What Measure Is A Non Human / Animated Films

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• A tip of the hat to The Brave Little Toaster, the movie that made some of us feel just a little guilty about replacing old household machines with new ones. To be fair, the people in the movies are unaware of the appliances being alive. Thomas & Friends, on the other hand... (see under Western Animation).
• Anything by Don Bluth. Generally, the less human a character looks, the cartoonier their animation, the less respect they receive from the story. Non-human minor characters (unless they are effectively human due to Rotoscoping) are prone to be splatted at any moment, without a death scene to drum up audience sympathy.
• Zig-zagged in Jonny Quest vs. the Cyber Insects. The cyber insects don't tend to be seen as sympathetic and the heroes kill them left and right (although Zin seems to genuinely care about them at times), while 4-DAC, although he's a robot, is treated like a living, breathing member of the Quests' family and his possible demise(s) cause the characters much distress.
• Metafictional example in The Lion King. Disney is no stranger to killing family members of the heroes, and have continued to do so in three films past the point where they stopped killing their villains. However, Simba's father, Mufasa, is murdered in front of him by his own brother. We see his body (though admittedly there is no blood), the words "dead", "killed", and "murder" are used, and it affects Simba greatly. Most of the other family member deaths weren't as drawn-out, would they have gone all out on Mufasa's death if he and Simba had been human instead of lions? And if they had, would it still have been rated G? And then the fact that Scar himself gets eaten alive by hyenas. Though we only see the shadows, and he so richly deserved it after the aforementioned murder of his brother and attempted murder of his nephew, this death was so violent and brutal that Disney had earlier decided against giving it to Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, in favor of a Disney Villain Death. Although they did consider it a less frightening alternative to their original plans for Scar's death.
• Pixar seems to like this trope. To wit:
  • Toy Story has Woody react this way when he sees what Sid did to the other toys. Especially when they drag a wounded Buzz off...
  • Jessie's song in Toy Story 2
  • Remy the rat has to fight hard for respect in Ratatouille.
  • WALL•E. The inhabitants of the Axiom generally treat the robots as cruise crew (which is understandable given that they're on a cruise) or as video game characters (which... is a product of lazy ignorance more then anything). This is probably a general BnL stance; convenience before ethics. However, McCrea gets a major wake-up call in the form of the A113 recording, and from that point on treats robots as people. It's shown at the end that ALL the humans are genuinely shocked and dismayed at WALL•E's mangled form, so... Continuation fan fics generally have a lot of deep probing questions about this trope; whether a robot is considered criminal, defective, or insane, how robot marriages would work, the exact question of robot children, should robots and humans even live together...
• In Starchaser: The Legend of Orin, if you are a robot, run! You have a 90% chance of being killed, regardless of how much personality or plot importance you have. If you're a fembot, you're the character who gets kidnapped, mind raped, sold into slavery, and killed. This movie seriously hates robots.

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