Kids are never scarred by love
Ask anyone my age what film death ruined their childhood and I bet it’s Artax that comes to mind. Artax was a horse, of course, and his demise in The Neverending Story made the film a one-way trip to trauma land for the kids who witnessed it.
Although we were forever scarred when Artax sank into the swamp of sadness, we were only one of many generations traumatised by moviemakers’ determination to make us cry.
The onscreen death of Bambi’s mother first upset children in 1942, while the grim fate of stray dog Old Yeller was a seminal trauma for the kids of the 50s and 60s. Watership Down and Charlotte’s Web ruined little psyches in the 70s; ET suffered painfully before the eyes of 80s kids; and the Lion King killed off both Mufasa and many an innocent childhood in the 90s.
More modern children have had to contend with weepers such as Marley & Me, Bridge To Terabithia and my own personal howler, Nanny McPhee, which doesn’t actually kill anyone off but never fails to make me bawl.
But while plonking kids in front of movies designed to make them sad appears to be perfectly acceptable, some adults have now taken aim at a film that does the opposite. The pearl-clutchers have somehow got it into their heads that Lightyear, the new Disney/Pixar movie, is posing real danger to impressionable youngsters by, well, I’m not too sure.
The scene that’s got them all hot and flustered features a kiss between two women characters, something its critics believe is both one more step in society’s moral decline and something children should be shielded from.
Although the same-sex kiss is a first for Disney, we should be a little hesitant with our praise as it only made the final cut after employees shamed the company into keeping it in. Anyway, this brief liplocking between a cartoon lesbian couple has led to calls for the movie to be either banned or censored. And, incredibly, that’s actually happened.
More than a dozen countries have done so, citing reasons that really just boil down to homophobia. Malaysia has refused to screen it because of its depiction of ‘‘homosexual or unnatural sex’’ and Singapore has set a minimum age rating of 16.
The movie was initially approved for release in the United Arab Emirates, though that permission was quickly revoked after social media outrage. Meanwhile, Indonesia has stopped short of a ban but has suggested the owner of the movie consider its audience in a country where ‘‘an LGBT kissing scene is still considered sensitive’’.
In the US, of course, the movie has been seized upon by conservatives barking about the fantastical ‘‘gay agenda’’ and warning of ‘‘grooming’’. One Oklahoma cinema even posted a sign warning parents of the danger their children were in and assuring them the theatre would do all it could to fast-forward through the scene. ‘‘But it might not be exact,’’ the sign read. ‘‘We apologise for any inconvenience this late discovery of this scene causes.’’
As it happened, the theatre ultimately took the sign down and never followed through with its promise/threat and there have been no reports of damage to children.
Because that’s it in a nutshell: kids will never be traumatised or upset by depictions of love; it’s the scenes of loss and despair that stay with us forever.
And just a few days ago a whole new generation of children watched plenty of those scenes as women’s rights in the US took yet another appalling step backwards.
Shame on you, America.