If there’s one thing that every person remembers from their childhood, it’s the animated films. From Cinderella to Peter Pan, Aladdin to The Princess and the Frog – you name it, we’ve seen it.

But it seems these very cartoons we watched and loved as a kid aren’t as child-friendly as we’d assume and contain more violence than films for adults.

Snow White
(KPA/PA)

In fact, 45 of top-grossing animated films between 1937′s Snow White and Frozen in 2013 were scrutinised to see if their U and PG ratings were truly appropriate, while the two most successful adult films of the same year were combed through too.

Two thirds of the children’s films featured the death of an important character in comparison to the 50% of adult films.

Parents, characters’ nemeses and children were often the first casualties in cartoons, with the parents of the leading characters five times more likely to die in a kid’s flick than an adult one.

Considering the full running time and the years since release, children’s main animated characters were 2.5 times more likely to die than their counterparts in adult films, and actually more than three times as likely to be murdered.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose
Children’s films were compared to the likes of The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Flickr/Hannes Engelbrecht)

“Rather than being innocuous and gentler alternatives to typical horror or drama films, children’s animated films are, in fact, hotbeds of murder and mayhem,” said the study’s researchers Dr Ian Colman and Dr James Kirkbride, from the University of Ottawa in Canada and University College London.

If you think about it, the shocking revelations do ring true…

The adorable Bambi was abandoned by his father at birth, only to cruelly witness the brutal shooting of his mother.

Nemo was the only survivor of a savage barracuda attack, where his mother and the rest of his siblings are eaten just four minutes and three seconds into Finding Nemo.

Tarzan’s parents are mauled to death by a leopard, leaving him a baby orphan just four minutes and eight seconds into the film.

Finding Nemo
Finding Nemo (Enterpress Buena Vista/DPA/PA)

Other grizzly deaths featured those in The Little Mermaid, A Bug’s Life Sleeping Beauty and How to Train Your Dragon.

These films were picked apart and compared to adult films like The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, Pulp Fiction and Black Swan.

After studying the most popular children’s animations spanning almost 80 years, there was no evidence suggesting the level of violence in films for a younger audience has fluctuated at all since Snow White’s evil stepmother was chased into the mountains by seven vengeful dwarfs, struck by lighting, plummeted of a cliff and crushed by a boulder.