But very very few can actually steal your childhood innocence in one fell swoop. Your dog getting mauled by a train in front of you or that Ronald McDonald clown... in general...
Or something that THIS man created
For those of you who don't know (and in fact I didn't know what he looked like till I looked him up there), this man is called Don Bluth. For a lot of people this name may ring a bell, he did after all create a lot of childhood animated movies, All dogs go to Heaven, the Fievel Films and several others.
And no, before some people think they've got the film I'm about to mention, it is not Bambi. While Bambi is known for taking a proverbial shit on many peoples childhoods, the movie I am about to mention takes a dump so massive that it would probably collapse in on itself annihilating our universe. Proverbially of course.
The movie I am talking about of course is this:
If you haven't seen this (just the first one, the rest are shite) then I consider you lucky. Bambi is an injury, this is a bulldoser through your soul.
I'll explain briefly what it's about. Dinosaurs are hungry, so hungry in fact that there's really only one place left in the world that they can eat, the "Great Valley". Queue shots of different herds walking across treacherous terrain (because if there's no vegetation there's only room for volcanoes) while watching a few die. Yes that's right, from the outset we watch a few things die. But it's alright, we don't know any of these, we haven't formed any emotional bond with them yet. The film knows this and rectifies this problem with catastrophically effective results.
So here we are with Little foot, our main long necked friend in the picture, he is the only baby long neck left and apart from that there is only his mother and his two grandparents. We watch Littlefoot and his mother form a special little bond, something only a mother and child can form and we relate happily to it off screen.
Then shit hits the fan. Littlefoot decides to dance with a T-Rex, forcing his mother to protect him and on top of that Don Bluth decides this is a perfect time for the planet earth to have a tectonic plate disco party. We watch lots of things die at this point, the ground collapses away sending thousands of dinosaurs to their dinograves while others just fall over and die (presumably from eating TOO much). We watch as littlefoot gets rescued by mammy, whom gets injured by the T-Rex and then we watch all the dino babies get split up by a massive chasm.
Woah that was intense for a 5 year old wasn't it? Even horror films takes their breaks in overwhelming tension, but Don Bluth just fucks it at us like oil from BP's broken well. Well done Donny boy, you've nearly broken a child with your apocalyptic vision of dino annihilation. But thankfully it's over.
WRONG, after beating you over the head with his imagery of prehistoric hell, Don then gives you a sucker punch so hard in the gut that shit comes flying out of your eyes, ears, nose and mouth (not really but I think I get across the point I'm making).
What I'm talking about is THIS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgJhVgK0tPI
I was seven when I saw this scene. I was seven when I lost my childhood innocence. No... It was stolen from me. By a man. A man with an ambition to create a Hiroshima sized crater in a child's mind. Well done Don, you succeeded.
P.S. I absolutely love the film Don!
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