How Kids’ Movies Train Children to Accept Animal Use

If you think kids’ movies are harmless fun, think again. Behind the cute animation and catchy songs, they’re selling something much darker: the idea that using and eating animals is normal, natural, and necessary.

A new study rips the mask off the industry, showing how children's films push animal-based foods onto young minds while scrubbing away any hint of what those foods really cost — to animals, to workers, to the planet. It’s not just lazy storytelling. It’s a lesson in supremacy, taught early.

Marketing to Kids: It’s Not Innocent

Marketing food to children is a multi-billion-dollar operation. Animated characters, bright colours, catchy slogans — it’s all designed to shape their preferences, their shopping requests, and ultimately, their values.

And while researchers have spent plenty of time studying junk food advertising, hardly anyone has bothered to ask: what about meat, milk, and eggs? How do they slip through, looking wholesome and harmless, when they’re anything but?

This study finally asked.

Using framing theory, the researchers looked at how children’s films show animal-based foods — not just how often they appear, but how they're portrayed. The findings weren’t surprising if you’ve been paying attention, but they’re damning all the same.

The Data: Normalisation in Action

The study analysed 14 top-grossing kids' films from 1999 to 2019. Not obscure indie flicks — household names available on Netflix, easy to access, and easy to absorb.

In the 68 food scenes they studied:

- Plant-based foods showed up 60 times.

- Animal-based foods showed up 49 times.

Sounds balanced? It's not. A deeper look showed animal-based foods were pushed far more positively. Meat, dairy, and eggs were almost always shown as delicious, exciting, or part of some happy moment. Meanwhile, plant-based foods got shoved aside with grimaces or disgust nine times. (Because apparently eating a carrot is tragic, but eating someone's body is a celebration.)

Statistical tests confirmed it: animal-based foods were wildly over-represented compared to even the USDA’s industry-friendly guidelines — which, by the way, still recommend 75% plant-based eating. 

The Hidden Lessons: Rich People Eat Animals

Three key messages kept popping up across the films:

1. Poverty Means Plants, Wealth Means Meat - Six movies pushed this idea hard. Poor characters ate sad bowls of cabbage soup; rich or newly successful characters feasted on chicken dinners. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory made it almost cartoonishly obvious: no meat until money comes in.

The message to kids? If you want to be happy, important, or respected, you’ll need to put an animal’s corpse on your plate.

2. Meat Is “Us” — Plants Are “Them” - Films like Kung Fu Panda 2 showed plant-based meals in Asian settings, framed as charming but foreign. Meanwhile, Western-coded characters in movies like The Croods were all about hunting, eating bugs, cracking eggs open with their teeth. Kids aren't just learning what to eat. They're learning who eats what — and who they should aspire to be.

3. Meat Is Just Background Noise - In movies like Ralph Breaks the Internet and The Bee Movie, characters munch on burgers and chicken legs while the plot moves along, with no comment, no reflection. Meat becomes invisible — not a choice, not a cost, just part of life. No blood. No slaughterhouses. No desperate animals. Just a hamburger, magically appearing, as natural as breathing.

Normalisation By Design

This isn’t an accident. Industries that rely on animal use know full well that if children made the connection between what’s on their plate and who they’re eating, they’d start asking uncomfortable questions.

They can’t risk that. So they teach obedience early. Make meat a reward. Make dairy a celebration. Make eggs part of being a happy family. Hide everything else.

It’s marketing so deep you don’t even notice it happening — but your kids do.

The Bigger Picture

This study only scratched the surface, looking at just 14 films. Imagine what a full analysis across books, TV shows, toys, and video games would reveal.

Children are bombarded daily with images that normalise exploitation while making freedom, respect, and justice look weird, sad, or foreign. It's the perfect setup for another generation trained to see animals not as individuals with lives of their own, but as property, resources, and background props.

If we want a world that actually respects animals, the first step is seeing the machine that trains us not to.