Joe Wilkinson’s Home Movies: why cartoons are better than real life

In the new cartoon adventure ‘The Croods’, early human history was a riot that featured zany animal sidekicks and brightly-coloured scenery.

In reality, our Homo sapiens ancestors’ lives were blighted by disease, violence and quite possibly cannibalism. Not great material for a DreamWorks kids flick.

That’s why we love cartoons. They take awful situations, such as fratricide within lion prides, or stepmother abuse, and turn them into jaunty, musical stories that always have a happy ending. But how do they do it? Joe Wilkinson investigates...