PARENTS STAY ALIVE IN DISNEY FILMS

For one year, at least, we got a reprieve. In reversing a trope’s troubling body count, 2016’s major awards-contending animated films managed to stop icing our parents.

Yes, kids, in some ways, these weren’t your father’s CG-animated films, because in the past year, your cartoon daddies actually got to live.

It’s been 80 years since Disney began whacking our ancestors in feature films, with the release of 1937’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The blood line remained rather Grimm since as Disney made this adapted move integral to its storytelling DNA. Within five years, the studio tapped the gorgeous original art of Tyrus Wong — who died last week at age 106 — in making one of its most memorable parent-killers, 1942’s “Bambi.”

Once you’ve fatally pierced the Mama Deer in your kiddie fare, well, there’s no going back.

Every succeeding generation has received its own animated films that play the Orphan Card, or at least render a parent long absent. Be it with Cinderella or Simba, Mowgli or Belle, Disney has especially adapted works that offed the offspring’s next of kin. We thus became conditioned to death in our cartoons, particularly within the Tragic Magic Kingdom.

In recent years, though, the trite parental deaths in CG-animated films were reaching a critical mass, if not mess. We grieved through “Frozen” and “Good Dinosaur” and the especially ruthless “Big Hero 6.” It got to the point where we were surprised when a missing parent actually returned, as in “How to Train Your Dragon 2.”