Week 3: Inquiry

I've been thinking about the role of the creator in children's stuff recently. Between our discussions about inquiry and the screening of The Jungle Book two weeks ago, I've been trying to figure out what an adult's responsibility is in creating things for children. It goes without saying that the majority of creators of children's media are not children, which makes the genre(?) a unique one. Even when I consider work created by children, they are always facilitated by adults.

One of these works, the comic series Axe Cop, was created by Ethan Nicolle but written by his then 5 year-old brother Malachi. The series was illustrated and constructed by the elder brother, but was conceived and dictated by the younger one. Here's an example of that dynamic:
The strange thing about Axe Cop is that it is by no means for children — instead, it revels in the fertile imagination and loose logic of a kid's brain while wrapped in a winking, adult tone. The irony on display wouldn't resonate with kids either; they'd still just respond to the silly stuff.

But our trip to the Bean Museum helped connect these disparate ideas of responsibility in creation. It was being at an actual museum that made me apply the word curation to these concepts of children's media. A museum curator works to facilitate the best possible experience for their given museum and carefully chooses what is displayed and how it is displayed. Likewise, Ethan Nicolle facilitates his little brother's creativity and gives him an outlet to see his imagination fulfilled. In the same sense, Georges Lopez (the teacher in To Be and to Have) takes on a similar role of curator to his student's understanding of the world. In all three of these cases, the adults are helping shape children in ways that directly meet children on their level.

For example, I think it's relevant that the Bean Museum recently underwent a major renovation. In the past, the museum has been a stuffy, grandpa's-basement sort of place, with an emphasis on the deadness of the taxidermied animals. Now, the museum is brighter and more open, with the animals arranged in ways that are more accessible to children. There are more hands-on exhibits, and everything seems better designed to have appeal with kids. That curatorial goal reminds me of To Be and to Have, in the sense that Lopez works to meet his students on a mutual level of understanding, rather than lecture or speak down to them.

The most obvious instances of this dynamic are when Lopez sits down with one of the students individually. He makes a concerted effort to make them broaden their senses of understanding, be it pushing their conception of numbers to greater levels or questioning what a bee would be doing in their school's hallway. The film presents him as a sage more than an instructor, giving children the tools to find their own answers -- much like a good museum gives children the right room to explore the world around them. Adults who create for children have a special responsibility to motivate their audience to further explore and push their senses of understanding, and I think those thoughtful curators are the linchpin to successful children's media, and even successful children as a whole.

Week 2: Morality

Over the 90-or-so years of its existence, The Walt Disney Company has established itself as a sort of arbiter of moral decency. Perhaps due in part to its early dominance of feature animation, Disney Company is ascribed a particular resonance by the American public — we have even invented a term, “Disney magic,” to identify the qualities of the studio’s output. This connotation argues that movies made by the Disney Company are “timeless” or even “good” simply by virtue of their existence. We connect universal morality to these movies without acknowledging the real people (and real ideologies) behind them.

For the most part, the Disney Company does a pretty good job hiding any sort of political statement in their work. But The Jungle Book is a movie that is overt not only in its politics, but also in its specificity to its period. This movie calls into question the nature of morality in children’s media — are creators obligated to tell universal stories of absolute morality, or is their responsibility to rather reflect the moral realities of the world?

In 1967, the counterculture movement loomed over the public consciousness, and no doubt was influencing the artists working on their Kipling adaptation. Hippies were still looked at as practicing a cute alternative lifestyle rebelling against modern structures. Only a couple of years later, the Manson murders would reconfigure the public perception, but at the time of The Jungle Book, there was a real cultural pull occurring between the counterculture and traditionalists.

As a document of this period in time and a movie for children, The Jungle Book is less directly about teaching children morals and more about adult ideologies fighting for the children’s (or future’s) soul. The movie is not about Mowgli’s journey — in fact, Mowgli disappears for large swaths of the runtime — but rather about the animals determining what is good for him. On the extreme end of the spectrum is Shere Khan, the ultimate representation of authority and arbitrary power (Why is he in charge? Because tigers have always been the apex predators. That’s just how it is). Baloo occupies the other pole as a devout follower of the hippie lifestyle. His “Bare Necessities” mindset reflects the calls for simpler, more sustainable living from the hippies of the 1960s. Baloo is most often admonished for his habits by Bagheera, who most accurately represents the parents of the younger generation caught between ideologies. Bagheera is obligated to take care of Mowgli and see that he is given some sort of future, so Mowgli’s ultimate acceptance of a domestic life is a sort of victory for the panther dad.

Of course, The Jungle Book is full of potential virtues for children to glean, like being true to what you are or getting a wife “who stays in the home” or whatever. But the most telling image in the movie is the hug shared by Baloo and Bagheera as they walk away from Mowgli. Bagheera’s acceptance of Baloo and rejection of Shere Khan feels like a statement from the filmmakers, indicating that regardless of how the youth turn out, they’d better not succumb to The Man.

The dad literally walks off arm-in-arm with the hippie in this movie.

This direct politicking almost feels out of place in a movie by The Disney Company, but it coheres when considering that Walt Disney himself was on his deathbed as this movie was made. While surely not a bitter sentiment towards Uncle Walt, the movie argues for kicking out the old rulers and forging ahead in a new way.       It’s important to recognize that all this ideology likely whizzes over the heads of children. This is still a movie made for them, but it’s remarkable how much timely, adult commentary is contained within.

It’s telling that Mowgli is pulled between worlds so much; this is a movie concerning the filmmaker’s anxieties about the future, so naturally the kid (the future itself) becomes a ball to be volleyed around. Even with these competing goals, this text is rich with a morality that, while not universal, offers multiple avenues to a happy, virtuous life — which is a more nuanced and helpful moral than The Disney Company usually offers anyway.

Week 1: Introduction to Children and Media

There's an easy assumption to be made about Son of Rambow (2007), an assumption that would very easily be made by my mother — that regardless of the outcome or implications of the characters' journeys, they still shouldn't have been watching violent movies. This sort of rhetoric may be true on principle, as our society values the protection of children in the Victorian sort of way we discussed in class, but it fundamentally misunderstands the way that real children operate. Son of Rambow has an innate understanding of how the mind of a child works, not only in the realm of imagination, but also in how they desire to explore the real world.

         It’s telling that Son of Rambow is the first movie we viewed for this class, because it surely reflects many of our experiences as people who have been inflicted with the movie disease. My childhood was not dissimilar to Lee Carter’s, growing up in an irreligious household in a deeply faithful town. My friends were very much like Will, and for better or worse, my parents’ VHS collection served as a gateway for them to catch the same bug that I have. Children identify with movies in a remarkable way, particularly once they discover their own powers of creation. Not only that, but the media they consume can influence them for the remainder of their lives.

         As an example, one of my earliest memories is the 1929 Silly Symphony called The Skeleton Dance.

I had seen other Disney cartoons before, but this particular cartoon stuck with me in a profound way. Two moments really stand out — the first is a shot where a skeleton charges towards the ‘camera’ and dances away, chomping his teeth; the second and most terrifying is when the four skeletons combine into a horse-like monster and run back to the grave. That macabre imagery and quiet terror is something that I chased (unconsciously so) throughout my adolescence, and eventually led me to this department.

         This experience is not unlike that of Mark Borchardt, the subject of the 1999 documentary American Movie. In the film, Mark is an unemployed near-alcoholic still living with his parents — but he dreams of making a feature film. It becomes clear that his ambitions are deep-rooted in the same kind of child psychology that affects the boys in Son of Rambow and still affects me. But those goals are seemingly destructive and risk his own well-being. It calls into question the nature of our childhood goals, and the way they must change as we grow and mature(?). Dean Duncan often complains about filmmakers who never grow up and whose names rhyme with Blentin Blarantino, but those same complaints would likely not be leveled at a child exploring the possibilities of the craft. 
         We're affected by the things we see as kids — they stick with us, haunt us, drive us. Regardless of whether the content is violent or innocent, it still colors our adult existence. So how do we draw figurative lines between childhood and adulthood, and when we must adapt to our changing positions in life? How do we retain childlike ideas while not succumbing to childishness? There must be some kind of balance between a Mark Borchardt and a Lee Carter, and I suppose part of this semester will be figuring out how to delicately walk that line.