Abstract
With the intention of making this volume useful and accessible to all readers, the introduction provides a comprehensive summary of the complexities, tensions, and conflicting impulses of children’s film, including the problem of defining the genre, the impact of technological evolution and the digital divide, issues of censorship and ratings systems, screen time, and the place of children’s film in the larger realm of children’s literature and children’s literacy practices. This chapter also introduces the book’s major themes, including the function of adaptation in children’s film, theories of childhood, the use of children’s film to explore social issues and questions of identity, and the role of film in education.
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Notes
- 1.
Film and television are media genres. Technically, “children’s” film and television are sub-genres. However, given that the entirety of this volume is devoted to these “sub” genres and many further distinctions within them (by age demographic, such as the “teen film,” or of genre such as “horror,” or “documentary”), the endless subgroupings become unwieldy. Therefore, this volume elevates children’s film and children’s television to media genre status, and follows film and literary criticism in treating as genres categories that are further refined, such as the “teen high-school Cinderella-story romcom” or the “preschool, animated, anthropomorphic animal television series.”
- 2.
As Claudia Nelson (2006) writes regarding children’s metafiction (226).
- 3.
Christina Petersen (2011) calls this position “youth spectatorship” which refers “not only to the adolescent moviegoer but also to a structure of looking and feeling constructed by the formal organization of the youth film accessible to the filmgoer of all ages.”
- 4.
Used in passing, for example, in the editors’ introduction to Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media (2014, 1).
- 5.
- 6.
Filipa Antunes (2017) argues that children’s demographics are becoming increasingly segmented into smaller slivers.
- 7.
These are: babies and where they come from, genetic contributions, prenatal and natal experiences, size, growth, sex and gender distinctions, maturation, cognition, language, dependence, and sexual immaturity (Davies 2010, 9–13).
- 8.
As Neil Sinyard writes in Children in the Movies (1992): “if the attitude to children, in art and life, reflects the health or sickness of civilization, what do such films reveal about our condition?” (15).
- 9.
This event, in which ten Lumière brothers’ short films were viewed projected on a screen in a public space (the Salon Indien, in the basement of the Grand Café) by a paying audience, is widely cited in film studies as the birth of commercial cinema.
- 10.
The MPAA actively promotes censorship in some ways, by requiring cuts to certain action or language in a film in order to secure a rating. While it is possible to appeal the MPAA rating—and to win such appeals—the only alternative in many cases is instead to release the film “unrated,” which affects distribution options and box office earnings.
- 11.
With the advent of DVDs, the associated technology was ClearPlay, which enables spectators to alter content based on preset filters for at-home viewing. The Family Movie Act of 2004 legalized this selective filtering (essentially altering the film from its release version). Currently, ClearPlay also allows selected films to be streamed via Amazon with this filtering in place as well.
- 12.
However, as Amy Jordan (2008) reports, regulations are sometimes of limited use. She notes that fewer than 10% of parents polled by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in the year after V-chip technology was put into use consistently used the device (245). Respondents said it was difficult to locate and confusing to program. She further reports research by the Kaiser Family Foundation noting that a decade after the television ratings system was introduced “only 11 percent of parents know that ‘FV’ is an indicator of violent content in children’s programming” (Victoria Rideout, “Parents, Children, and Media,” Publication 7638, June 2007, p. 8, quoted in Jordan 245).
- 13.
Noel Brown and Bruce Babington (2015) provides a helpful summary of such diversity in Family Films in Global Cinema (5–6).
- 14.
Ginsberg v. New York (390 US 629, 1968) asserted the rights of states to define obscene material for minors in far-reaching ways, citing the right and responsibility of the state in “protecting the welfare of children” and “safeguarding them from abuses.” A similar impetus to bypass government regulation is attributed to the formation of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) from within the industry in 1913 to govern the cinema licenses required of the 1909 Cinematograph Act (see Staples 1997, 10).
- 15.
Antunes (2017) points out in addition that “the rating system has never had any concise criteria for its classifications; instead, the ratings are bound to external factors such as society, culture, economy, and the industry” (28).
- 16.
See also Staples (1997, 11–12).
- 17.
As Patti Valkenburg (2004) points out, this model of the empowered child or savvy kid is savvily coopted by “commercial and marketing circles” (7).
- 18.
See Nat Brandt (2003), Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press).
- 19.
Yet in further illustration of the way in which medical and moral anxieties intertwine, the Act extended its reach to include threats to moral safety as well (Bignall 2002, 132).
- 20.
From National Council for Public Morality, The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities (London: Williams & Norgate, 1917), cited in Staples (1997): 13–17.
- 21.
Matrix argues instead for the active model of spectatorship: “Far from being passive couch potatoes, however, binge viewers are actively engaged in content discovery and curation, configuring highly customized television programming, and ushering in a productively disruptive transformation in viewer-program relations” (2014, 133).
- 22.
The Act was followed in 1996 by the “three hour rule,” a guideline set by the FCC to air at least three hours of E/I programming a week, as the FCC found networks were underperforming their mandate. Some were airing as little as half an hour a week and were labeling entertainment programs (like The Jetsons and Leave it to Beaver) as “educational.” In addition, networks were found to be airing “educational” content at hours when children were unlikely to be viewing it (Heintz and Glaubke 2011, 72, citing The Center for Media Education 1997).
- 23.
The rules developed by Christina Romano Glaubke and Patti Miller (2008) as recommendations for parents and caregivers, specifically in support of “creating a healthy multicultural media environment for children” (435).
- 24.
This is also the case in recent works such as Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction (Hintz and Tribunella 2013) which includes sections on film within each chapter, even though the title is silent on the fact.
- 25.
See Hermansson (2019) for a fuller analysis of the pedagogical roles of screen adaptations of literature for children and youth and of the consequences for adaptation (such as fidelity) this context generates. See also Deborah Cartmell (2007), “Adapting Children’s Literature” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 167–80).
- 26.
This is also the title of Parry’s dissertation: Movies Teach Movies: Exploring What Children Learn about Narrative from Children’s Films (2011, University of Sheffield).
- 27.
Quoted in Valkenburg (2004, 5).
- 28.
A courgette is also known as a zucchini.
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Hermansson, C., Zepernick, J. (2019). Children’s Film and Television: Contexts and New Directions. In: Hermansson, C., Zepernick, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Children's Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17620-4_1
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