Somewhere out there from American Tail

nostalgia

All Dogs Go To Heaven opens with the main character- Charlie- escaping from prison and returning home, only to be murdered by his business partne. But he's a dog, and all dogs go to Heaven- but Charlie gets bored at the prospect of no surprises or challenges, and he wants revenge, so he sneaks out and escapes back to Earth, being told, as he flees, that if you leave, "You can never come back"- i.e., when he dies again, he'll face an eternity in Hell.

Yes, this is a kid's movie.

Back on Earth, there's a scene where he finds himself caught up in a tornado, and dropped into a boat on a placid lake- which, as he looks down, suddenly turns to lava, and the boat is suddenly made of bones, and a great demonic beast flies down to it and exhales a blast of fire, and Charlie dodges it, but in the fire are tiny imps, who begin clawing at him as the boat starts to sink, and an evil, cackling voice bellows "YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK!". Then he wakes up- just a nightmare!- but that scene is scary to me now, in my forties.

In The Brave Little Toaster, a group of abandoned appliances go on a journey to seek out their owner, and at one point find themselves in a garbage dump, where a giant electromagnet is picking up cars to carry them onto a belt leading to a crushing machine that reduces them to inanimate cubes, and the cars begin singing a song (literally titled "worthless") about how the lives they lead have lost all meaning, and they have nothing left to live for.

Yes, this is a kid's movie.

The cars just calmly accept being dropped on to what they know will be their deaths, one even exclaiming "and there ain't nothing you can do about it!" as the cubes of what used to be their peers slide past them on the exit belt. The only one who seems to have any volition left is an old pickup that drives itself onto the belt before the magnet can even pick it up, effectively committing suicide. As a child, it made my vow to defend my grandfather- my last remaining grandparent, at that point- from any and all evil electromagnets that threatened him; as an adult, it's terrifying on an entirely different level.

In The Land Before Time, there's a scene where the main character (a brontosaurus) sees his mother killed while protecting him from a T-rex. Now, that T-rex is easily the scariest dinosaur I've ever seen in a movie, WAY beyond anything an actual predator could be, but that's just what got left in- the original scene, while it shows the attack only in silhouette, was SO frightening that Don Bluth didn't just cut it, he ordered that segment of film destroyed.

While it's probably for the best that movies don't set out to traumatize kids any more, they've definitely lost a lot of the soul they used to have.

you say that like encanto doesn't exist