Do movies today make children feel? They try to make them laugh; broad comedy abounds. But where are the films that weave a complex fabric of emotion? Films don’t have to be hard or difficult to be transformative, but when watching a film with a child, it should not begin and end with overblown entertainment. Heartwarming is becoming a dirty word.
Animation is now the default for family film, whereas in the 90s there were more live-action films. Harry Potter shifted the scope of family films (and everything else) as a hybrid of live-action and computer animation. Animation is its own form and genre, and that, plus the hybrid model with its enormous budget is what tends to make it to mass audiences, mirroring how Hollywood thinks about big budget vs indie1. Yet there is an argument for children’s cinema in a market that’s all about watered-down live-action comedies or hyped-up Marvel universes.
There are exceptions. Wes Anderson’s stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox took on greed and gluttony with a charming sly wit and painted an entire visual reality. That was over a decade ago. In 1971, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was released, and Hollywood has been trying to replicate its success ever since, with misguided results at best. What these earlier films shared and what the recent ones lack (without going into an exhaustive list on both sides) is a sense of uncertainty about it all.
Children live in the same world as the rest of us. They are not immune to difficulty. They still relate to the character of a dog on film even if it doesn’t sport a cap, have the blank half-moon eyes of a stuffed animal, and consider “pawsome” an acceptable line of dialogue.2
What Disney created in the beginning was form-breaking: hand-drawn classical cartoons (2d), rooted in fairy tale, and Pixar expanded into CGI technology (3d) and went on to explore an emotional interiority that was accessible to both children and adults. Dreamworks animation (among others) followed with quirky, irreverent comedies primed for franchise. Now there’s a lot of disruption and competition in the market, and box office is declining.
They all rely on visual extravaganza, even though the cost per shot of an animated film is higher than that of a live-action film. Like everything else in the film industry, studios seem willing to bankroll a few enormously high-budget movies and bank on their box-office success—bigger is still better, even though box office has shown otherwise.
On the other side of the animated spectrum are the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Elevated to works of art, they are dark, exquisite, and nothing short of profound. Tellingly, last year’s The Boy and the Heron scored big at the box office. As a side note, Miyazaki’s complete dismay and contempt for AI is perhaps one of the most succinct, on-target pleas for humanity and the arts yet.
There are more significant losses beyond Hollywood’s box office. When it comes to children, a book trumps a screen, but what about film? Films, as opposed to television, with their longer storytelling format, can contribute to developing critical thinking skills, logic, narrative, and language, and promote empathy and social-emotional intelligence.
Now, however, films use quick cuts and multiple shots per scene, often in place of a reliably strong narrative. It’s more than a child’s brain can handle. There are no ratings and no codified standards for shot length in children’s films. MPAA ratings refer to content and have nothing to do with visual presentation. It’s undoubtedly easier to have standards in place around content.
The length of the shot and the stillness of the camera have an enormous effect on the brain’s capacity to understand time and place and deeply affect children’s ability to pay attention and what they pay attention to (orienting networks). Also, programming has expanded across screens and formats.
Yet there’s a dearth of films that put character and narrative above one-liners and spectacle. Imagine the 400 Blows, Old Yeller, The Princess Bride, or To Kill a Mockingbird by today’s production standards. We can’t; To Kill a Mockingbird is busy being banned. Old Yeller would probably steadily spew ironic one-liners from a CGI mouth, and the sins of the 400 Blows would likely be overblown with such depravity and rage that there would be no innocence to mourn.
These are vastly different movies, but they share three things: narrative storytelling and character live together, connected by motivation and circumstance in a temporal realm; there are fewer cuts, and scenes are not afraid of stillness, either in blocking the actors or the camera; and they treat children like people—they don’t write down to them, they “write up,” as E.B. White insisted. Thematically, one can argue at what age to show a child any of these films (and the individual temperament of a child matters), but children are wise.
There is a demand for children’s content and an evolving relationship between film and television and the publishing industry.3 I wonder if there’s a possibility for some sort of healthy mutualistic relationship. Children’s book publishing is contracting slightly, and digital alternatives continue to eat into market share. There are a lot of reasons why parents might not be buying as many books, but it’s not because there’s no interest in storytelling. Children are the best audiences. It’s very hard to make any film these days, but there are still stories. It must be possible to make films for children that can also be a great cinematic experience. To state the obvious, they are the audiences of tomorrow. And besides that, children deserve so much more.
https://americanfilmmarket.com/what-the-data-says-producing-low-budget-family-films/
ibid.
https://kidscreen.com/2019/09/24/a-producers-guide-to-the-publishing-industry/
Really enjoyed this post Sasha and not something I'd thought about before. It makes me think of what my kids watch and how most of it is animation and comedy - like you say there's so many different skills they could learn from a film with a more complex and emotional story.
Great article. Important stuff.