The right movie for your child
Robbie Collin offers a guide to the unexpected cinematic tastes of the YouTube generation.
Is this a scary film?’’ my three-yearold son asked me the other morning, holding up a copy of Chinatown he’d found in the spare bedroom. ‘‘Yes, very scary,’’ I said in a low voice. He immediately brightened. ‘‘Is there a whale in it?’’ ‘‘No,’’ I said. ‘‘There isn’t a whale in it.’’ ‘‘Oh. Is there a dragon in it?’’
‘‘No, there isn’t a dragon in it either.’’ ‘‘Oh.’’ The brightness had faded. ‘‘Well, what’s so scary about it then?’’
Not much fancying explaining existential torpor, fathomless civic corruption and, well, the rest of it to a 3-year-old, I changed the subject. But I was impressed by his curiosity.
Clean-cut cases like this one aside, gauging which films are right for children can be a tricky business, in terms of both suitability and taste. From heart-rending personal experience, I know kids can flee the room after mere seconds into a paternal favourite like, say, Albert Lamorisse’s
The Red Balloon, claiming paralysing boredom, then stare entranced for the best part of an hour at an anonymous pair of hands cracking open Kinder eggs on YouTube.
Perhaps that’s why trustworthy film brands seem to count for more than ever: with Pixar, Aardman, DreamWorks and the Minions-riddled Illumination Entertainment, you know at least roughly what you’re going to get. But it also means that when a great children’s film comes along that doesn’t fit into a familiar comfort zone, we often don’t quite know what to do with it.
In recent years, movies like Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and JA Bayona’s A
Monster Calls have been mesmerisingly beautiful, subtly crafted and performed, sophisticated tales for younger viewers as well as older ones.
But British Film Institute senior curator Danny Leigh says while ‘‘it’s a beautiful idea that viewers of every age can be brought together by the same visual narrative, but in practice that’s often not how it works.
‘‘For example, take The Red Balloon: it’s a classic in the canon of children’s cinema, but if you show a contemporary audience of kids a small child following a balloon through the streets of Paris, they will not necessarily take to it in the same way as adults who saw it as children did.’’
This makes me feel a little better about my own boy’s lack of interest in the Lamorisse film, but does it mean children today simply don’t have the capacity to soak up a venerable classic? Far from it, says Leigh. ‘‘The truth is, the average 8- or 9-year-old today has a more sophisticated understanding of the moving image than we do. In our childhoods we were engaged with moving images when we watched TV; now it’s everywhere. If you’re 8 or 9, the moving image is your primary language.’’
Leigh was the founding programme manager of the educational charity that became Into Film, which runs school film clubs and cinema screenings for children aged 5-19 throughout Britain, so he knows his stuff. . In the charity’s early days, he quickly noticed that any title more than three or four years old was approached by young audiences as an ‘‘old film’’ – even something as recent as Shrek (2001).
‘‘If you’re 8 or 9, any film that was made more than 10 years ago is prehistoric,’’ he says. But Leigh discovered an unforeseen upside: children would engage with almost 100-year-old films just as enthusiastically as those from a decade ago. And black-and-white comedies – with Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers – were enormous hits.
‘‘You would think the children would have seen them as impossibly old and creaky,’’ he says. ‘‘But after a two-minute period where they were baffled and slightly hostile, a house would fall on Buster Keaton, or Harpo Marx would pull a face, and you’d see this beautiful scene unfold, with laughter spreading around the room at something that was made in 1928.’’
Into Film’s annual festival for young cinemagoers puts these kind of findings into practice. The 2017 edition, which staged free screenings and events at
600-plus venues around the UK last November, opened with Paddington 2 and closed with Pixar’s Coco, but also featured grown-up titles such as The
Florida Project, and classics including Hitchcock’s Rear Window. In fact, the charity often struggles to persuade film companies that their latest releases are child-friendly – not least because marketing them as such can be an easy way to turn off adult audiences.
‘‘We’ve often seen films and wanted to go big on them, and heard ‘I don’t think this is necessarily one for you’,’’ Into Film’s Sarah Wilby says. ‘‘We’ve had to argue the case that we do know what our young audiences can manage. Some distributors recognise the sophistication of the young audience – particularly secondary school-age children – while others play it a lot safer than they should.’’
I asked Into Film’s team of curators which recent titles had struck a particular chord with younger viewers. Three of the top four were period dramas marketed to adults – Their
Finest, Suffragette and Journey’s End – while the fourth was a South African film called Felix, a comic drama about a boy from a poor township who wins a scholarship to study music at a private school.
For Leigh, the adult reticence often comes from a good place. ‘‘We are so nervous about what kids can handle in terms of sex, violence, bad language and bad examples that we push them downwards,’’ he says. ‘‘But there are all kinds of stories they’ll engage with, given the chance. Isle of Dogs [the new Wes Anderson stop-motion animation] seems like an obvious film to screen to
12- and 13-year-olds, not least because it will also play to their parents and hip older brother or sister. But it’s not a family film in that sugary, slightly chore-like sense.’’
Leigh believes something revolutionary is afoot.
‘‘Particularly with YouTube, some of the materials kids are drawn to can feel apocalyptic to parents, because they seem so meaningless,’’ he says. ‘‘But in a sense, things are coming full circle. You can look at the history of cinema as the taming of the moving image – directors harnessed it to tell stories. But now kids watch things with no story at all, where the moving image is a pleasure and a positive force in and of itself. So the real conundrum is what the films will look like that are made by this coming generation – the ones who’ve grown up watching Kinder egg unwrapping videos.’’
‘‘The truth is, the average 8- or 9-yearold today has a more sophisticated understanding of the moving image than we do. In our childhoods we were engaged with moving images when we watched TV; now it’s everywhere. If you’re 8 or 9, the moving image is your primary language.’’
●➤ The results might make The Red Balloon look like child’s play.
– The Daily Telegraph