Cartoon `goodies' dish out violence

The animated films we take our kiddies to on a Saturday afternoon are awash with violence and many deliver the message that if you want to win and all else fails, try physical force.

Experts from the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, watched 74 G-rated movies, the kind of films deemed suitable for children aged two and up. Ms Fumie Yokota and Ms Kimberly M. Thompson were stunned to discover the level of mayhem dished out in the name of entertainment.

They defined violence as intentional acts that included physical contact with the potential to cause injury or harm. They discovered the cut and thrust of politics was as nothing compared to the punishment meted out by the cartoon thugs.

All 74 films, released between 1937 and 1999, had at least one act of violence and at least one character was injured in 62 per cent of them, the researchers report in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Even worse, nearly half the injuries were fatal. Happily, most of them had it coming to them because 71 per cent of the fatal incidents happened to "baddies". Don't think, however, that dishing it out to the baddies had anything to do with building character. In all but two movies at least one "goodie" participated in a violent act, and at least one character in half of the films celebrated this violence by cheering or laughing. Things have been deteriorating over the years, according to the findings. The average length of exposure to violence per film was 9.5 minutes, but the researchers found the average exposure was longer in more recent films.

"Our content analysis reveals a striking behavioural message implied by many of the G-rated animated films: the good guys triumph over the bad through the use of physical force," the authors write. They found that the majority of violent incidents (55 per cent) were to do with goodies or neutral characters using violence as a means of conflict resolution.