anthropomorphic fun

I am sure that I am not the only one who has noticed that the ratio of adults to kids in a movie theater is inversely proportional to the ratio of animals to humans in the movie. In short, saying that kids movies have a lot of animals in them would be an understatement. I have to wonder why this is.

While I did have a few pets when I was a kid I have never been an animal person. I don't mind pets but I simply don't establish relationships with animals, which I think is an important prerequisite to being an animal person. I still liked a lot of kids movies with animals in them when I was a kid (and some while I am an adult), but the fact that a movie has animals in it has never made a movie more appealing at any age. I would have been just as entertained if Fievel from An American Tail were a human, though it would have made the movie title a bit less descriptively accurate. It's the same with Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and all of the rest of the incredibly well-known anthropomorphic fictional characters I watched in my childhood.

Why is it that movies for kids focus on animals so much comparatively to movies for adults? Is it because kids spend more time around the family pet than adults do? Is it because a story with talking animals lends itself to being more fantastical, which is more appealing to kids? Is it because kids are more likely to have empathy for animals than adults are? My theory is that it is a combination of the things that I just mentioned, plus the fact that this is just the way it has always been done so this is the way we're going to continue to make kids movies.