The Grief They Hid In Children's Cartoons

Being a kid protects us from so much.Being an adult is so sad.It forces you to care less.I posted that recently without thinking too hard about it. But the more I sit with it the more I realise it might be the truest thing I have said in a long time.Because I have been thinking about cartoons.Not the warm nostalgic kind. The other kind. Where a scene replays in your head and lands differently than it did when you were seven years old on a floor somewhere eating something completely unbothered.You were unbothered because you were a child. The protection was still in place. You felt the sadness but had no language for it yet. No context. No life experience to tell you why a scene hit that hard.That comes later. That is what growing up is. Not becoming strong or wise. Just slowly irreversibly losing the protection. Scene by scene. Until one day you rewatch something you loved and have to pause because you finally understand what you were actually watching.The NeverEnding Story<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/447635.jpg" style="background-color: transparent;"/>You remember the horse first. Artax. White. Gentle. The one that did not make it out of the Swamp of Sadness.As a child you cried when he sank without fully knowing why.But here is what you did not see. Bastian ran into that library because he was running from everything. His mother was dead. His father sat inside his own grief unable to look at his son. Other boys chased Bastian and called him names because he felt things too much.So he found a book. And in the book he found a world that needed him in a way his real world did not.We watched it thinking it was about a hero saving a fantasy world. It was not. It was about a lonely grieving boy who needed somewhere to belong. The escape was the point.Artax sank not because he was weak but because the Swamp of Sadness feeds on despair. He felt everything and that feeling became the weight that pulled him under.As a child you cried for the horse. As an adult you cry for the boy who had to watch it. Because now you understand. You have felt that swamp yourself.The Chronicles of Narnia<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/447639.jpg" style="background-color: transparent;"/>Four children evacuated to a grandfather's house because there was a real war outside. Bombs falling. Cities burning. Parents sending children away telling them it was for their own good.And then they found a door at the back of a wardrobe.Of course they did. Because when the real world becomes too heavy the mind goes looking for another one.As a child the White Witch's endless winter sounded like an adventure. As an adult you know what a hundred years of cold feels like. Not in weather. In a person who has stopped expecting warmth because it has been absent long enough to feel permanent.The wardrobe was never just a wardrobe. It was what every child needs and most adults have lost. A door that opens somewhere better.All Dogs Go to HeavenYou remember the little girl's voice. Soft. Gentle. Like it was always saying goodbye.You did not know she actually was.Judith Barsi was ten years old when she voiced that film. At home her father was hurting her every day. The studios knew she was talented. Nobody knew what she was surviving just to reach the recording booth.Her father killed her and her mother in July 1988 then set the house on fire. She was ten. The film was not even out yet.As an adult you cannot hear her voice the same way. Because some goodbyes in fiction are being said by people also saying goodbye to something real. A child can pour something true and heavy into a recording and nobody in the room knows why it sounds so real.You could not have known. You were a child. But now you know. And knowing changes everything.Tom and Jerry<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/447641.jpg" style="background-color: transparent;"/>You laughed at the anvil. Everybody laughed at the anvil. Pain was funny because it always reset.Except one episode where it does not.Blue Cat Blues. 1956. Tom sells everything for a girl who takes it all and marries someone richer. Tom sits on the train tracks and waits. Jerry finds his own heartbreak and sits beside him. The final shot is both of them as a train approaches. The narrator says cheerfully "To be perfectly honest they are still there."Two people who gave everything got nothing back and decided they were done. In a cartoon for children. That aired once.The anvil was the distraction. Behind it someone was putting real weight into the frames hoping someone would eventually be old enough to see it.The Lion King<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/447642.jpg"/>Simba did not just lose his father. He was immediately told by the uncle who caused it that it was his fault. He was a child. He believed it. He ran.He grew up with people who taught him to forget. Hakuna Matata. And for years it worked. He became cheerful on the outside with something buried so deep it stopped feeling like a burial.As a child Timon and Pumbaa were the funny characters. As an adult they are the coping mechanism that works just long enough to become its own trap.It takes a ghost to wake him up. Not saying you are strong. Just saying you have forgotten who you are.As a child you cheered when Simba won. As an adult you understand how long it took him to even try.Adventure Time — The Ice King<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/447643.jpg"/>As a child he was just the silly villain who kidnapped princesses.Then you find out who he used to be.Simon Petrikov was a normal man who found a crown that gave him power but slowly took everything else. His mind. His memories. His name. He wore it anyway because during the apocalypse he found a small girl alone in the rubble named Marceline. He kept her safe and wore the crown destroying him because its power was the only thing protecting her.He wrote her a letter as he felt himself disappearing knowing the man writing it would soon be gone.I am sorry I do not remember you. I am slowly losing my mind but I am still fighting.He chose to lose himself completely so someone he loved could survive. Then lived a thousand years as the thing he became with no memory of why he made that choice.The saddest love story ever told. Hiding inside a silly cartoon the whole time.SpongeBob SquarePants<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/447644.jpg"/>One Coarse Meal. Mr Krabs terrorises Plankton daily until Plankton walks into the middle of a road and lies down waiting to be hit. Psychological torture leading someone to give up on living. On a children's channel.Are You Happy Now. Squidward cannot think of a single happy memory. The episode has two scenes that as an adult are not ambiguous at all. Played for laughs. For children.Have You Seen This Snail. SpongeBob forgets Gary. Gary waits past the point where waiting makes sense then quietly leaves without making a scene.As an adult you know exactly what it feels like to quietly leave somewhere you stopped being seen.Johnny Bravo<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/447645.jpg"/>Johnny lives with his mother. An adult who never left home with no real friends spending every day trying to get someone anyone to choose him. Every episode. Same outcome. He tries. He fails. He goes home.As a child that was the punchline. As an adult that is someone who confused confidence with connection and never understood why it keeps not working.The joke was always on Johnny. You just did not know who it really belonged to yet.Courage the Cowardly Dog<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/447646.jpg"/>Courage is terrified every episode. He screams and panics. The couple he loves dismiss him constantly. Stupid dog.And yet he never leaves. Every single episode despite carrying every fear completely alone he stays and protects people who do not understand how much danger they are in.As a child that was a horror cartoon. As an adult that is anxiety. Being the only one who sees the threat while everyone around you remains unbothered. Carrying the fear so others do not have to feel it.The dog was never cowardly. He was afraid every episode and showed up anyway.Ed Edd n Eddy<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/447647.jpg"/>The Eds were never genuinely accepted. Every attempt ended in rejection. The scams were never about the jawbreakers. They were about being noticed. About being just once the ones everyone wanted around.It never happened.The only real warmth in that show was between the three of them. People trying to impress an audience that would never clap for them while the thing they actually needed was already right there.As an adult you recognise that exhaustion. And the strange comfort of the people who are failing alongside you.You were a child. You could not have seen any of this.Childhood is not just innocence. It is protection. Specific temporary unrepeatable protection from the full weight of what these stories were actually carrying.You felt the surface of all of it. You cried at Artax. You laughed at Tom. You loved Courage even though he scared you. You checked wardrobes.That was enough. That was exactly enough for who you were then.But you grew up. And growing up means the protection comes off slowly without announcement. One day you rewatch something and it lands somewhere completely different. You pause it. You think oh. Oh that is what that was.And once you see it you cannot unsee it.That is the cost of adulthood nobody warns you about. Not the bills or the pressure. But this. The loss of the screen between you and the full sadness of things.So without deciding to without meaning to you learn to feel a little less. Scroll a little faster. Build small walls around the places that hurt so you can still function still move still get through the day.That is what I meant when I said it forces you to care less.Not that you stop caring. Not that the heart goes cold.Just that you learn how much feeling you can afford. And you stay just below that line. Because feeling everything all the way all the time is not something you can do and still keep going.The cartoons knew this before you did.They put the grief in the frames and the sadness in the voices not to hurt you but because humans cannot create without putting something true inside even when the audience is seven years old eating cereal and completely unbothered.They were talking to who you would become.And now finally you are old enough to hear them.

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