The Palgrave Handbook of Children's Film and Television

Casie Hermansson, Janet Zepernick, Casie Hermansson, Janet Zepernick

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030176204
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Darstellende Kunst

This volume explores film and television for children and youth. While children's film and television vary in form and content from country to country, their youth audience, ranging from infants to "screenagers", is the defining feature of the genre and is written into the DNA of the medium itself. This collection offers a contemporary analysis of film and television designed for this important audience, with particular attention to new directions evident in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With examples drawn from Iran, China, Korea, India, Israel, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and France, as well as from the United States and the United Kingdom, contributors address a variety of issues ranging from content to production, distribution, marketing, and the use of film, both as object and medium, in education. Through a diverse consideration of media for young infants up to young adults, this volume reveals the newest trends in children's film and television and its role as both a source of entertainment and pedagogy.

© The Author(s) 2019

Casie Hermansson and Janet Zepernick (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Children's Film and Televisionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17620-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Children’s Film and Television: Contexts and New Directions

Casie Hermansson¹ and Janet Zepernick¹

(1)

Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, KS, USA

Casie Hermansson (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Janet Zepernick

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Perhaps no other media genre¹ is debated as keenly nor by so many varied and competing stakeholders as those designated “for children.” Children’s film and children’s television are distinct from one another but share the following features and fortunes. Both

• are defined by their audience demographic (youth, variously aged from birth to late teens)
• are for youth and frequently about youth but are seldom produced and often not procured by youth
• imagine, construct, and in some ways prescribe the normative youth audiences they presuppose and are thus vehicles for enculturation
• enculturate childhood differently in different times and places
• are constantly evolving in concert with changing technologies of production and spectatorship
• typically aim to entertain their youth audiences
• often (but not always) include an overt or implicit pedagogic aim
• have been the focus of successive waves of moral panic, whose particulars vary
• are accordingly often subject to more censorship and regulation than other media
• are situated and studied in relation to a variety of overlapping fields, including childhood studies (in disciplines such as psychology, sociology, history, cultural studies, gender studies) and media and communication studies and approaches (film studies, television studies, literary studies; literacy studies, adaptation studies; new media studies; and reception, spectator, and fan studies)
• frequently adopt certain themes, protagonists, styles, sub-genres, and treatments in greater concentrations and in greater degrees than media not specifically designated for a youth demographic
• are nevertheless unlimited in themes, protagonists, styles, sub-genres, and treatments
• are engaged in the same multimedia, cross-platform convergences as media “for adults”
• employ complex and sophisticated arrays of codes and conventions
• frequently presuppose an equally complex and sophisticated array of hypermediated viewers and reception practices
• may present “empowering” or “controlling” content
• variously presuppose active “users” or passive “consumers”
• are increasingly made by fewer and fewer transnational, multimedia conglomerates
• may be received critically by a media-literate youth demographic, viewing “against the grain”
• are increasingly accessed in the home, on mobile personal devices, for increasing numbers of hours, and on-demand
• are experiencing increasing convergence in content creators, delivery providers and methods, means of access, and production standards.

Such lists could run much longer, but these points indicate some of the many overlapping and often contradictory contexts for children’s television and film. Only one thing is certain: children’s film and children’s television defy limited definition.

The task of developing a Handbook of Children’s Film and Television that speaks to these and numerous other variables and contradictions is daunting. But a good starting point would be the nearly unanimous response we heard from the authors contributing to this volume, which can be summarized as “this is long overdue!” The fact that children’s genres must battle longer and harder for academic legitimacy and coverage is by now a truism. But just as children’s literature rose first to popular prominence, then met limited academic acceptance, and finally reached full academic legitimacy, so now children’s film, television, and new- and multimedia genres are engaged in a similar evolution. We are perhaps therefore overly pleased with ourselves to bring you this book because its very existence in the Palgrave Handbook series—as well as the recent Routledge International Handbook of Children, Adolescents and Media (2013) and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film, both of which we share some contributors with—signals the relatively new and novel status of academic mainstream for children’s film and television. Perhaps the battle for legitimacy of “juvenile” genres in general is drawing to a well-fought close? But it is not our intention to congratulate ourselves and our authors further here. Instead, this chapter outlines several key critical contexts for the ensuing chapters on children’s film and children’s television, and the new directions currently exhibited by these media in the twenty-first century—the overall theme of this volume and what distinguishes it from the two volumes mentioned above.

Scope

Our guiding thematic focus is “new directions” in children’s film and television. Many, but not all, of our examples hail from the present century, but our reach extends some decades into the twentieth century as well, since most “new directions” in both media and its scholarship are clearly derived from previous trails. Despite the long global shadow cast by Hollywood, we have attempted to include a broad spectrum of film and television examples reflecting various national perspectives that are international in impact and relevance (Iranian, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Israeli, Eastern European, French, and others), as well as new directions in “Anglo” children’s film and television from countries such as New Zealand, Australia, the USA, the UK, and Canada. Additionally, we have aimed to draw together in this volume a diversity of approaches, from scholars of pedagogy and teachers of youth to media and communication studies, adaptation studies, and English literature programs. Moreover, children’s media do not limit themselves to select topics. It will likely surprise no one familiar with children’s film or television that we have a chapter on, for instance, children’s films based on the experience of Korean “comfort women,” often young girls, in fact, forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. Film and television employ a full range of genres (horror, comedy, drama, fantasy, science fiction, romance, Western, dystopia, mystery, and so on) and styles (live action, green- and blue-screened, animated, motion-captured, anime, rotoscoped, claymation, hand drawn or painted, and so on). It may be that children’s film and television include proportionally more animated works than film and television as a whole, just as it is probable that children’s film and television are more likely to feature anthropomorphic animals (often animated for obvious reasons), but animated works by no means dominate this collection. The presence or absence of traits that define children’s film and television (as against film and television for adults) is a question of degree rather than one of kind.²

That said, children’s film and television often feature various preoccupations in greater numbers or to a greater degree than media not oriented to a child audience. These may include, for example, a coming of age theme; a greater use of fantasy; the role reversal plot (Sinyard 1992, 21); the presence or use of fairy tales; and the presence or use of other intertexts from children’s literature and other children’s media. Ian Wojcik-Andrews adds the disruption-resolution pattern (7); journeys (9); moments of self-awareness or self-discovery that lead to moments of choice (9); the presence of an alternative world (10); a focus on the body, including body-switching (10); and metafilmicity (11). There are many more as well, as a study by Heasley and others (2018) on the themes of top-grossing children’s films (2005–2015) indicates. A number of preoccupations of children’s media are reflected in this volume and are likely not “new” in essence, even if the iterations are contemporary and novel.

In focusing on new directions in children’s film and television, the contributions in this volume overlap with the recent collection Children’s Film in the Digital Age: Essays on Audience, Adaptation and Consumer Culture (2015), edited by Karin and Stan Beeler. That collection, focused on children’s film and largely absent children’s television, includes both animated and live-action films, particularly those released after 2000 as DVD, Blu-ray, or digital copy. We see this volume, with its “new directions” theme, as a continuation and expansion of their project: “to bring communities of scholars together to engage in the discussion of children’s film and their roles within the film and as viewers of film and as participants in transmedia culture” (2).

Problems of Definition

As has been noted, issues of definition present a paradox for the study of children’s film and television. How is it possible, except in the most technical sense, to group together films such as the animated children’s horror ParaNorman (2012), the blockbuster Percy Jackson & the Olympians series of film adaptations (2010–2013), and the indie film Moonrise Kingdom (2012) in the same catchall genre? Or Nickelodeon’s animated preschool and younger child television series Dora the Explorer (2000–2014), the tween Netflix adaptation series Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017–), and their even darker teen series Stranger Things (2016–), in the same category: “children’s television”? And American media influence on global media notwithstanding, what happens to definitions of children’s film and television when more inclusive and diverse lenses are used to view the increasingly internationalized world of children’s screen media? Any definition of children’s film based on American or British examples and scholarship is likely to be challenged by an encounter with Stanley ka Dabba , a children’s film from India, in which a child is bullied by his school teacher due to his caste status (see Devika Mehra, this volume). As Ian Wojcik-Andrews (2000) says, representatively: “Def...