Anyone Can Die/Western Animation


 * Played with in A Bug's Life in form of the junior ants. First, they make a painting of the good warrior bugs and bad grasshoppers battling, and they painted one of the good guys dead because their teacher said it would be more realistic that way. Then, they perform a play of the battle, in which apparently, EVERYONE dies.
 * They started to show death in the Cars series films, from the gruesome end of Rod "Torque" Redline to the offscreen death of Doc Hudson.
 * Transformers: The Movie (1986) was famous principally for introducing this phenomenon to millions of Saturday-morning TV fans, when Optimus Prime dies, along with Megatron, Starscream, almost all the Autobots and an entire planet of Red Shirts in the first ten minutes, followed by the pointless on-screen maiming of several more robots including the last survivor of aforementioned planet for good measure, just to impress upon young'uns that Fiction Is Not Fair.
 * The animated series Exo Squad also used this trope, inspired by Macross and Robotech, quite daring for the time.
 * Transformers: Beast Wars probably had one of the highest Saturday-morning cartoon mortality rates out there. In the first episode of the second season, Terrorsaur and Scorponok fall in lava and die with relatively little fanfare. Near the end of the season, Dinobot sacrifices himself with quite a bit more fanfare to save a tribe of proto-humans. Tigertron and Airazor die, come back, and then almost immediately die again, this time for good. Inferno and Quickstrike get toasted by their own boss. Depth Charge and Rampage go up in an immense explosion. Tarantulus gets hoisted by his own petard. And this is only counting for-real deaths.
 * It's easier just to say that 22 characters were introduced (Including a fusion of two previous characters and a clone of another previous character) and that only 8 of them survive to the end of the series.
 * When we add Beast Machines, we must trim  from that list. The death count of its new arrivals is harder to calculate; it depends on whether or not   If we do, the death toll of Beast Machines new arrivals just tops 50%.
 * Transformers Animated was also pretty brutal. In the first season finale Megatron kills Starscream with the Allspark key, although he gets better a few episodes later. In the third season it got worse.
 * Blurr is crushed into a cube by Shockwave in Transwarped, Master Yoketron is left to die in Prowl's arms by Lockdown, Prowl sacrifices his life to stop the Lugnut Supremes from blowing up, and Starscream dies after the Allspark fragment keeping him alive is sucked out of his head. Since this was the final episode of the show, he probably didn't get better.
 * There's also the sorta-deaths. Ultra Magnus is beaten nearly to death by Shockwave and we never do see him wake up from his coma (Word of God: Had they gotten a season four, Magnus would have bought it and Sentinel would have taken his place, and the dangerous acts he commits in his hubris would have only escalated.) and the Constructicons are blown up, with only Scrapper seen to survive. There's also the business with the gathering of the Allspark fragments. Since many of them had brought other Transformers to life and removing Starscream's fragment killed him, he may not have been the only casualty.
 * The makers of Transformers Prime have said that "when we kill a character, we kill a character," and a few surprising deaths have happened. However, no main characters yet as of the season one finale.
 * This is major gimmick of the Total Drama series. Well, technically, not die, but be elliminated, and can return to the show (and will - in the end of the season, to try to come into the next). Still, the number of active characters is rapidly decreasing and no one is safe, even the most popular and beloved by writers characters.
 * In a rarity for a children's programme, The Animals of Farthing Wood had a fairly high mortality rate, with a lot of the major characters being killed off as the series went on. By the end of the show only a few of the original animals still survived.
 * Frisky Dingo is one of the few Adult Swim original cartoons in which death is permanent, which it makes liberal use of by killing off both major and minor characters left and right during the second season.
 * Star Wars: The Clone Wars doesn't touch any of the characters from the films, but they are not afraid of introducing an original character and then kill them in the same episode. Jedi and well as clone troopers. Sometimes any original, named character surviving past an episode is a surprise. Sometimes.
 * Near the end of Season3 they.
 * The entire message of Watership Down being "Small Furry Animals Will Eventually Die Anyway, so get used to it," so it includes all variants of on-screen cute rabbit death in order to drive home the message. It was felt that too many rabbits actually survived the book (Show, Don't Tell!) due to author's reluctance to pull the trigger. So additional doomed characters are introduced and a particularly sympathetic Woobie who played a big part in the novel is highlighted in order to be gruesomely Stuffed Into the Fridge near the climax.
 * Vuk the Little Fox: The beginning of this children's cartoon seems to imply that it will be something cuddly and cute. Besides maintaining a level of cuteness, over a dozen characters (including those with names, personalities and spoken lines) die, either killed by other animals or by human hunters. There is no Carnivore Confusion, as the main hero kills and eats prey on-screen without any trouble.
 * The Venture Brothers, after pointing on at great length in the Lepidopterists episode how 21 and 24's Genre Savvy made them indestructible, went on to brutally kill 24 in the season 3 final episode. His burning severed head lands right in 21's hands, making sure everyone knows he's Killed Off for Real.
 * And let's not forget the titular brothers themselves, who were killed at the end of Season 1. For awhile, this seemed to be final, until they got better when the second season finally started, two years later.
 * Since The Simpsons' Halloween episodes aren't part of the show's canon (not that the show has much continuity to begin with), the writers frequently end up killing off lots and lots of characters (not even the Simpsons themselves are safe.) In fact, not only can anyone die, anyone can become a brutal and sadistic murderer. Yes, even a godfearing churchgoer like Ned Flanders. (And he has.)
 * In the Harley Quinn cartoon, there are, as of the season one finale, two confirmed deaths of canon characters, the Scarecrow and Queen of Fables. The Joker is confirmed to have survived, but was Brought Down to Normal after falling victim to chemicals he intended to use on Harley. (As in, his body does not die, but his identity does.) Also, the Justice League and Legion of Doom are all missing, but their fates remain unknown for now.