It has episode showing family of mice struggling to survive and worried about future for their babies. In following episode we get shot of same mice family impaled on needles by birds going to eat them.
https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_EkpfJKfyX8WRKQnr7H...
Entire story is told around forest dying out and animals struggling to survive in it. It was once called „that animals cartoon that traumatised generations”.
The first two episodes are about two anthropomorphised ducks that meet, fall in love, move into a clog and have a spawn of babies, happily ever after until the whole family but Alfred get killed by a car. That was err. a pretty brutal thing for a four year old to see.
The show goes on to depict things like nazis, racism (waterfowl aren't real birds like us!), apartheid, classism, alcoholism, even transgenderism / gender fluidity (the stork Ollie), etc. In hindsight, it was A Lot, and most of it probably escaped me.
It doesn't seem to be available on any streaming platforms, though.
Fantastic cartoon, impressive how they handled facisme. Guess certain Dutch politicians either didn't see it or did and got inspired by Dolf.
In related news, I've also seen every episode of True and Nijnje (90s, 00s and specials) a similar number of times for kid #2 and kid #3 :)
I grew up in the UK so as a kid I was traumatised by Yellow Submarine, Tottie (dollhouse burns down killing everyone), Watership Down and the aforementioned Animals of Farthing Wood.
This "etc." includes the aids epidemic, North/South Korea-like country, and environmental topics like whaling and the seas being overfished, acid rain, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
Yeah the show was A Lot and I love it for that.
The people in the past had no youtube and no tv. They still wanted to have some fun.
Does it?
Many of these stories are embedded idiomatically in many languages? Let each parent decide at what age they should read Rapunzel, when they are ready.
Free of cost for the teacher, not for the student
That's kind of the main reason we started to write stuff down, to learn things from the past through other's experiences, so that you don't have to feel alone going through every traumatising events as if you were the first human to do so.
We have empathy, better use it than wait for the hardest part of life to "give us a lesson", most of the really hard parts only happen once so you won't learn much, but you'll suffer a lot.
My father who was financially devastated by people close to him passed on one insanely strong piece of advice that is superior to any fairy tale and saved me.
1. Always have a legal agreement at the start even/especially if it's friends and family.
2. Always have that legal agreement reviewed by your own attorney.
Years later I'm finally getting over the sudden violence and the hostility, but the law made sure their plans to intimidate, force, steal and defraud came to nothing.
I don't remember anything about consequences of moral failings in the old fairy tales, just random violence and chaos. In Sleeping Beauty the prince's mother turns out to be an ogre who tries to eat Beauty's children, but luckily the prince returns in time and kills her. Where's the moral lesson there? Don't move in with your mother-in-law?
The old stories were designed to help prepare children for the hostile world they lived in.
The moral of the story is that monsters live deep inside even the people we trust most.
--Cinderella: mean deceptive people might get their feat chopped off & eyes pecked out. (In short, Karma. though unfortunately the world doesn't quite work that way, but there's still a bit of "the world can be ugly" too)
--Cat & The Mouse: Never forget that the nature of a predator is predation
--Hansel & Gretel: Don't take candy from strangers. Also, if something looks to good to be true, it probably is. And also that maybe little children are delicious? I mean, the witch had to have her reasons.
--Rumpelstiltskin: Okay, there's some mixed messages here. Lying father, malicious greedy king, deceptive girl... Rumpelstiltskin comes out looking like a hero, saving the girl's life 3 times but then get's cheated out of his last payment & kills himself. But he also wanted her baby. She agreed, but still... anyway no one really comes off smelling of roses but Rumpelstiltskin is the only one dead.
--The Peasant in Heaven: Truly good rich people are very rare
--Snow White: Alright, maybe this one shouldn't on the list. Could be there's a lesson about jealousy in there, and also that maybe you should try the Heimlich maneuver on someone that keels over while eating, but in the end it kind of boils down to some fairly creepy borderline necrophilia.
Beware from the child rapists as an analogy. Kinda similar to The Little Red Hood.
Stories like Sleeping Beauty or ones with monsters allow kids to transfer those feelings of all encompassing fear to these bad guys, until they outgrow it and they're able to handle ambiguity.
That doesn't explain why the stories were originally told, but could explain their stickiness.
Hmm. This sounds like a hypothesis from someone who doesn't remember being a child very well. I never lived in total fear of my parents' anger or disappointment, and I'm pretty sure my kids never did either
These used to be more than just stories for kids, but modern fairy tales are rarely ever told to an adult audience anymore. For many fairy tales, the happy ending was added centuries after they spread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_of_Isaac#Possible_chil...
They were collected or written and then popular collections of folklore in some part of last century. They are not exactly bible, many of those stories don't even have some kind of moral lesson in them.
Digging a little deeper, you find tons of variants of stories, and discover all sorts of new ones, hybrids, seemingly incomplete ones, different levels of embellishment, darker and lighter. And some do have morals, but a lot of them are just things happening. Some motifs just seem to stick. And folk tales were not primarily meant for children either—we tell kids campfire ghost stories all the time, and don’t think so much on what they teach. We just like them.
Although I can imagine this being quite horrific, I also don't recall that this cartoon was all that upsetting me when I watched it as a child. Then again I grew up in the countryside so maybe it was less shocking to me because I already knew what nature was like. When it comes to animal cartoons I think Watership Down and The Plague Dogs were much worse experiences.
Still, kind of makes me wonder what's up with the UK and depressing animal cartoons.
I think a LOT of UK school kids were truamatised by this, a lot of teachers, saw it thought 'oh, same author (Richard Adams) and director (Martin Rosen) as Watership Down, lets stick the kids in front of this while we do something else.
Man, that film was harrowing.
(Also, the recent Netflix adaption of the material is a lot closer to the source material than the 1980s-era cartoon).
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