Serious Children's Media

In a New Yorker article on the inner workings of Pixar, I read some details on the visual development of the upcoming movie, Brave, and with that in mind I was excited to see that a teaser trailer has been released for it.



Watching this, I can hear the voice of my good friend, with whom I went to see Rango a few months ago, asking “How is this a kid’s movie?” It is a striking preview, and it is striking in a way that isn’t typical of what we expect in child-oriented films. After the shooting star sparkles over the Disney castle and the Pixar lamp turns to face us before its bright white background, every image in the one-minute trailer is dark and heavily atmospheric. When the child protagonist, Merida, is revealed, her skillfully rendered expressions are neither joyful nor unassuming, but full of both fear and purposive intensity. These are not the features we generally expect from an animated film, the intended audience of which is children.

After watching Rango, I discussed the ways in which children’s films were being artfully crafted to appeal to both children and adults in roughly equally measure. In light of this preview, I’m ready to reevaluate that assertion. I think the actual trend is decidedly better than that. Filmmakers are not merely growing their ability to introduce children to grown-up themes and situations, they’re actually changing the way in which we as a society engage children in media.

There is an awful book from the early 90s called The Celestine Prophecy that’s considered foundational to the New Age movement. It is an awful book made up of some excellent, if disjoint ideas, one of which is that children will demonstrate more maturity if you talk to them like they’re regular people. This is something I’ve been advocating for a long time. Since I was a child, in fact. I remember being a child fairly well, and I know that I didn’t appreciate being talked down to. I was a child who took uncharacteristic and perhaps excessive pride in maturity, and I sometimes tended to thumb my nose at things that were normal interests for children of my generation. Still, I don’t think my mental capacity was any different from that of my peers, and at the time I didn’t think there was much for which I was “too young.” I still think I was right. There were a lot of things that I didn’t understand because I hadn’t been exposed to much, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t engage with more adult media, and take it as an opportunity to learn something.

I think it could be very good for our children if we moved away from the notion of separate genres of adult and child entertainment. Maintenance of that distinction could mean depriving children of meaningful themes and emotional experience. The fact that something has a particular target audience should not mean that that audience is cut off from content that might hold more significance for another demographic. Leveling content somewhat so that it holds appeal for a broader population is a fine way of fostering inter-cultural and inter-generational learning.

I expect that Brave will put some overprotective parents ill at ease, but that the children of the rest will have an opportunity to have a cinematic experience that goes well beyond pure enjoyment, allowing them an early introduction to the more earnest appreciation of film that they might develop later, or that they might already have developed by secretly watching movies for which they are “too young.” Obviously, there are films about which that’s actually true, but too often the impulse to protect our youth translates to an impulse to coddle them, and coddling could threaten to stunt their emotional and intellectual development. I am pleased to see that some of the makers of our children’s entertainment are reliably tacking against that impulse, and I hope that it truly implies changing social trends, whereby the effort at bringing up our children need not preclude our respecting their minds.

Analysis vs. Escapism

Almost exactly three years on from its original release date, I’ve finally gotten around to seeing Wall-E. It has still be quite low on my Netflix queue, but a friend of mine had it lent to her, and she offered that we watch it together. I knew to expect an excellent, critically acclaimed film, and I knew to expect a post-apocalyptic setting. My friend, however, was apparently completely free of any expectations. By the end of it, she was crying almost openly. The word “almost” is important there, because when the credits began to roll, she conspicuously avoided looking in my direction and said, “That was a stupid movie.”

I struggled to try to get her to elaborate. It was extraordinarily well animated, it was touching, it had moments of terrific suspense, and highly relevant themes. But when I asked her just what it was she didn’t like about it, the best response I was able to get from her was a synopsis of some of the plot points, which she gave while dabbing her eyes with a crumpled napkin.

The friendship that she and I share is of an odd sort. We have a scant few points of profound similarity, and apart from that we have virtually nothing in common. She is also not forthcoming with opinions or explanations of her beliefs or feelings, so gathering a better understanding of her takes a substantial bit of labor. One of the things that has long puzzled me about her is her taste in movies. That is, there seems to be no coherent pattern to what she chooses to watch and what she reports that she enjoys. She scoffs at some of the suggestions that I offer, but then speaks highly of films in the same genre, with similar styles or themes. She pretends not to like a particular class of film, but then eagerly embraces an individual film that is perfectly representative of it.

Eventually, after working to understand why she indicated that she didn’t like Wall-E in spite of clearly having been affected by it, I came to the conclusion that our distinct viewing habits were not exactly indicative of different tastes in film. Rather, they speak to differences in the very way that each of us consumes media. She felt shocked an uncomfortable after watching Wall-E because when viewing an animated film, she doesn’t expect an emotional rollercoaster or an overall challenge to the lifestyles of modern society. She only expects to be entertained.

I believe that that’s exactly the way that it is with her and virtually every move that she chooses to watch. She finds a film’s trailer appealing because it looks like the feature will be entertaining, and that it will provide good, non-threatening escapism. I have never been that way. I have never found appeal in pure escapism. Everything I watch, read, or listen to, I do so because I expect to get something out of it, something that speaks to the human conditions, or issues facing modern man, or at least the contemporary cultural aesthetic. Even if I find myself consuming a piece of media idly, I do not then merely let it wash over me. My mind’s tendency toward analysis never remains switched off for long, as so I’m eager to find emotional or intellectual content in even the simplest, most casual things, like television commercials.

It is always difficult to fully comprehend the notion that other people think differently than you do, and it is an essentially foreign concept to me that some people consume media as little more than a distraction. When I am challenged to think about it, however, I wonder whether fans of pop culture are more likely to do just that than they are to take my approach to the enjoyment of media. For me, real enjoyment only comes from the belief that something I am doing, whether actively or passively, is contributing to who I am as a person, what I understand, and how I think. Am I correct to surmise that this is something of a cultural divide within the population, and if so, am I in the minority of it? Am I an anomaly, and is there anything damning or self-injurious about over-thinking as I do, and striving to see that none of the themes of a work of art escape my attention, even if it’s a children’s movie?