Doing it for the Kids
Jun 28 '02
The Bottom Line The few children's films that break the tendency towards blandness.
The problem with 'family' or 'children's' films is that they tend to be shockingly bad. Along with children's television, they tend to be the domain of people who are either marking time until they can make a 'real' film, or are just not good enough to be trusted with a decent budget. The actors know that the drama is going to be fairly inconsequential, and they are annoyed at the fact that the useless child stars' faces are going to be central on the posters. The crew know that their work is unlikely to be scrutinised by the Academy, and boom microphones, continuity errors and terrible lighting all spread like a rash.
The problem is that people are basically afraid to give children decent entertainment. These days, even films that are considered too suspenseful tend to be given a 12 rating in the UK. It doesn't take a genius to work out that it follows that any suspense in a child's film must therefore be 'not very suspenseful', or 'poorly directed'. My personal favourite film ever Pierrot le Fou was restricted to people aged over 18 on its initial release. In a Cahiers du Cinema interview, the magazine mused that children would love the colourful quirkiness of the film. Jean-Luc Godard agreed, but then revealed that his film had been censored due to its 'intellectual anarchism'. In other words, the censors saw fit to dictate what political material children should have access to. I'm sure I don't need to draw you a picture of how this is a bad thing, especially in this day and age when politicians are constantly moaning about apathy towards democracy in the young. When you deny children the access to political thought, especially radical political thought, which is where the interesting stuff is, they are not going to see the point of participating in politics in later life.
So, are children's films really a non-stop barrage of drivel? Yes. But occasionally a film comes along that was made to enrich everyone, and the censors can't find an excuse to restrict people's enjoyment. It's more a list of proper films that children will enjoy, and that The Man will graciously allow them to watch. This is the hardest list I've ever had to draw up, but here goes in no particular order...
1) Spy Kids. Directed by Robert Rodriguez and starring Antonio Banderas, Alan Cumming and the curiously omnipresent Tony Shalhoub, this film is a fantastic surrealist romp by a seasoned film-maker. Achingly cine-literate, it is piled high with references to Rodriguez's previous films, The Matrix, Star Wars and Edward Scissorhands. Of course it's utterly silly, it hardly needs mentioning that bright yellow spy submarines are not exactly discreet, but it glories in its absurdity. When the action moves entirely to Floop's twisted castle, children's imaginations are ensnared utterly. The special effects are often patchy, and this just adds to its charm (I am delighted to note a recent return to men in monster costumes just when the cinematic dead end of CGI fascism looked like destroying everything). The ending is a bit trite for anyone over the age of ten, but Alan Cumming's mesmerising performance keeps everyone's attention throughout.
2) Harry Potter. I'm deeply cynical about the whole Potter phenomenon. But the film definitely did children's cinema a great service by having a couple of soil-your-pants tense moments. As a child I thrived on being scared witless by TV, yet this is now somehow regarded as a BAD THING. The Harry Potter film proved conclusively that kids like to have their bravery challenged. A healthy sense of terror is a sign of an active imagination. How anyone can be expected to appreciate the kind of child's drama where the worst the villain is going to get is a custard pie in the face is beyond me. That dead unicorn failed to spark off a rash of impressionable children gutting donkeys (or whatever), and hopefully it will lead to more moments of toddler terror. Whatever the faults of the film, and there were many, its tactic of juxtaposing serious super-cool actors with the child stars was also solid. Just take a look at how often Alan Rickman appears in the same shot as one of the children and you'll see what I mean. Fun for all the family.
3) Jurassic Park. I think you can see where I'm going with this list. I want to warp your children's minds by scaring them half to death and then warping them with blatantly drug-inspired imagery. Spielberg's film, based on Chrichton's novel and starring the world's most mobile accent in the mouth of Richard Attenborough, was great. The cry at school was: you see people get eaten and everything! After a couple of hours of fairly simple but extremely clever adventure cinema, the final raptor attack pins you to your seat for however long it lasts. Almost unbearably tense, no matter how old you are, Spielberg remembers to put his master director's hat on for one of the last times (Minority Report opens here next week, how I am hoping) for some real terror (the sequence where the girl is trying to get the oven closed to hide from the raptor is awesome). The structure is impeccable, with the action really kicking in about an hour in, just as the audience is PRAYING for the twee theme park to go belly up. We are complicit in the mayhem, because we WANTED to see it. And we are not disappointed.
4) The Lion King. It is a myth that children like Disney cartoons. Parents like Disney cartoons. They think their children ought to like Disney cartoons, and so they drag them along for another ninety minutes of singalongadull from animators that can't draw people. When a Disney cartoon is actually good, as this one was, parents drag their kids from the screen and go home in a huff. Animals eating each other? Disgusting! Yeah, nature red in tooth and claw! Far more alarming to me were the shots of randy lions during Can You Feel the Love Tonight. And what about the giant phallus that mystic monkey was waving around? The stampede scene is another in a long line which some would say are too good for children. I say they're perfect for children, and they're the sort of thing children should be watching to spark a lifelong passion for cinema, and the imagination in general. Children are just like adults in that their entertainment needs to provoke them, to challenge them. If they can't watch a few lions getting trampled to death, they'll only go and buy some of that nasty cop-killing rap music that a certain proportion of this site objects to so strongly.
5) Shrek. And this is the anti-Disney. This film is massively clever in that it validates its intensely silly fantasy world by putting down another fantasy world. The jokes at the expense of Disney trick us into accepting the reality of Shrek's world without protest. It's a neat trick. This is the first film on my list truly representative of modern cinema, with its soundtrack made up of carefully-selected pop hits. However, adding the fantastically miserable Eels to the soundtrack of a kid's film is a stroke of perverse genius. The film contains much which is far too clever for children, requiring a certain amount of maturity and breadth of knowledge of popular culture. However, just because they won't necessarily get the jokes is no reason to leave them out. It just means that they will continue to enjoy the film even more as the years roll by. Slapstick contrasts with fantastic verbal wit in one of the best films of last summer.
6) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Oh my. What a film. I must pause as a hamster prepares to run over the keyboard. Gene Wilder excels as a faintly manic Willy Wonka, owner of the world's most successful confectionery empire. The film is so blatantly drugged-up I'm surprised it doesn't star Ewan MacGregor (Come on, the main character's called Charlie). The film takes the basic storybook realist fairytale of Roald Dahl's novel and adds such delights as the acid trip boat ride (Wonka screaming at back-projected insects while coloured lights strobe all over the place until your brain leaks out of your ears). The universal appeal of the film can be summed up by the bank holiday afternoon my friends and I spent identifying all the dodgy drug subtexts and double-entendres. And yet, it's still a fantastically visual film which captures the imagination of children perfectly.
9) The Princess Bride. Is there anyone who doesn't love this masterful fairy-tale? The ill grandson (and Columbo) start is unpromising, but the central story is remarkable for the straight bat with which it presents a fairy-tale. Although frequently camp and silly, a traditional fairy tale is presented in a manner utterly different from Shrek with no hint of tongue-in-cheek knowing ironic post-modernist self-referential commentary and stuff. Gosh, I don't know what else to say, it's great.
8) Les Quatre-Cent Coups. It bears mentioning, having been so dismissive of family films in my introduction, that one of the most influential films of all time anywhere stars and centres around children. While it's basically a thinly-disguised account of director Francois Truffaut's formative years, the first installment of the Antoine Doinel cycle, which won various awards and paved the way for the rest of the French New Wave, is a frank account of growing up told by a survivor of the process. Hugh Grant reminded us a few months back in About A Boy that we were all kids once, and it's absurd that so many of us forget how to entertain kids. Truffaut's bittersweet account of childhood is note-perfect, even forty-five years down the line. Jean-Pierre Leaud, the young star of the film, proceeded to be a prominent player in New Wave films, starring in further Truffaut films and Masculin/Feminin, taking production roles in Pierrot le Fou and major supporting parts in Weekend. And then he cropped up earlier in the year as a middle-aged washout in Le Pornographe. Now there was a reminder of the ephemeral nature of youth that I really didn't need. Still, while you'll be lucky to find a child who'll sit through a hundred minutes of black and white subtitles, this is a masterful film.
9)Lord of the Rings. I wouldn't dream of suggesting any dubious dealing here, but how on earth did this film get a family certificate in the current climate? Never mind, it is great. I might come across as a rampant cinephile, but I do like to read a bit as well, and it's awesome that such a massively successful film is pointing the way to one of the most important books of the last century. It's been lovely at the cinema I work at, listening to children showing off that they 'know what's going to happen' in the next film because they've read the whole trilogy. On top of that, the film is a full-on action adventure masterpiece, with the impossibly gruff Sean Bean reprising his battle-hardened warrior routine on the big screen with unbelievable panache. Harry Potter re-introduced scary bits to family films which had been alarmingly interest-free for several years. Then Fellowship of the Ring re-introduced terror, aggression, pain, death and, best of all, the use of authentic cinematic language.
That's about all from me, I'm afraid, although I shall be adding some further titles if I can think of any. Show these films to your children. They might have their heads screwed up by a few of them, but they'll have richer minds as a result. But, at the end of the day, take a look at a few of those 'grown-up' films on your shelf. Do you really want to deny your children the opportunity of seeing a decent film just because it contains a few words that they hear every day at school? Or because they might have a few nightmares afterwards? Or because they might turn round and say: 'Mummy/Daddy, what are they DOING?' Think about it.
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Epinions.com ID:
ALawston
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Location: London
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Send Away the Tigers
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