Since ever, heroes have always played the mythical role of desirable and perfect model citizens. From philosophy to literature, we have several heroes as a key concept for understanding how to mobilize and inspire political and social action. This was the case in Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche and the superman and in Le Fil de L´Epée, by Charles de Gaulle, where exceptional people were the essential key to leading the crowd to victory. In our times, the myth of the hero is still an essential player and actor in opening the imagination and leading people to higher standards of performance. In literature, novels, and films we find heroes as a common ingredient for inspiring desirable patterns of behaviour in our daily lives. This contribution explores the role of heroes in children’s cinema and how these formulas target desirable standard human behaviour in Western democracies, considering several films in cinema from the period between 2020 and 2024. In theoretical terms, this contribution is based on an anticipatory perspective, aiming particularly to identify what are the expected desirable effects in social and political terms, on children, through a set of narratives that focus on the ideal and aspirational attitudes and behaviours of the heroes. In methodological terms, we applied the content analysis technique to a set of commercial films for children that are cinema successes in several countries. The research question is: how are modern heroes shaped to attract the interest of children and how do they intend to design a future model of citizen, in political and social terms? The expected results are to identify which formulas have been used to attract the children’s interest considering hero traits and how these can be important to design and shape an ideal performance of a future model citizen.
