Comic vs. Dramatic Violence in The Hunchback of Notre Dame

In children's movies, violence is obviously portrayed very differently than it is in most works intended for adults. Since the main concerns are simple slapstick laughs, and because in works for children it is important to limit serious harm, violence in children's movies is generally very cartoonish and silly, with no serious lasting effects. This is what I would call comic violence, and it is used pretty extensively for easy laughs.

However, occasionally children's movies will use violence for a more dramatic effect. Lots of movies for children feature villains, but since more serious violence is a risk for the younger audience, even villains only rarely threaten serious violence. A few Disney classics do feature serious acts of violence, and these scenes have demonstrated an amazing staying power in our generation's memory: the deaths of Mufasa and Scar in the Lion King, for instance, or Gaston fighting the Beast in Beauty and the Beast. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, although not quite as successful as either of those, is notable for its extensive use of very serious acts of violence with repercussions that last throughout the film.

Here are some examples of non-slapstick violence in Hunchback:

-A fleeing woman is murdered by being thrown onto stone steps

-A prisoner is whipped and screams in pain

-Judge Frollo threatens to drown a baby

-Frollo kills an ant nest, when introducing his plan of genocide

-Frollo tells a bound Esmerelda to either submit to his lust, or be burned at the stake, and he sets her stage on fire when she refuses

-A house is locked with an innocent family inside, and then it is set on fire

-The entire city of Notre Dame is set on fire by Frollo's orders

-Frollo drops off the belltower and into a pit of hellish molten metal with a visible splash

Although there is almost no blood, and only one character is actually killed, this is an extraordinary amount of violence for a children's movie. What's most interesting about Hunchback's dramatic violence is that it is side by side with the comic slapstick violence that is considered perfectly appropriate for a children's movie. In some scenes, armed guards are punchlines (literally), and in others they are serious and deadly threats.

In order to clearly differentiate between the different styles of violence, the movie relies on a few key clues that help to covey the message of the violence. In dramatic scenes, the tension is carried with dramatic religious intonations or with ominous orchestral cues that help the viewer to sense the emotion and weight of the violence. In comedic violence sequences, the music is much more jaunty. Additionally, the physics of the world is bent into comedic form when the violence is non-serious. For the slapstick scenes, people go flying across the screen when hit, or are capable of amazing acrobatic tricks. This contrasts sharply with the more serious scenes, where the characters seem to lose these tricks and instead are punished by arrows or spears and must struggle to survive. The sound effects vary too: for comedy, there are pinball sounds or other goofy noises when people are struck. In the dramatic scenes, these joke sounds are gone.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the violence committed by the villain, Judge Frollo, is never comedic, whereas the heroes frequently commit acts of violence that would kill or incapacitate guards which are mitigated by the comedic nature of the attacks. Even in otherwise dramatic scenes, the heroes always seem to land hits that produce goofy visuals or silly noises to make the violence more acceptable. It's only attacks on Frollo himself, the single developed villain, that are dramatic.

This, in some ways, runs contrary to the examples of violence in movies we've discussed before. In, for example, Kill Bill or Star Wars, the uniformity and non-development of the guards makes it easy to see unmitigated violence committed against them. It's only against well-developed (or even somewhat differentiated) characters, like the Yakuza boy whose mask falls off, that the concept of mercy or a fair fight need apply. In adult films, the undifferentiated mooks are the most abused because their uniformity makes them sub-human and unworthy of consideration. In this children's film, the undifferentiated mass of guards is still a target of violence, but it is always played for comedy, never as a serious source of pain. It's only the differentiated villain that can be fairly targeted by unmitigated violence.