Gory Discretion Shots in western animation.
- The Animaniacs episode "Valuable Lesson" had Yakko, Wakko, and Dot being lectured about the content of their cartoons by a pair of overbearing censors while Attila the Hun is searching for the Warners with the intent of causing them serious harm. By the time Attila finally catches up with the Warners, he instead starts attacking the censors. None of Attila's attacks are seen on-screen, but it is made apparent the censors didn't survive the encounter because Yakko remarks how the censors came in handy after all.
- Avatar: The Last Airbender:
- In the flashback of how Zuko got his scar in "The Storm", the "camera" cuts from his terrified expression over to the audience reaction, with his scream of pain interspersed with Iroh's look of horror and Zhao and Azula's sadistic satisfaction. Justified as Iroh, who was telling the story, mentions that he looked away when his nephew's face got burned.
- In the Season 1 finale, we don't actually see the Ocean Spirit drowning Zhao, but we do have a good idea what happens to him after he seizes him in his arms and, despite Zuko's best efforts to save him, drags him down to his doom. However, The Legend of Korra reveals that he wasn't killed, although he might wish he was.
- Parodied in "Sozin's Comet, Part 1 - The Phoenix King" — the "camera" cuts away when Sokka bisects the head of the Melon Lord (a prop of Fire Lord Ozai), and all we see is the top of the head falling on the ground, with Momo running in to gorge on its contents. Aang is disturbed even at melon-Ozai getting sliced in two, because Sokka is proposing killing the Fire Lord outright, something Aang's philosophy forbids him to do.
- In BIONICLE 3: Web of Shadows, Keetongu kills Sidorak by slamming both of his fists down on him, effectively pounding him into the Coliseum floor. The shot only focuses on Keetongu from the waist up, and we only see pieces of debris flying into the air when he delivers the blow. Then the movie quickly cuts to Roodaka slowly walking away from the scene in complete satisfaction, while the ground is still continues to shake a bit.
- "Borrowed Time": All we see of the father's death is a splatter of blood on his son's face as he accidentally pulls the trigger on the shotgun.
- In the 1943 wartime cartoon Camouflage, one of the Japanese pilots ends up cut into ribbons by an airplane propeller, the violence obscured by a black bar reading "Deleted".
- The Cartoons That Never Made It short "Salt 'n' Slug" revolves around an Interspecies Romance that happens to be between a sentient salt shaker and a slug. When the inevitable happens, we don't actually see Slug's reaction to being exposed to sodium chloride and the camera instead focuses on the horrified reactions of the other characters.
- Code Lyoko: Happens almost everytime X.A.N.A-William takes down the Lyoko-warriors. In some shots, William was initially supposed to stab them in a horrific manner, but the stabbing part was hidden by the screen, due to the show being made for children.
- In The Crumpets episode "Octosquito", the titular half octopus, half mosquito monster José dies from being thrown to a Helicopter Blender by Granny. The slicing of his body isn't shown to the viewer, except for a Freeze-Frame Bonus depicting the tip of one of his tentacles cut off. The next shot shows tossed sliced tentacles and splattering black ink to the ground.
- The Crunch Bird: The film cuts to the end credits as the bird eats the man.
- DC Animated Universe:
- Zig-zagged in the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Mad Love". The Joker slapping Harley Quinn isn't shown, and instead we see Batman's reaction. A few moments later, however, the Joker pushing Harley out of a window several stories down is shown in all its glory, complete with one of the few aversions of Bloodless Carnage in the series (Harley bleeds from her mouth afterwards).
- At the end of the three-part pilot of Superman: The Animated Series, a bunch of unlucky aliens pick up Brainiac's pod. Brainiac bursts out of the pod and attacks. Cut to a scene of the aliens' blood splattering on the walls as Brainiac takes over their ship.
- The Justice League episode "A Better World" starts with Superman confronting President Lex Luthor, with Superman conceding Luthor's point that he is complicit in Luthor's actions because of his unwillingness to kill and promptly killing Luthor with his heat vision being the first clue that we are actually witnessing events in the Justice Lords universe. While we don't actually see Luthor's demise or his charred remains, the scene cutting away once Superman's eyes start to glow, Batman commenting on the smell and Batman and Wonder Woman reacting to the results of Superman's actions once they enter the Oval Office make it very clear what happened to President Luthor.
- In the John Dilworth short The Dirdy Birdy, the scene where Fergurina retaliates to Purdy's mooning by inflating his ass with helium cuts to a photograph of the short's creator with a shocked facial expression when she starts to use a safety pin to pop Purdy's inflated buttocks.
- Dragons: The Nine Realms: The threat of a Deathgripper pack ends when to of them are scared up out of the giant grass and into the air by Alex and Feathers, where they're promptly eaten by an unseen larger dragon. The audience only hears the Sickening "Crunch!" and sees the Dragon Club's reactions, where humans and dragons alike stare wide-eyed into the sky and awkwardly shuffle away.
- The Black Comedy cartoon Drawn Together sometimes used this. Purely for reference though, as they had no qualms against showing as much violent, gory deaths they could think up about every other five minutes.
- Used in an episode of Family Guy when Peter attatches several razor blades to a fan because he wants to shave off all his facial hair at once, he brings the fan closer to his face and we cut to blood splashing on the window.
- In the Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids episode "The Gunslinger", the gang's friend Sean shows off his father's gun to the gang, and everyone except Albert finds it cool. Rudy offers a bullet he had found, but it's too big for the chamber, so Sean forces it in. The gun explodes when Sean fires it, injuring his hand, and it falls out of frame as he clutches it in pain. The next scene shows Sean in the hospital with his hand covered in bandages, and the doctor explaining that he lost a lot of blood and could have lost his hand.
- On an episode from the Avalon World Tour on Gargoyles, the characters come upon a panther's carcass in a Nigerian jungle. We never see the actual carcass, only hear the buzzing of flies and Angela's grossed out expression. Goliath questions what kind of hunter takes a skin and leaves the meat.
- Gravity Falls: In "Northwest Mansion Mystery", we see the demise of the Lumberjack Ghost who haunts Northwest Manor, where he gets caught in a mudslide and it cuts away just before a stray ax embeds itself in his head.
- In He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2002), King Hsss devoured a victim on two occasions (once in a Flashback scene) and this device was used both times. (Still, even this would have been unheard of in the original version of the series, and it was far from the only reason the remake was Darker and Edgier.)
- A particularly dark episode of Invader Zim has a child's eyes ripped out of his head by a robot, shown in silhouette on the wall of Zim's house. Yes, this is a children's program.
- Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous: following the pattern of the live-action films that it's spun-off from, Camp Cretaceous mainly uses Gory Discretion Shots to hide violence and death:
- As the first season takes place concurrently to the events of Jurassic World, the Indominus rex does a fair bit of this starting in episode 4: she attacks a Brachiosaurus and causes it to fall to the ground while still hidden by trees and then attacks a pair of workers on the ground below the main characters, cutting away from just as it attacks. Episode 5 has a not-quite-stable-anymore scientist steal the van the kids had taken only to be immediately attacked by Indominus and killed, with his body on the ground obscured by foliage in the foreground.
- Early on in Season 2, the campers find their way to Jurassic World's Main Street area and see the wreckage of the climactic fight between Rexy and the Indominus from the film, wondering what happened, and soon find what must be the torn-apart remains of the Indominus floating in the lagoon after she was finished off by the mosasaur; they're entirely off-screen, but the characters' reactions tell us that it's not pretty. Further along, the season's antagonists Mitch and Tiff, along with their much more heroic guide Hap, are all killed off-screen by dinosaurs, in two cases by a group of Baryonyx and one by Rexy.
- In the final season, the Arc Villain of Season 4, Kash Langford, gets his comeuppance as his attempted to take over the antagonistic Mantah Corp ends with him being torn apart by raptors, who push him just out of frame and we hear him scream as they kill him. Later on, Biosyn's representative in the Mantah Corp investors, Lana Molina, is killed by a swarm of Compsognathus with the last we see of her being on her smartphone showing her on the ground and being overwhelmed by the tiny dinosaurs before it falls flat and hides her actual death.
- King of the Hill:
- This trope is parodied when a mentally unstable barber puts shaving cream on his head and blows it off with a blow dryer, splattering it on the wall as Hank leaves the premises.
- Played straight with Trip Larsen, however, when he falls into a meat grinder and is presumably ground up into processed food.
- The Legend of Korra:
- Lin smashes through the cockpit canopy of a Mecha-Tank with blades on her bracers, which the chi-blocker inside is desperately trying to dodge while trapped in the seat. Such is the power of the attack that the mecha is pushed back into a large steel frame that collapses on top of it, with Lin still utterly destroying the crew cabin. The next shot we see of that now downed Mecha-Tank, Lin's almost done stabbing through it, most of the canopy segments are smashed open, and the rest are discolored as though splashed with something opaque from the inside.
- In Book 3, P'Li (aka Combustion Lady) is about to fire off another combustion shot at Lin when Suyin metalbends her breastplate around P'Li's head, containing the blast. The last shot we see of her is with light glowing through the breastplate, after which it cuts away to Zaheer looking over and shouting her name as we see a plume of black smoke.
- In the series finale, Hiroshi Sato sacrifices his life in a Redemption Equals Death maneuver, completing the hole he cut into Kuvira's Colossus, even as the device's massive hand comes slamming down to crush him. When the hand moves away, all that's seen is Hiroshi's ruined hummingbird mech sliding away.
- Men in Black: The Series: Every time a character is killed (which happens often), the camera quickly moves away and only screams are heard. The same happens if a character gets shot. The show is pretty dark, but is still a kid's show.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- Parodied in the episode "MMMystery on the Friendship Express", one of Pinkie Pie's Imagine Spots features the cake she was guarding falling in the hands of a Dastardly Whiplash villain, who proceeds to dispose of it with a Conveyor Belt o' Doom. As the "victim" nears the sawblade at the end, the camera zooms in on the villain's mustache-twirling face to see it splattered with sugary gore.
- Played straight in the season 5 finale. When Twilight ends up in the alternate timeline where Queen Chrysalis conquered Equestria, we are treated to a shot of said villain attacking Zecorra. She knocks her down with one energy blast and is seen charging up her horn for the fatal blow, but the camera cuts away before it can be delivered (what appears to be a silhouette of Fluttershy being Impaled with Extreme Prejudice by a henchman can be seen in the background, on the other hoof).
- When the gang on Nature Cat meet a pair of turkey vultures, the scavenging birds are shown to eat carrion. No actual carcass is shown: the vultures peck at something stinky, but it's concealed behind a pile of leaves.
- The Owl House:
- In "Echoes of the Past", when Lilith invites Hooty along on her, Luz and King's adventure, Hooty removes himself from the door to crawl into a backpack. However, considering the door is part of his body, this process is a lot more visceral than anyone expected. The camera focuses on Luz, King and Lilith's progressively more horrified faces over wet tearing and squelching sounds, the camera briefly shows a hole in the door surrounded by pulsating organs, before cutting back to Lilith with a horrified grimace, King with tears in his eyes, and Luz doubled over while gagging.
- In "Thanks to Them", Hunter gets his hand caught in a sewing machine, apparently impaling his finger all the way through. Fortunately we only see his pained expression from the shoulders up, before the scene cuts to Gus bandaging his finger.
- Also from "Thanks to Them", when a Belos-possessed Hunter impales Flapjack on his claws, the camera just shows the shadow on the ground. However, the audience is not spared of the imagery of a grievously injured Flapjack collapsing on Luz's hands, with neon green blood leaking from multiple massive holes in his body.
- The Patrick Star Show: In "The Patrick Show Cashes In", the episode cuts away before we can see Pat-Tron fire a laser at GrandPat's butt.
- In the Phineas and Ferb episode "Hip Hip Parade", Buford accidentally does a good deed. Dismayed, he announces that he has to "restore the balance," and runs out of shot. The next sound is Baljeet's scream, and the characters remaining in frame are splattered with red goo from the direction of the incident. The shot slides over to reveal that Buford has jumped on top of Baljeet's box of jelly doughnuts, spraying jelly onto the other kids. Before the reveal, the implication is disturbingly gory.
- This is used on Quack Pack in the episode "Cat and Louse" when Huey shuts the door on the abusive animal trainer Andre Demouche while he's about to be attacked by his lions and tigers. Huey even lampshades the trope by assuring the audience that they don't need to see what is happening.
- ReBoot: In the season 3 episode "Game Over", Enzo and AndrAIa enter a Mortal Kombat-like game. The User's avatar is a fire demon whose Finishing Move involves grabbing the opponent's head and glowing. It's not left clear exactly what the move does, since the camera focuses on AndrAIa's horrified expression, especially when the User's about to do it on Enzo himself.
- In Road Rovers, scenes where the titular team sic Muzzle on the bad guys often cut to the Road Rovers' reactions to the ensuing carnage.
- The Simpsons:
- We don't see what Frank Grimes looks like after he, having gone insane, grabs some voltage wires in "Homer's Enemy" and is electrocuted to death.
- In "Treehouse of Horror IX"'s "Hell Toupee", Homer, possessed by Snake, murders Apu, cutting away as Apu screams "NOOOOOOOOOO!". The next morning, as Chief Wiggum is asked about Apu's murder, we see his legs dangling out of the Squishee machine.
- When Maude dies in "Alone Again, Natura-Diddily", we see her get knocked off the back of the grandstand, but we don't see the result due to the crowd gathering around her body getting in the way.
- South Park has some fun with this:
- In "Die, Hippie, Die", we get this shot when a guilt-ridden Mayor blows her brains out. After the act break, she's among the rest of the townsfolk, perfectly fine and wearing a bandage around her head.
- This is initially done in "Night of the Living Homeless" with the scientist committing suicide, but he's then shown soon afterwards, wounded and failing his suicide attempt... multiple times.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Dying for Pie", while the imagination sequence doesn't show SpongeBob exploding on-screen, we do see pieces of what used to be the sponge sprinkling all over the restaurant to give the impression that that's what happened.
- After the first Spider-Man film, there was a teen-oriented cartoon spinoff known as Spider-Man: The New Animated Series that stylistically inferred or cut away people having their fingers, hands and heads sliced off, being electrocuted, drowning, and other such nastiness. A good example being Shikata cutting Damien's head off, we only see Shikata with Damien out of frame, where the scene shifts to focus on the animal heads he collected. When Mary Jane finds him lying behind his desk we see him from the neck down, then her reaction to finding him beheaded.
- Star Wars:
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
- "Rookies": When the commando droids execute the clone sergeant after knocking him to the ground, they're only seen aiming and firing their weapons while the sergeant cries out.
- "Counter Attack": Early on, a clone trooper is bisected in half by a shutting defense door, but another such door closes right in front of the camera just before it happens, stopping the viewer from seeing anything.
- "Nomad Droids": When R2 crushes the lilliputian dictator Hay-Zu, the episode just shows Artoo falling onto him, large strings of turquoise slime when Artoo is righted, and the other Pattitites looking down towards the camera while grimacing.
- "Darkness on Umbara": When one of the clones wrestles an Umbaran to the ground, he aims his gun at his head and the camera focuses sharply on the clone's face just before he shoots. Shortly afterwards, after Fives has broken another Umbaran's helmet after tripping him, the camera angle tilts upwards just enough to exclude him and to only show Fives aim down and fire several shots.
- "Shades of Reason": the duel between Darth Maul and Pre Vizsla ends when Maul overpowers him and summons Vizsla's own lightsaber to his hand to behead him. The camera pans sideways and causes Bo Katan to block the actual decapitation from sight, but we still see Vizsla's head roll away from his body.
- Star Wars Rebels:
- "Call to Action": When Tarkin has the Inquisitor execute incompetent officers Aresko and Grint for their failures in apprehending the Ghost crew, the camera cuts away to Kallus and Tua's reactions just after the Inquisitor starts decapitating them.
- "Twilight of the Apprentice" does this twice: When the Seventh Sister is bisected by Maul, and when Maul blinds Kanan — the latter by showing it as a Second-Person Attack.
- "Legacy of Mandalore": When Sabine disarms Gar Saxon, she slices the fingers of his right hand off at the first knuckle. It's only shown briefly on screen when he's killed, and is otherwise hidden by camera angles.
- Star Wars Resistance: In the finale, Kylo Ren force chokes Agent Tierny to death for her repeated failures. The scene cuts away before he finishes her off.
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
- Tom and Jerry:
- In the short "The Two Mouseketeers", Tom is charged with guarding a king's banquet in 18th century France, and told that if he fails to do this, "off comes ze head". After spending the cartoon (unsuccessfully) battling Jerry and Nibbles, Tom is presumably beheaded offscreen: we get a distant shot of the top of a guillotine and see the blade come down. "Pauvre, pauvre pussicatte ..."
- In "Mouse Trouble", Tom is hiding in a "suprise package" to ambush Jerry. Jerry SAWS the box in half, looks inside, and then holds up a sign that says "Is There A Doctor In The House?" Tom reappears in the next scene covered head to toe in bandages
- The 2000s Tom and Jerry short "Karate Guard" skip to 3:26 and listen to Tom's innards drop
- In the Total Drama Island episode, "Hook, Line and Screamer", the campers are watching a slasher movie. When the slasher encounters an amorous couple, the original version shows the blood spatter effect on the Fourth Wall, but the bowdlerized U.S. version doesn't even show that. The observant viewer will notice, though, that for several seconds the light beam from the old-style film projector alternates between its normal white and a pale red.
- Parodied in an episode of Viva Piñata. Fergy goes begging to Pinata Central's Big Boss (who is always shown as a bowl of fruit with an intercom in it) and gets no reply due to the Boss being away. Thinking he is getting the silent treatment, Fergy snaps and bludgeons the fruit bowl with a stapler. Cue various shots with dark lighting, shadows and fruit pulp going flying across the screen whilst Psycho-esque music plays. And considering this is a show created and produced in part by 4Kids, it's amazing how this scene got in in the first place!
