Lighter and Softer/Animated Films

• The Open Season sequels and rest of the series are like this, except for the short Boog and Elliot's Midnight Bun Run.
• Believe it or not, there's the Italian animated film Titanic: The Legend Goes On, which made a Disney-like fairy tale out of a real-life disaster where over fifteen hundred people died. And the dog raps.
  • Possibly parodied in a Saturday Night Live animated segment, featuring Jason Alexander as "Titey", Whoopi Goldberg as the Iceberg, and ... Anne Frank?
  • And then there's The Legend of the Titanic, in which evil sharks tricked a dopey octopus into throwing an iceberg in front of the ship. Tentacles the octopus saves the day, and everyone survives. In the sequel the shark raps.
• The first Brother Bear movie might have been lighthearted despite the deaths of Kenai's brother Sitka and Koda's mother, but the second one is obviously more lighthearted by comparison.
• Despite it's PG-13 rating, The Simpsons Movie is a bit more lighter than its source material to have a likely appeal to families. Apart from some nudity and a visible penis when Bart skateboarded through Springfield fully naked, it tones down the violence, bad language, sexual references, and overall crude humor that the show normally has, and even had a Burger King promotion to top it all off.
• The first Ice Age was about an unlikely group of animals who had to work together to return a baby to his family. It didn't even focus on comedy, except for a few scenes, and that was it. Ice Age 2 and 3 on the other hand, focus more on comedy and Scrat, mainly because the children loved Scrat so much in the first. The darkest the sequals ever got were when they showed the presumed deaths of the villians in Meltdown.
• This happens in nearly every direct-to-video Disney sequel (with The Lion King 2 being an arguable exception.) The sequel will generally be much lighter and fluffier compared to the previous film.
• The Fox and the Hound had this towards the ending...wait..No. Through the whole movie actually. In the original book Todd and Copper weren't even friends. They all die at the end. Oh. And there is no happy singing of being friends or meeting girls either. The animals don't even talk.
• The Land Before Time. The first one, while still primarily aimed at children was very dark, featuring the child dinosaurs coming very close to dying several times, adults dinosaurs actually dying, including Littlefoot's mother, who fought a T-Rex, getting a nasty gash on her neck among other things. And then... the sequels came. Never Say "Die" was introduced, to the point where it seems the T-Rexes at most just want to scare the herbivores, and put very little effort into feeding. It gets particularly stupid when a triceratops rammed one, and only pushed it back. Oh, and big musical numbers too, something the original neither had nor needed.
  • It should be added that this was par the course for every Don Bluth movie ever to receive a sequel. The most major example is The Secret of NIMH II; it is far more light hearted and family friendly than the very dark original.