Every animated movie has that one character who exists to make you laugh. The loud one, the weird one, the one who shows up so the sad parts land softer. And almost every single time, they're the one quietly carrying the worst thing that happened in the entire film.

Today we're going through eight comic relief characters from DreamWorks, Pixar, Disney, Illumination and Sony whose backstories are far darker than the jokes ever let on — ranked from bad to genuinely unbearable. A donkey nobody ever chose. A rabbit who got thrown out when his trick stopped working. A cat who lost the only town that ever claimed him. A vampire who built a hotel because he couldn't build a family. A snowman made out of a memory. A robot built by a dead man. A fish who spent her whole life being lost. And an imaginary friend nobody ever mourned.

Some of these you already knew. A couple of them you've been laughing at for twenty years without realising what you were laughing at.

Which one hit you the hardest? Let me know in the comments — I read them all.

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#animation #videoessay #disney #pixar #dreamworks