mrs. Brisby spends the entire experience scared out of her mind:
  Brisby: Owls EAT mice!
  Jeremy: Uh... only after dark!
• In Shark Tale, Lenny the Shark, a principled vegetarian who refuses to devour sapient creatures, and massive disappointment to his father, makes an unsuccessful attempt to eat a sobbing shrimp who begs for his life.
  • In a clear case of Artistic License – Biology, when he wants to look harmless to the fish population, he dresses up as a dolphin, even though fish are the food of choice for dolphins. It seems only sharks are afraid of dolphins. Yes, the badass predators of the deep are terrified of a dolphin, but the small little fishies don't even bat an eye (in real life, dolphins have been known to battle sharks that stray too close to their pods, but still).
  • The first view of the reef also briefly pans over a sushi bar, which is manned by a fish but totally empty.
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: Spider-Ham, an anthropomorphic pig, loves to eat hotdogs. He's technically a spider who was bitten by a radioactive (if sentient) pig, which might mitigate things: also, the movie's writers confirmed that in Spider-Ham's universe hotdogs are made out of human meat. (So that's alright, then).
  Spider-Ham: Don't worry, people! It's 100% beef! (I'm lying!)
• We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story: Thank to Captain Neweyes' "Brain Grain" cereal, the dinosaurs he feeds become intelligent and non-carnivorous. Well, sort of. Though Rex apologizes for if he might've attempted to eat any of his new friends, Woog the Triceratops is shown eating hot dogs. Tofu dogs, maybe?^note It's been speculated that Triceratops might have been an omnivore, but this film was released well before that theory. According to Neweyes, his Brain Grain has brought about world peace in the distant future due to no carnivores. Apparently, the future hasn't had any problems thus with overpopulation or malnutrition.
• The Wild avoids the issue altogether, except for the unusual subversion in which the film's wildebeest villain intends to turn the Circle of Life on its head by eating lion meat and "ascending to carnivorism". He's more than a little cracked...

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