Family Films in Global Cinema: The World Beyond Disney 9780755694884

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Illustrations

0.1 Our Gang’s children as group protagonist 0.2 The solitary child. The transcendental ending of The Red Balloon 1.1 Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) with friend and colleague in Babe 1.2 Babe surveys Pig in the City’s Metropolis 2.1 In the future world of 2001: A Space Odyssey, parents going into space can stay in touch with their children 2.2 The StarChild has the Earth at its feet and its future is wide open 3.1 Director Mel Stuart posing with his cast of Oompa-Loompas on the set of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory 3.2 An unhinged Wonka (Gene Wilder), during the nightmare boat ride in the S.S. Wonkatania 4.1 Producer Tim Burton posing with the models of the Pumpkin King and Sally 4.2 Jack recovers his ‘true’ identity of the Pumpkin King after being shot from the skies in his ‘Sandy Claws’ persona 5.1 Kala-Nag gently places Toomai (Sabu) on his back in Elephant Boy 5.2 Sabu as Mowgli in Korda’s Technicolor production of The Jungle Book) 6.1 Husband–Father (William Powell) and Wife–Mother (Irene Dunne) in Life with Father 6.2 Mama (Irene Dunne) oversees the family finances in I Remember Mama 7.1 The central family, happily reunited at the climax of The Railway Children 7.2 The central child figure (Scott Jacoby) in a rare joyful moment with Roger (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and Chris (Britt Ekland) in Baxter!

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Daniel (Robin Williams) spontaneously plays puppeteer and transforms the ‘dry’ dinosaur show, a symbol for reinvigorating ‘extinct’ traditional father roles Night at the Museum’s Larry (Ben Stiller) expresses anxiety about paternal obsolescence through night play with a dinosaur-turned-pet ‘Moor’ (Alfred Müller) discussing the role of workers with neighbourhood children during a stroll through downtown London Janni (Bettina Hohensee) learning her lines as the ‘Prince’ for the film within the film in The Coward The three heroes – Dobrynia Nikitych, Ilia Muromets and Alesha Popovych – from the film Tri Bogatyria i Samakhanskaia Tsaritsa The evil enemy Tugarin Zmei (Tugarin the Dragon) The modern, urban Indian nuclear-style family unit in Masoom Jadu, the benign, very Hollywood-esque ExtraTerrestrial of Koi...Mil Gaya Nutty Boy (Samuel Costa) engaged in outdoor play Nutty Boy and his friends playing in the cave, Nutty Boy 2’s cinematic non-space Seita and Setsuko, the child protagonists/victims of Grave of the Fireflies The steampunk-inspired iconography of Howl’s Moving Castle The destruction of the Hometree in Avatar The destructive capabilities of the Driller in Transformers: Dark of the Moon

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Contributors

Holly Blackford is Professor of English at Rutgers UniversityCamden, where she teaches and publishes criticism on American and children’s literature. Her books include Out of this World: Why Literature Matters to Girls (2004), Mockingbird Passing: Closeted Traditions and Sexual Curiosities in Harper Lee’s Novel (2011), The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature (2012) and edited volume 100 Years of Anne with an ‘e’: The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables (2009). Benita Blessing is University Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy and Education at the University of Vienna. She has published and presented widely on European history, knowledge and information dissemination, childhood and educational studies, gender and media. She is the author of The Antifascist Classroom: Denazification in Soviet-occupied Germany, 1945–1949 (Palgrave, 2006), and is currently completing a book on East German children’s films. Alessandro Constantino Gamo is Professor of Brazilian Cinema and Documentary at Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar). He holds an MA and a PhD in Multimedia from Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), and a BA in Sociology from Universidade de São Paulo (USP). He is a member of SOCINE (Brazilian Society for Cinema and Audiovisual Studies) and has published a book on Jairo Ferreira’s film criticism. James M. Curtis is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi, pursuing a PhD in English Language and Literature (with emphasis on children’s literary and cultural studies). His primary focus is psychoanalytical and gender studies approaches to children’s literature and film. His most recent work, “We Have a Great Task Ahead of Us!”: Child-Hate in Roald Dahl’s The Witches’ was published in Children’s Literature in Education (2013). Natalie Kononenko is Professor and Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural ix

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Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of the awardwinning Ukrainian Minstrels: And the Blind Shall Sing (1998) and Slavic Folklore: A Handbook (2007). Her interests include folk narrative, digital humanities, folklore and film, and Diasporic communities. Kononenko has done fieldwork in Ukraine and Turkey and among the Ukrainian Diaspora in Canada and Kazakhstan. Peter Krämer is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of A Clockwork Orange (Palgrave, 2011), 2001: A Space Odyssey (BFI, 2010) and The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars (Wallflower Press, 2005), and the coeditor of Screen Acting (Routledge, 1999) and The Silent Cinema Reader (Routledge, 2004). He has published more than 60 essays in academic journals and edited collections. Mirian Ou has an MA in Image and Sound (Film and Media studies) from Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar), São Paulo, and a BA in Audiovisual (Cinema and Television) at Universidade de São Paulo (USP). She researches the production and the poetics of children’s films, in particular those made in Brazil. She is a member of SOCINE (Brazilian Society for Cinema and Audiovisual Studies) and has published extensively on the subject in various Brazilian journals. Fran Pheasant-Kelly is MA Course Leader, Reader in Film and Television Studies and Co-Director of the Film, Media, Discourse and Culture Research Centre at the University of Wolverhampton. Her research centres on fantasy, 9/11, abjection, and space, which form the basis for two books: Abject Spaces in American Cinema: Institutional Settings, Identity, and Psychoanalysis in Film (I.B.Tauris, 2012) and Fantasy Films Post 9/11 (Palgrave, 2013). Jeffrey Richards is Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University. His books include The Age of the Dream Palace (1984; reprinted 2010), Films and British National Identity (1997), Hollywood’s Ancient Worlds (2008) and Cinema and Radio in Britain and America 1920–60 (2010). Adrian Schober has a PhD in English from Monash University, Australia, and is the author of Possessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film: Contrary States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). He has published widely on the child figure in journals such as Literature/Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema and The Journal of Popular Culture. He also serves on

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the editorial board of Red Feather: An International Journal of Children’s Visual Culture. Tom Ue is Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow and Canadian Centennial Scholar at University College London, where he researches Shakespeare’s influence on the writing of Henry James, George Gissing and Oscar Wilde. He is editor of a World Film Locations: Cities of the Imagination collection on Toronto (Intellect, 2014), and is currently writing a monograph project on legal theory and the British novel in the nineteenth century.

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank Jeffrey Richards and Philippa Brewster for their initial enthusiasm for the project; Philippa for commissioning it and Anna Coatman for skilfully developing it for publication. We also greatly appreciate the hard work of the contributors in bringing this collection to fruition, and thank everyone else who has participated in some way in its completion.

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General Editor’s Introduction

It is the contention of editors Noel Brown and Bruce Babington that there is more to the children’s and family film than Disney. They convincingly demonstrate the truth of that contention in this original, wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection of essays examining the role of children’s and family films in a global context. The editors begin by carefully defining their terms and drawing a distinction between children’s films and family films, between commercially and non-commercially-produced films and between different modes of address to the audience. The book is divided into four sections. The first section looks at the overlap between the two genres and the multiple levels of engagement possible in such films. The essays in this section analyse Babe and other animal-related films, argue the case for regarding 2001: A Space Odyssey as a family film, examine the ‘dual address’ to adults and children in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and trace the process by which The Nightmare Before Christmas, initially regarded by Disney as too macabre for their normal release label, became a cult success with both adults and children. Section two on the child and the family has essays on the film career of Sabu and his roles as an orphan seeking his place in the world, the classical Hollywood family films of the 1930s and 1940s (notably Life with Father and I Remember Mama), the post-1970s Hollywood family films with their absent, divorced or infantilised fathers, and Lionel Jeffries’s attempts to revive the family and children’s film in 1970s Britain. The third section covers the relationship between cinema and the state in the production of children’s films in the German Democratic Republic, post-Soviet Russia and India. The final section focuses on the relationship of cinema and national identity, with essays on Brazilian films and the bid for the construction of national identity, the manipulation of time in Japanese animé films and the process of engaging and challenging adult and child

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audiences, and the contemporary Hollywood fantasy film as a product of the post-9/11 world. The whole collection provides new insight into and understanding of the long undervalued and underestimated genres of children’s and family films. Jeffrey Richards

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Introduction: Children’s Films and Family Films Noel Brown and Bruce Babington

This book’s publication coincides with a surging critical interest in children’s culture, particularly novels but also comic books, games and other forms of apparently child-orientated entertainment that have found mass international acceptance. However, cinema for children has received far less scholarly attention. This collection examines two closely-related genres: the children’s film and the family film, in their global manifestations. In both, child spectators are integral, whether as the primary audience-base (as in the former) or within more inclusive ‘family audiences’ (as in the latter). In looking ‘beyond Disney’, as our title puts it, we are not concerned with articulating ideological or aesthetic criticisms of that organisation, but rather with redressing a critical imbalance. Most previous studies of these genres have limited themselves to Disney, whose enormous popularity over eight decades has tended to obfuscate the wider field we seek to illuminate here. In taking this broader view, rather than pursuing an impossible comprehensiveness, we have embraced as broadly-encompassing a historical and geographic focus as may reasonably be sustained in a book of this size. Particular emphasis is afforded to Hollywood, the dominant force in the production of family-orientated films, but this collection also examines films from the British, Australian, Russian, (the former) East German, Indian, Japanese and Brazilian cinemas. For reasons of practicality, it concentrates on sound-era, feature-length fiction films, regretfully excluding shorts, silent films and documentary filmmaking. And although we touch on a range of national film industries, inevitably there are gaps,1 reflecting the necessary practical limitations of such a book, and the limited research activity in the field as it presently stands. This collection, therefore, presents a series of case studies, the value of which lie collectively in their exploration of the major 1

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commercial, ideological, theoretical and thematic aspects of these overlapping, critically neglected genres.

Preliminary Definitions In common with much of the rather meagre scholarship on the subject, this anthology largely rejects the notion that ‘children’s film’ is a satisfactory label to describe the pluralistic, broadly-appealing mode of cinema to which it is frequently attached. In fact, the term relates to one of the most misunderstood generic categories, for if we define children’s films as appealing only or predominantly to children, then most are actually family films. Although there is considerable overlap between the formats, the children’s film is less visible in commercial cinema, which is dominated by the family film, characterised by appeal to adults in addition to broad suitability and appeal for children. A simplified metaphor for this basic child/adult dialectic would be a see-saw, with an adult at one end and a child at the other, the balance between the parties fluctuating from film to film, but ever-present to some degree. While a ‘children’s film’ heavily prioritises the entertainment requirements of younger audiences, in commercial cinema adult appeal remains desirable as a means of extending a film’s potential reach, and satisfying the parents/guardians accompanying young children to the cinema. This child/adult doubleness is thus integral to any serious analysis of these genres. In the majority of cases, the children’s film remains an abstraction, a theoretical category seldom unambiguously realised. This is to follow Bazalgette and Staples’s definition of a children’s film as one where appeal is largely restricted to audiences aged 6 to 12, thus positioning ‘tween’ and ‘teen’ films – which address a more financially-independent adolescent/teen audience – as separate categories, beyond our purview.2 Bazalgette and Staples contend that the ‘family film’ is largely North American, and the ‘children’s film’ largely European.3 Indeed, North American/Hollywood films are overwhelmingly predicated on commercial imperatives, thus the acquisition of an audience as broad as possible, whereas in Europe (formerly in Britain; presently in Scandinavian countries such as Denmark) there is a strong history of state financial support of children’s films, which frees their makers from the commercial need to broaden their appeal bases to adults. Historically, such films have provided a cultural alternative to Hollywood, being seen to inculcate

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certain values lacking in Hollywood productions in their young audiences. The basic dichotomy identified by Bazalgette and Staples is that of Hollywood as a commercially-orientated producer of family films, and Europe as a non-commercially-orientated producer of children’s films. However, this useful distinction must be qualified in several ways. First, there is a contrary tendency in European countries towards more commercial, broad-appeal family films, with the French–German–Italian Astérix (1999–) series and British Aardman productions prominent examples. Second, there is a lesser tradition of bona fide children’s films (especially between the 1920s and 1950s) in North American cinema which cannot wholly be ignored. Third, as several chapters in this collection illustrate, there is a history of government-supported children’s films in several non-European countries. Otherwise, the non-commercial children’s film/commercial family film antithesis remains valuable, although many apparent children’s films are, in reality, child-orientated family films. In such instances, the slippage between ‘family film’ and ‘children’s film’ is eminently forgivable. But in the majority of cases, there are perceptible lines of demarcation.

Common Themes/Cultural Variations Defining the children’s film and family film genres in their intricate relations and differences may be a complex task, but it is hardly, as Ian Wojcik-Andrews hyperbolically alleges, impossible.4 Despite their broad historical and geographic span, the films examined in this book share strong commonalities, most importantly: i) Suitability for children; ‘suitability’ meaning that such films will not cause apparent psychological harm to a child. ii) Recurrent themes and situations, including the reaffirmation of nation, kinship and community; the exclusion and/or defeat of disruptive social elements; the minimisation of ‘adult’ themes, such as representations of sexuality, violence, crime, profanity, drug abuse, poverty, gore, etc.; and a story which, while acknowledging the possibility of an unpleasant or undesirable outcome, is finally upbeat, morally and emotionally straightforward and supportive of the social status quo.5 Despite surface variations (and occasional exceptions), these attributes can be found in the overwhelming majority of family

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films. Together, they provide a generic template – a ‘master-genre’ – against which more specific aspects such as story, narrative, tone and aesthetics are measured. iii) Finally, the focus is often on a literal or symbolic child figure. Child stars ranging from Shirley Temple and Sabu to Macaulay Culkin are obvious identification figures for children, while remaining objects of fascination, nostalgia and objectification for adults. Symbolic children are more mutable, ambivalent figures, embodying values of innocence, play and superficial anarchism. They include Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Old Mother Riley, the adult protagonists of Satyajit Ray’s Goopy and Bagha trilogy, and the Brazilian comedy troupe, The Trapalhões. They also include animals (e.g., Lassie; Flipper), aliens (e.g., E.T.) and even animated toys (e.g., Pinocchio and the Toy Story films). However, child centrality – pre-eminently important in child-orientated family films such as The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), Annie (John Huston, 1982) and the Harry Potter series (2001–11) – is less present in more recent Hollywood all-age productions with teen and adult appeal, including the Star Wars (1977– ) and the Lord of the Rings series (2001–03). Despite these thematic and ideological commonalities, there are important points of divergence between the two genres. The children’s film, being specifically aimed at children, embodies more centrally the tension between pedagogy and pleasure which is implicit in all films for children. Of course, these two aspects are not mutually exclusive; even the most commercially child-orientated family films exhibit some didactic elements. But there is also a long history of films aimed at children made for explicitly didactic purposes within systems of state-regulated propaganda, e.g., Russian fairy-tale films and Czech puppet films, which achieved widespread critical recognition for their aesthetic qualities and were even screened in Western children’s matinee shows. Britain, from the 1940s to the 1980s, was a world-leader in the production and exhibition of specialised children’s films. Between 1943 and 1950, J. Arthur Rank’s Children’s Entertainment Films (CEF) made a succession of short and feature films which were exhibited to attendees of the children’s matinee shows organised by his own Odeon theatre chain. Afterwards, the production of specialised films for children’s shows continued through the formation of the Children’s Film Foundation (CFF), an independent body indirectly supported by the government through the Eady Levy, a tax on theatre admissions. CFF films, while exhibiting elements of ideological agenda, increasingly veered away from

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the insistent moralism of Rank’s initial impulses, reflecting a broader departure in Western children’s entertainment from the overtly didactic. There are numerous other examples of state-sponsored children’s cinema. India’s Children’s Film Society (CFS) was formed in 1955 at the behest of Prime Minister Nehru, and has produced in excess of 250 films. State support of specialised children’s films also remains commonplace in continental Europe. For instance, in Denmark – frequently cited as the European country most committed to such films – since 1982, under the Danish Film Act, at least 25 per cent of subsidies for film production have been awarded to films for children and youth. Though the level of support – just over ¤21.4 million for feature film production and development and ¤6.2 million for shorts – is relatively slight, it remains essential to continued production. Because shorts do not reach cinemas, the Danish Film Institute oversees DVD distribution and online streaming to libraries, schools and other institutions, including the approximately 70 film clubs showing films to around 60,000 children and young people. The boundaries between children’s films and family films, and between child- and adult-orientated entertainment more broadly, are also related to ever-changing standards of acceptability. Acting on the need to protect children from too-early exposure to disturbing content (e.g., physical and psychological violence; overt sexuality) has been a constant in the history of film, contingent on shifting societal norms and expectations. Broadly, there has been a progressive (and still ongoing) liberalising trend since the 1930s, when practically all the major film-producing nations effected extremely tight censorship laws after the coming of sound. Cultural liberalisation is much too broad an area sufficiently to address here, but it is worth briefly noting some trends in film censorship relaxation. From 1934 to 1966, Hollywood’s self-regulatory Production Code prevented various kinds of ‘adult’ material from reaching the screen.6 In 1968, the present-day ratings system was introduced, allowing the wider proliferation of material deemed unsuitable for child consumption, and paralleling a broad relaxation in attitudes regarding suitability for children, resulting from factors such as earlier sexual maturing and common access to previously restricted knowledge. Many major Hollywood family films, including several of the Harry Potter movies, are now released in the US with a PG-13 rating, previously not considered a family-friendly classification.

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Some idea of the changes that have taken place in Britain can be gauged by the numerous films previously classified A or X (thereby limiting/barring entry by children), or not allowed release, now released as PG or U. One instance is The Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932), a version of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), that was refused classification in 1933 and again in 1957. Then, with cuts, it was given an X certificate in 1958, but released without cuts as a 12 certificate in 1996, and passed PG on DVD in 2012. British Board of Film Classification director David Cooke linked the latest change to comparisons with contemporary films with marked child/young adult appeal: ‘When we had to classify it again last year we went for PG on the basis of comparison with the Doctor Whos and Harry Potters’.7 Censorship patterns are very different in some non-Western societies. Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995) was initially banned in predominantly Muslim Malaysia. But even in the relatively undifferentiated Western world, some societies are more stringent, others more liberal. France belongs to the latter, with Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) first certificated as 16, then 12; Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999) certificated as 10; and Borat (Larry Charles, 2006) as U. (Borat was classified as R in the USA, admitting under-17s only with an adult.) The Scandinavian countries are also more liberal. The brilliant, rather ‘profane’ Danish film Terkel in Trouble (Terkel I Knibe; Kresten Vestsbjerg Andersen et al., 2004) – which won the Best Children’s/Family award at the 2005 Copenhagen Robert Festival – has a 7 rating in Denmark, 11 in Sweden and Norway, but 15 in the UK and Ireland, and R in the US.

Content vs. Context Despite considerable overlap, the children’s film and the family film are not synonymous. Distinctive textual features of the children’s film include relatively simple syntax: the greater centrality of the child and the child’s perspective and the marginalisation of adult figures, relationships with beloved animals, learning of responsibility and the importance of friendship. However, distinctions between the genres often reflect contextual discourses as much as textual divergences or emphases. As regards the latter, there are five primary non-textual manufacturing processes which collectively inform a film’s ‘family’ identity: i) marketing and distribution strategies;

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ii) suitability ratings; iii) critical responses; iv) merchandising; and v) television broadcast strategies.8 Together, when allied to textual mechanisms, these discourses determine a film’s playability to ‘family’ audiences, or, more narrowly, to child audiences. Another informing factor, specific to the children’s film, is where the film is exhibited. Major family films are shown in large, multiplex theatres patronised by a mixed clientele. However, even in North America, where historically the idea of the ‘family audience’ has been tightly embedded, there is a long tradition of separate movie programmes for children. Similarly, in Britain and other Western countries, a division of adult and child audiences through the provision of children’s matinees was common until the advent of the multiplex. This separation allowed a greater distinction between child and adult entertainment than exists today. Specialised children’s cinema programmes showed a wide variety of films – shorts and features; liveaction and animated; fictional and documentary – thought to be especially suitable for children. Today, the children’s film in its most child-orientated (i.e., uncommercial) form is sustained by children’s film festivals. Festivals promote (through exhibition, attendant publicity and prizes) the making and viewing of children’s films, most of which are shorts. In the majority of cases – exceptions being predominantly in the young adult category – these do not gain commercial release, but are further distributed through schools, clubs, and in some fortunate cases, children’s slots on television. High-profile festivals include the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival (1983– ), the Los Angeles-based International Family Film Festival (1993– ), the Seoul International Youth Film Festival (1999– ) and the International Children’s Film Festival, India. Between January and March 2013, others took place in Bangladesh, Hof, Seattle, Glasgow, Berlin, Antwerp and Bruges, Annonay, Val-de-Marne, Providence, Middlesbrough, Calgary, New York, Montreal, Winnipeg, Lyon, Malmö, Wurzburg, Augsburg and Bologna. Exhibition categories in these festivals show small-scale children’s filmmaking following television programming for very specific early-age groups, with the programme for the 2013 Chicago International Children’s Film Festival dividing its films into specifically-defined demographics: 2+, 4+, 5+, 8+, 9+, 11+ and 15+. The comparatively hermetic world of the children’s film festival is the only place where film production and exhibition in the children’s film field imitates television in playing to a relatively narrow segment of the child audience.

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Questions of Appeal Even if the textual distinctions between children’s films and family films are sometimes slight, it is still worth briefly expounding on their modes of appeal to different audience sections. There are three basic forms of address: i) single address, where the target audience is one specific (in this case, pre-teen) demographic group; ii) double or dual address, which attempts to engage both child and adult audiences, but as separate entities, requiring their own specific forms of engagement; and iii) undifferentiated address, where child and adult audiences are addressed as a single entity.9 Single address, for the reasons outlined previously, is less common in popular cinema than is double/dual address. The latter rests on the widespread assumption that children and adults require different forms of entertainment based on their respective interpretative skills, knowledge and experience. The majority of films discussed in this book are double/dual-addressed family films, but undifferentiated address has become more prevalent since the 1970s, reflecting a wider blurring in Western societies of the cultural distinctions between childhood and adulthood. Undifferentiated-addressed family films have since been made in more culturally conservative countries, such as India. The question of what children desire in their screen entertainment is clearly important to these equations. Numerous investigations – too many to document – of children’s movie tastes have been carried out, mostly by British and North American researchers.10 Generalisations are problematic, but there is broad correlation across this geographical and historical range in some key areas: i) children of both sexes usually begin attending the cinema with parents/guardians; ii) traditionally, action-orientated films are more popular with boys, and more romantic films with girls (especially when entering adolescence), and comedy is enduringly popular among both sexes; iii) children and young people go to the movies more often, proportionally, than adults, although attendances declined across the board after the popularisation of television; and iv) children of both sexes usually aspire towards adulthood, increasingly rejecting juvenility, embracing more adult- or teen-orientated films by adolescence. This is reflected in the well-documented practice of older children sneaking into age-restricted movies, and, indeed, in such recent Hollywood ‘tween’ (i.e., pre-teen or early-teen) films as Hannah Montana: The Movie (Peter Chelsom, 2009).

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Double address is predicated on the idea – historically central to the family film – that adults’ entertainment requirements are discrete from those of children. Adult aspects of double address, as the subsequent chapters will show, take many forms. The Hollywood comedies Life with Father (Michael Curtiz, 1947) and I Remember Mama (George Stevens, 1948) offer episodic vignettes centring, respectively, on each (i.e., children and parents) family member. In other instances, the child/adult doubleness is less explicit, taking the form of materials that only adults may fully grasp, but will not alienate children, and may have meaning at a simpler level. Sophisticated and sometimes suggestive wordplay is a popular strategy to engage adults in seemingly child-orientated texts, as is the brief, punctuating, typically comically-allusive ‘cultural reference’. Examples include the robots in Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) making noises resembling the Macintosh computer start-up chime, and the elderly protagonist’s conscious resemblance to Spencer Tracy in Up (Pete Docter, 2009). Less specifically, there may be a wide variety of adult thematics encoded within such texts. One of the arts in constructing effective child/adult doubleness is avoiding disturbing the child’s understanding/engagement. This is often achieved by accompanying (primarily adult) verbal appeal with non-verbal elements appealing to children. In Pixar’s Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), for instance, Potato Head’s face is misaligned by the baby, whereupon he quips to another of the toys, ‘I’m Picasso’, and gets the reply (which stands for the child’s response), ‘I don’t get it’. Some children may understand the joke; but for those who cannot, there is the visual comedy of the misaligned face. In the Ian Fleming-derived Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Ken Hughes, 1968), the heroine’s (Sally Ann Howes) name of ‘Truly Scrumptious’ can be appreciated wholly innocently, but for adults (with Fleming’s Bond girls in mind), she partakes of the libidinousness of such names as Pussy Galore and Honeychile Ryder. On the other hand, some wordplay (e.g., the ‘ewe/you’ jokes in Babe) is equally open to adults and children. Undifferentiated address also operates on several different levels. Many big-budget family films heavily privilege visual spectacle and other universalistic forms of sensorial appeal. Such films have been called ‘regressive’ and ‘kidult’-orientated. The latter term suggests a temporary hybridisation of child and (infantilised) adult, a condition viewed widely with distaste. But this condition is often entered into willingly by adults, reflecting a common desire – also manifest in the popularity of ‘crossover’ literature such as the Harry Potter

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series – temporarily to escape the social and interpretive bounds of adulthood. Relatedly, many films evince a childish playfulness, channelled through whimsy, nonsense and scatology. Slapstick, comical linguistic excess (e.g., the cowardly lion’s ‘rhinoceros/impoceros’ slippage in The Wizard of Oz) and toilet humour (e.g., a feminised Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire [Chris Columbus, 1993], dressed as the titular nanny caught urinating by his horrified son) are all ‘regressive’ in the Freudian sense, recalling a child’s artless obliviousness to/ active enjoyment in social-behavioural transgressions. Screen children provide identification figures for child audiences, but also evoke feelings of nostalgia within adults. Mark Twain writes in his Preface to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876): Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in. This may be taken as a classic exposition of children’s fiction (literature, later film) operating through what appears to be single address, but which is doubly or multiply interpretable. Twain’s statement can be compared with Walt Disney’s elaboration of his films’ double text as addressing ‘the child of all ages’, thus recuperating ‘that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us that maybe the world has made us forget and that maybe our pictures can help us recall’ (although the moralism of Disney’s films positions them as hybrids, with aspects of double and undifferentiated address).11 While both Twain and Disney employ tropes of remembrance of childhood working on the adult viewer, Disney’s view is more sentimental in its allbut-absolute identification of childhood with goodness, naturalness and innocence. Twain touches on (through the phrase ‘what queer enterprises they once engaged in’ ) more complex states. Here, the adult is able to read the on-screen child both as memory of past self and version of present self: helpless, controlled and put upon, while fresh, receptive, curious and playful. The attractions of re-experienced childhood have memorably been articulated in ‘body-swap’ films such as the British and Hollywood versions of Vice Versa (Peter Ustinov, 1948; Brian Gilbert, 1988) and Big (Penny Marshall, 1988), and form the centre of Spielberg’s Peter Pan reinterpretation, Hook (1991).

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Figure 0-1 Our Gang’s children as group protagonist

It is worth reflecting briefly on the doubleness (or undifferentiatedness) of apparently heavily child-orientated films. Hollywood producer Hal Roach’s long-running Our Gang series of shorts (1922–45) were immensely appealing to children, and clearly fulfil the most basic definition of the children’s film (i.e., made about children, for children). Though in the long series there are occasional conventional instances – particularly where the children, as in Our Gang Follies of 1938 (Gordon Douglas, 1937), play pygmy simulacra of grownups (see Bugsy Malone, Alan Parker, 1976) – usually childhood desires, experiences and fantasies are predominant, with adults either absent or only peripherally present as rather ambivalent authority figures. Importantly, too, the films’ many casts of children – oddball, ungroomed, sometimes fat, bullying and vindictive, often anarchic, and acting naturalistically rather than cutely – are very different from the conventionally beautiful, ingratiating Hollywood child stars. The films are also notable for the inclusion of black children as central characters (e.g., Allen ‘Farina’ Hoskins, Eugene ‘Pineapple’ Jackson, Matthew ‘Stymie’ Beard and Billy ‘Buckwheat’ Thomas), presenting happily mixed racial groups. Though one of Eddie Murphy’s

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Figure 0-2 The solitary child. The transcendental ending of The Red Balloon

stand-up routines takes a sardonic view of the names given to these characters, slippages into racism are rare, and outweighed by the quotidian assumption of natural egalitarian relationships between black children and white, paralleled by a sexual egalitarianism with considerable focus on the female children. Our Gang famously centres on groups of children, with friendship (fractious, variable, unsentimentally-conceived) being a primary theme. But Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (1956), another famous ‘children’s film’, represents antithetical interests of the child-centred film – the single child, embodying isolation, sensitivity, solitude and loneliness. The Red Balloon centres on a child’s preference for a relationship with a non-human object (a balloon that mysteriously attaches itself to him) with which to communicate feelings and desires more profoundly than with adults or other children. Whereas Our Gang embraces a raucous comic mode, The Red Balloon develops a plangent poetic realism, invoking sentiment yet avoiding sentimentality, for it is a gang of children – portrayed as conformist and destructive rather than sensitive and unblunted – that destroys the young protagonist’s balloon, before the narrative moves into redemptive fantasy as balloons from all over Paris float down in sympathy to lift the boy in a magical flight over the metropolis. Between the Our Gang films and The Red Balloon, the most obvious

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link is their placement of adults in the peripheries and concentration on aspects of childhood experience. But these invocations of childhood also allow adults, as Twain intuited, to reawaken and observe memories of childhood feelings (or experience the child within the adult). Adults recounting and writing about experiencing, and also reexperiencing, these particular films are quite common. So, these are all family films, even if they are clearly at the child-orientated extreme of the larger genre, not having (again borrowing from Bazalgette and Staples’s definition of the children’s film) major adult stars and adult concerns taking emphasis away from the children.12

The Children’s Film/The ‘Child’ Film A crucial distinction must be drawn between the ‘children’s film’ and what we call the ‘child film’. The children’s film is a production both suitable for and potentially appealing to children. The child film – often confused with the children’s film, but in our usage distinct – centres on a child or children (and their fears, fantasies, etc.), but is not primarily intended for their consumption, and may indeed clearly be unsuitable for them. Child films are far from uncommon in Western cinema, and include such adult-orientated films as Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006), in addition to Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy (1955–59) and the harrowing Brazilian drama Pixote (Hector Babenco, 1981). The division, though obvious in the previous instances, is not always certain. Francois Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cent Coups (1959) and Ken Loach’s Kes (1969) are examples of child films primarily intended for adults which may interest older children. The internationally-acclaimed Iranian child films are also a grey area. The significant number of ‘art’ films centred on children and youth in post-Islamic Revolution Iranian cinema – distinguished from the more commercial and internally-popular home cinema – is partly explained by the country’s extremes of censorship, especially intense under the present regime, particularly affecting discussion of politics, criticism of the theocracy, and portrayals of sexuality and women. This has led to tendencies to build films around children in order to escape censorship restrictions. Internationally-acclaimed films centring on children such as Where is the Friend’s House (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987), Children of Heaven (Majid Majidi, 1997) and The Apple (Samira Makhmalbaf, 1997), contain nothing that children should not see, and might well appeal to children not addicted to

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pleasures and recognitions more obvious than their slowpaced ones. However, because the child film generally excludes child audiences in larger numbers, it falls outside our scope.

Organisation This book is divided into four sections. The chapters in the first section examine the overlapping and discrete characteristics of the children’s film and the family film. Bruce Babington’s ‘Ladies and Gentleman, Boys and Girls: Babe and Babe: Pig in the City’ analyses the adult/child doubleness of these acclaimed Australian productions. Peter Krämer’s ‘“A film specially suitable for children”: The Marketing and Reception of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)’ convincingly reveals the film as of great interest to contemporary children. Adrian Schober’s ‘“Why Can’t They Make Kids’ Flicks Anymore?”: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the Dual-Addressed Family Film’ shows how this Roald Dahl adaptation was conceived primarily for adults, while still satisfying younger audiences. And James Curtis’s ‘“This is Halloween”: The History, Significance and Cultural Impact of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas’ illuminates the ambiguities of the children’s/family film dichotomy. The essays in the second section each explore representations of children within adult social environments. Jeffrey Richards’s ‘Sabu, the Elephant Boy’ reveals the ideological uses to which Indian child star Sabu was put in British and American films of the 1930s and 1940s. Babington’s ‘The Classical Hollywood Family on Screen: Living with Father and Remembering Mama’ examines the ways in which the nuclear family was represented in classical Hollywood. Noel Brown’s ‘The Railway Children and Other Stories: Lionel Jeffries and British Family Films in the 1970s’ centres on the child-orientated films directed by British actor Lionel Jeffries. And Holly Blackford’s ‘“Luke, I am your father”: Toys, Play Space and Detached Fathers in the Post-1970s Hollywood Family Film’ investigates the ways in which play spaces serve for children as a terrain to negotiate the roles of detached or divorced fathers in contemporary Hollywood cinema. The third section explores the relationship between cinema and state. Benita Blessing’s ‘“Films to Give Kids Courage!”: Children’s Films in the German Democratic Republic’ examines some key children’s films made under the state-run DEFA. Natalie Kononenko’s ‘Post-Soviet Parody: Can Family Films about Russian Heroes Be

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Funny?’ focuses on a recent series of folktale-inspired Russian animations. Brown’s ‘A Brief History of Indian Children’s Cinema’ concisely details the genre’s development in India since the 1950s. The fourth and final section explores the relationship between children’s and family films and national identity. Mirian Ou and Alessandro Constantino Gamo’s ‘Brazilian Children’s Cinema in the 1990s: Tensions Between the National-Popular and the International-Popular’ analyses two important Brazilian children’s films in the context of cultural globalisation. Tom Ue’s ‘Narrative, Time and Memory in Studio Ghibli Films’ demonstrates how Studio Ghibli’s globally-popular animé films are tied closely to Japanese post-war socio-political currents. And finally, Frances PheasantKelly’s ‘Dark Films for Dark Times: Spectacle, Reception and the Textual Resonances of the Hollywood Fantasy Film’ examines the prominence of post-9/11 trauma in contemporary US fantasies.

Notes 1. Such as early Soviet-era East European children’s cinema, and such important film-producing countries as China, Denmark and Iran. 2. Cary Bazalgette and Terry Staples, ‘Unshrinking the Kids: Children’s Cinema and the “Family” Film’ in Cary Bazalgette and David Buckingham, eds, In Front of the Children: Screen Entertainment and Young Audiences (London: British Film Institute, 1995), pp. 92–108. 3. Ibid., pp. 94–95. 4. Ian Wojcik-Andrews, Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory (New York: Garland, 2000), p. 26. 5. Noel Brown, ‘The “Family” Film, and the Tensions between Popular and Academic Interpretations of Genre’, Trespassing Journal: An Online Journal of Trespassing Art, Science and Philosophy, Issue 2 (Winter 2013), p. 29. 6. Noel Brown, The Hollywood Family Film (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2012), Ch. 1. 7. Tim Masters, ‘BBFC Anniversary: How Banned Horror Film Island of Lost Souls Got a PG Rating’, BBC News, 28 March 2012. [accessed 30/9/2013]. 8. Brown, The Hollywood Family Film, pp. 6–8. 9. See Barbara Wall’s slightly different definitions of single, double and especially dual address in The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991). 10. Notable studies include Alice Miller Mitchell’s Children and Movies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929); the large-scale Birmingham (1931), London (1932) and Edinburgh studies; Edgar Dale’s Children’s Attendance at Motion Pictures (New York: Macmillan, 1935); J. P. Mayer’s The Sociology of Film (London: Faber and Faber, 1946); Mary Field’s

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Children and Films (Dunfermline: Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1954); Patricia May Edgar’s Children and Screen Violence (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1977); and David Buckingham’s Moving Images (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). Such research can also be complemented by more suggestive sources, such as exhibitors’ reports and children’s magazines, e.g., the long-running British comic, Film Fun. 11. ‘Interview with Fletcher Markle’, 25 September 1963, in Kathy Merlock Jackson, ed., Walt Disney: Conversations (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), pp. 89–103. 12. Bazalgette and Staples, ‘Unshrinking the Kids’, pp. 94–95.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: Babe and Babe: Pig in the City Bruce Babington

Book and Film Babe (Chris Noonan, Australia, 1995, written and produced by George Miller) is a film so popularly celebrated that it is difficult to imagine viewers with negative feelings about its narrative charm and brilliant interweaving of live-action, animatronics and CGI. By 1996, the fable of the piglet who turns himself into a sheepdog – a ‘sheep-pig’ – to transcend his destiny of being eaten, and the farmer who believes in him, had earned approximately $240 million. Its much-anticipated sequel, Babe: Pig in the City (1999, directed by Miller, the main force behind Babe), was much less successful commercially. Its first-year box office was a disappointing $65m (on an estimated $80 million budget, compared with $30 million for Babe),1 and it was generally seen by the film press as a failure, though it has since attained, without remotely challenging Babe’s popularity, degrees of cult status. This discussion traces Babe’s expansion of Dick King-Smith’s children’s story The Sheep-Pig (1983); it places both films within their generic contexts of the child-orientated family film and the animal narrative; points to the child/adult double text typical of childorientated family films; and explicates the protagonist’s doubleness as both animal self and child surrogate. It also outlines how the films mobilise – without undermining their ‘feelgood’ obligations – growing critiques of human treatment of animals which found focus in the Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s development in Animal Liberation (1975) of the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham’s critique of animals being ‘degraded into the class of things’, and his argument that the capacity to feel rather than reason is the key ethical issue in 19

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human–animal relations.2 This isn’t to argue that Babe and its successor unambivalently call for actions more radical than kindness and respect (the ‘woolly liberalism’ of Philip Kemp’s joke in his Sight and Sound review),3 since anything more definitive would be contentiously divisive, but to point to the influence of Singer’s and Bentham’s arguments as an important part of a complex ‘structure of feeling’, to borrow Raymond Williams’s phrase, that permeates both films, adding a further dimension to familiar animal cuteness and allegory.4 The reading of Babe and its sequel arrived at is argued to be more persuasive than the radical postmodern one articulated in Susan McHugh’s Camera Obscura essay, ‘Bringing Up Babe’.5 Babe acknowledges King-Smith both in its opening image of his book and by placing the climactic sheepdog trials at the ‘King-Smith Showgrounds’. However, it alters its simpler source, changing rural England to an internationalised Australia (visually an Anglo-Australian mix, with the Hoggetts’ farmhouse an improbable mélange of historical English styles), and its accents from English dialect to predominantly American. While some changes may reflect Australian film’s 1990s internationalisation,6 others, especially the farmhouse’s thatched roof, Gothic and Tudor elements invoke storybook worlds. Later, in Pig in the City, the city of Metropolis palimpsests on to New York, the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House, the LA Hollywood sign and a Venetian canal, similarly reflecting or allegorising the local industry’s internationalisation (of which Miller’s Mad Max films, 1979–85, were a prime example), but also deriving from Chaplin’s quieter palimpsest of European cities on Los Angeles in City Lights (1931). Other changes add richness and complexity, e.g., some important new characters such as Ferdinand the duck, whose attempts at self-metamorphosis parallel Babe’s; Rex, the patriarchal sheepdog; Duchess, the ill-natured cat; the Hoggetts’ unlovable grandchildren. Importantly, the opening nightmarish agribusiness sequence is wholly the film’s invention, introducing wider ethical concerns to the source material.

Children, Adults, Animals King-Smith’s The Sheep-Pig and Babe derive from E. B. White’s classic children’s book Charlotte’s Web (1952), also with film versions – the Hanna-Barbera animation (Charles A. Nichols, 1973), and the postBabe combination of live-action and animation (Gary Winick, 2006). Like Babe, its pig-protagonist Wilbur is saved from a runt’s death,

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but by a young farmer’s daughter, Fern Arable, who remains close to him when he is sold to her uncle to be fattened for slaughter. Wilbur’s life is saved by his friend Charlotte, a spider, who weaves on her web words praising him, seen by the locals as miraculous, and eventually guaranteeing his existence. A major difference between the two core narratives is that apart from his good nature and will for life, Wilbur has, unlike Babe, no special talent distinguishing him from other pigs. He also grows into a large adult, whereas Babe, though he does grow in The Sheep-Pig, remains throughout both films a piglet, with the appealing vulnerability of the naïve child confronting the world. (An unidyllic real-world irony is that Babe was played by as many as 46 piglets because industrial farming ensures such rapid bulking that no piglet could be used for more than their 16th to 18th weeks.)7 Another difference is that Wilbur’s animal–human relationship is with a young girl, until she transfers her affections to a boy – either readable as a natural movement from transitional to mature love object, or as the child’s innate sympathy with the animal world declining while she is taught that humans are totally different from animals. As David Rudd remarks of the role of the beloved fictional animal, ‘the expendable nature of the animal is […] constituted, often, by having its death mark a rite of passage into adulthood for the human protagonist’, a point paralleling the preceding.8 Children’s affinity with animals explains why many children’s/ family films centre on them, from My Friend Flicka (Harold D. Schuster, 1943) and Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox, 1943) to Beethoven (Brian Levant, 1992). As Gail F. Melson writes, ‘the emotions and personalities of animals real and symbolic are immediate to children in the same way that the emotions and personalities of people are. Because of this, animals enter the drama of a child’s life in direct and powerful ways.’9 These may be negative, as in Freud’s studies of animal phobias (‘Little Hans’; ‘The Rat Man’; ‘The Wolf Man’), but in films addressing children are nearly always positive. However, Babe surprisingly eschews the transitional child-animal relationship, with the only candidates the Hoggetts’ unpleasant grandchildren, whose interest in Babe is only as Christmas lunch, with the girl in particular a Roald Dahl-type brat. Instead, the cross-species relationship is between the piglet and the elderly farmer Arthur Hoggett (James Cromwell), and to a lesser degree his wife Esmé (Magda Szubanski) in Pig in the City, so that the relationship cannot be dismissed by adult viewers as a young girl’s sentimentality or merely a trial run for future relationships (as when Fern bottle-feeds Wilbur).

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The ‘structure of feeling’ – what makers and viewers may have had in their minds – behind Babe and Pig in the City further includes the primatologist Diane Fossey and her gorillas (the subject of Gorillas in the Mist, Michael Apted, 1988, with Sigourney Weaver as Fossey); the influence of PETA (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) from the early 1980s; Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1972) and its animated adaptation (Martin Rosen et al., 1978); the immensely inter-generationally well-known Disney animations such as Bambi (David Hand et al., 1942), Dumbo (Samuel Armstrong et al., 1941) and 101 Dalmations (Clyde Geronomi et al., 1961); for some of the adult audience, knowledge of such celebrated adult-animal relationships as Freud’s with his chow Jofi, Marie Bonaparte’s with her chow Topsy, J. L. Ackerley’s with his German Shepherd (the subject of the memoir My Dog Tulip, 1956) and many other elements ‘in the air’; but also must include the widespread tendency to treat domestic companion animals as special cases wholly different from other animals, and to let disapproval of factory farming be compromised by economic and ethical pragmatism. If most of these are much more adult subtexts than children’s, they are balanced by child viewers’ tendencies to empathise with animals, unlikely to have altered since 1913 when Freud wrote that ‘children show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilised men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals. Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals.’10

‘If I Had Words...’ / ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’ (or Dog? or Sheep? or Pig?) When in Babe Arthur sings ‘If I had words...’ to the existentiallystricken piglet after Duchess tells him his ‘purpose’ in life is to be eaten, and when in Pig in the City Babe sings it to the Flealands animals, preoccupations with human–animal communication shared by children and adults alike, characteristic of animal-centred films, are foregrounded. (Think of the disquisition on cross-species language, intelligence and understanding that the itinerant tinker, Rowley, addresses to Lassie in Lassie Come Home.) Arthur’s version, beyond its obvious meaning of his lacking words for his feelings, a lack paradoxically richly-expressed in the otherwise unfailingly reticent farmer’s words – ‘I’d sing a day for you / I’d sing you a morning golden and true’ – becomes a statement of the linguistic impasse between the

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possessor of human language and the non-possessor. Babe’s version features no such impasse, since Babe and his listeners possess the lingua franca with which some fictional animals communicate unknown to humans, as when Babe and Maa converse, and Esmé hears only animal sounds, while the audience overhears both their conversation and what to Esmé is just noise. This unitary animal language is the opposite of the 499 different animal languages John Dolittle (Rex Harrison) claims to know in Doctor Dolittle (Richard Fleischer, 1967). Babe is situated at the non-realist extreme of animal narratives (most of them animations), differing from films with realist

Figure 1-1 in Babe

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Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) with friend and colleague

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conventions like Lassie Come Home where the beloved animal, though intelligent and empathetic, cannot speak, and most extremely from narratives such as Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter (film by David Cobham, 1978) and Jack London’s White Fang (the most familiar of several film versions by Randall Kleiser, 1991) and Call of the Wild (Ken Annakin, 1972). These, centred on an animal rather than a human–animal relationship, attempt to imagine away layers of anthropomorphism from the creatures’ (in all three cases fierce predators, the opposite of Bambi, Dumbo and Babe) drives and emotions. The narrators’ often elaborate allusions to human knowledge and feelings are to be understood as analogical, different from animal consciousness but necessary in approaching a nonhuman subjectivity unavailable to the objective investigations of ‘physicalism’, asking in dramatic mode the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous question, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’11 Babe, and its sequel, take the less difficult route of anthropomorphism (though to a lesser degree than Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows [1908], where the animals’ English upper middle classness outweighs their animality, the status of which tends to the allegorical). The tear falling from Babe’s orphaned eye as he sobs ‘Mom’ is representative of the direct use of anthropomorphic characteristics, not just to underwrite the child half of the animal/child duality, but also to approach Nagel’s question from the least difficult angle, i.e., by enacting what we imagine we might feel if we were the piglet. Jonathan Burt in his Animals in Film addresses criticisms of the anthropomorphic sentimentality of the family film’s portrayal of animals by asking two questions: ‘what kinds of imagery would it be more appropriate for children to see? And what kind of imagery would be more true to the position of animals in the world?’, caught up as they inevitably are in ‘a network of human–animal relations’.12 The first question reminds us that, whatever adult meanings they suggest, Babe and Pig in the City are family films centrally speaking to children, who would make fewer distinctions than adults between animal and human feelings, while the second reminds us that degrees of anthropomorphism in imagining nonhuman subjectivities are inescapable.

Babe’s Opening Sequences In Babe’s title sequence, the camera moves around a room decorated with kitsch art objects based on pigs, ceramic pigs standing on each

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others’ backs, a wooden pig whose body slides open to reveal sausages instead of intestines, a pig chef happily carrying a pork pie, etc. Two comparisons come to mind. Ben Jonson’s country house poem ‘ To Penshurst’ (1616), with its Renaissance humanist extreme of animal subjection to human ends, makes the conceit that the estate’s animals actually wish to be eaten (‘ The painted partridge lies in every field / And for thy mess is willing to be killed’ ). In HBO’s The Sopranos’ (1999–2007) pre-credit sequence, Satriale’s Pork Store’s effigy of a gambolling pig, and an advertisement for ‘any size suckling pig’ with its laughing piglet face, invokes contemporary agribusiness with criminal overtones. In both cases, the animal art, kitschy or elevated, covers slaughter with a false veneer of happiness, which in Babe is immediately contradicted by the factory pigs being forced on to the abattoir-bound truck, decorated with the words ‘Sunny Valley Meats sends Choice to your Table’. Here the narrator (Roscoe Lee Brown), a sympathetic and important voice in both films (in Pig in the City gently addressing the audience as ‘dear ones’), announces that ‘this is a tale about an unprejudiced heart and how it changed our valley for ever’, tempering the trauma of the scene – a paradigm of Bruno Bettelheim’s insistence that the best fairy stories deal with the child’s anxieties and fears before offering resolutions.13 The narrator’s identity as noted black actor would be unknown to child viewers responding to his good fatherliness, and indeed to most adult ones, but reconditely alludes to the connections made between the treatment of animals and slavery by Jeremy Bentham, and Anna Sewell’s novel Black Beauty (1877). His overvoice has a complex temporality, delivered from a more enlightened future, to an audience situated in that future, speaking of a past (the actual audience’s present) ‘when pigs were afforded no respect except by other pigs. They lived their whole lives in a cruel and sunless world.’ Peter Singer’s development in Animal Liberation (1975) of Bentham’s argument that in the future the treatment of animals would be compared to slavery was, by the time of Babe, well known in his native Australia as elsewhere. The narrator, clear on the need to abolish the horrors of factory farming, though opaque as to what else ‘respect’ might entail, presents two further ambiguities. First, whose is the ‘unprejudiced heart’? By the film’s end, we will choose from Babe or Arthur Hoggett, or, most probably, not between them, for both exhibit ‘unprejudiced hearts’, the piglet in his never disrespecting other species, Arthur in bonding with the piglet. ‘Unprejudiced’

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is interesting, suggesting – after Bentham and Singer – that only man’s species-bound prejudice prevents greater ethical consideration for nonhumans. Further ambiguity resides in ‘changed our valley forever’. Is the hint of future utopia projected from the film’s beginning restricted only to ‘our valley’, the Hoggetts’ farm, or is it more far-reaching? Does ‘our valley’ hopefully signify all valleys, or, at least, many places? Recognition of such ambiguities, and familiarity with Singer’s Animal Liberation and Bentham, constitute an adult discourse, requiring knowledge beyond most children, typical of children’s and family films’ adult texts. However, the narrative’s primary motions are wholly comprehensible to the child audience, many of whom may have a closer, more empathetic relationship to animals than adults. Pertinent are the orphaned piglet’s aloneness; his double adoption by Maa and Fly, sheep and sheepdog, which enhances his understanding of different viewpoints and prejudices; his gradual realisation of the fate of pigs, his desire to transform himself and escape ‘the way things are’; his decision to become a ‘sheep-pig’; the farmer’s belief in him; his trauma when Duchess tells him his only ‘purpose’ is to be eaten, driving him to run away on the eve of the sheepdog trials to the cemetery; and his eventual triumph of self-definition. Throughout the film, Babe – like various other children’s film animal protagonists – can be read in a dual way (emblematised by the Duchess’s pig-baby in Alice in Wonderland)14 as both animal self and surrogate for the human self. Seen as the latter, Babe’s orphaned aloneness embodies the child’s feared loss of parents, his/her realisation of the world’s dangers, and most of all death waiting for him/ her, the fear of being eaten literally or metaphorically, as well as the wish to be recognised as special, beautiful and gifted, with the narrative offering irreproachable didactic encouragement to eschew prejudice, to pursue goals determinedly, and to be unfailingly polite to others – e.g., the farm sheep give Rex the ovine password ‘baa ram ewe’, which enables Babe and Arthur to win the championship, only because the piglet’s respectfulness, the opposite of the dogs’ aggression, has endeared him to them.

Christmas is Carnage Christmas is ‘carnage’, asserts Ferdinand, who only just escapes becoming the duck a l’orange served for Christmas dinner at the

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Hoggetts’. Before this, in a secular Christmas vein, unaware that he might become the meal himself, Babe comically/pathetically la-las ‘Jingle bells’. Later, though, with indubitable religious resonance, carol singers are heard distantly singing ‘away in a manger, no crib for a bed / The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head [...]. Bless all the dear children in thy tender care’, as the piglet sleeps in the barn, as if it is the Christ child being addressed. (This moment may remember the field mice’s carol in The Wind in the Willows, ‘Who were the first to cry Nowell? / Animals all, as it befell / [...] Joy shall be theirs in the morning!’,15 who might also be the distant source of the Babe films’ zany choric mice.) The scene’s sentiment derives from the myth of the saviour’s birth witnessed by animals (built on Luke 2), one of the few Christian traditions reasserting the paradisical world of Genesis 1:29–30, with its implicit dating of the carnivorous food chain to the Fall. In another related moment, when Arthur, in Esmé’s absence, allows Babe into the house, he watches television along with him and Fly. The programme, which we might think unexpected watching for Arthur, is a performance of Gabriel Fauré’s ‘Cantique de Jean Racine’, a setting of a translation of an ancient hymn asking the saviour to heed the faithful. The film’s music (and its sequel’s) is full of sophisticated allusions, mostly more popular, sung by the choric mice, and includes the song ‘If I Had Words’, based on a theme from Saint Saens’ Second Symphony, but the Cantique is the most curious, only explicable, it seems, by its giving the sequence a kind of Franciscan blessing, reiterating the implications of the manger scene. Certainly, the association of Christmas with ‘carnage’ (as distinct from incarnation) suggests a critique of the dominant JudaeoChristian attitude to the creaturely world, but the moments cited above, and the ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ intimations of Pig in the City’s close, suggest that latent within the tradition, in which human domination over nature is the dominant ideology, there might be other ways of seeing and doing.

Bonding Beyond Words Central to Babe is the growing symbiosis between the taciturn, rigid farmer, Arthur Hoggett, and the piglet he wins in the ‘guess the weight’ raffle. It is delicately played out, from the adjustment Arthur makes in his guess when Babe sheds ounces as he urinates on Arthur’s shoe, to the farmer’s making an excuse for delaying his slaughter, to his

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noticing the piglet’s unexpected propensity for shepherding (revealed when he separates differently-coloured chicks), leading to Arthur’s quixotic decision to train Babe for the national sheepdog trials, which he still hopes to win, despite his dogs Rex and Fly being unable to participate. The farmer’s attachment has a pragmatic source in the pig holding the key to his unlikely dream, rather than in any predisposition to animal rights, but this, rather than as exploitation, can be read as a metaphor embodying the two-way benefits of human– animal interaction, with the farmer benefiting from Babe’s genius and Babe from Arthur’s care. In moments enacting the farmer’s ultimate bonding, Arthur lets Babe inside the house, expels Duchess when she scratches the piglet, and tenderly dresses his injured snout. Later, when Arthur rescues a traumatised Babe from the graveyard after Duchess has told him his ‘purpose’ in life is to be eaten, he motherfathers him, bottle-feeding him, singing ‘If I had words I’d make a day for you’. Finally, he performs a prolonged acrobatic dance to divert him. Apart from Arthur’s song, the subject of which is the impossibility of linguistic inter-species communication, the scenes are almost completely enacted at a non-linguistic level – looking, touching, feeding, healing, dancing. In this, they are a paradigm of the ‘noncognitive and nondiscursive’, ‘sensori-motor-emotive’ nature of human–animal communication,16 based on gesture, tone, touch and look. As Burt, writing of the exchange of animal and human looks, notes, ‘communication by the look’ suggests a relation ‘more primal and perhaps also telepathic’,17 an interaction outside of verbal language fundamental to all human–animal relations.

Camera Obscura/Camera Less Obscura Even the commercially-orientated Variety reviews18 saw that the Babe films dealt at some level with serious meanings. Postmodern writing on animal–human relations, and the displacement and decentring of the anthropocentric, should prepare us for Susan McHugh’s Camera Obscura article ‘Bringing up Babe’. Making no concessions to its children’s/family entertainment status other than noting that its ‘exploration of noncentred, nonhuman subjectivity’ is ‘playful’, it underlines the narrative’s human–animal and animal-animal hierarchies and relations. Alongside these uncontentious emphases, however, it pursues an extreme argument that the film ‘routs the dominant human sense of self’, acts out ‘the displacement of the human centre’, and ‘wields

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visual technologies [an argument about the role of television in the narrative] radically to challenge the fixity of species identity’.19 Can such conclusions convince outside the hermetic world of academic cyborg postmodernism? Can the ‘dominant human sense of self’ reasonably be said to be ‘routed’ for any viewer not programmatically impelled to demonstrate the end of (human) ‘centredness’ and ‘subjectivity’? Does theory here, rather than interrogating the real world, circularly create its own world where all is unconstrainedly possible? In focusing on the piglet hero, and to some degree demoting Arthur from absolute sovereign (earlier he comes within a whisker of shooting Babe for supposed sheep-worrying) to benevolent constitutional monarch changed by inter-species consciousness, the ‘human centre’ could be said to be partly shifted, partly reformed, but hardly ‘routed’. McHugh makes some teasing points, including viewing the singing mice as complexly in tension with the narrator, and how Babe’s individualist trajectory actually owes to the other animals. But elsewhere the seductions of postmodern rhetoric lead the author seemingly at times to take literally the ludic conceit of the different species combining to aid Babe’s metamorphosis into sheep-pig, and then watching his triumph on television, as markers of an all-but-achieved real-world anti-anthropocentric revolution. Here, also, it seems that the breakdown of species ‘fixity’ does not merely mean humans ceasing to view animals from a fixed, commodifying viewpoint, but an actual metamorphosis of animals’ ‘fixed’ natures into something like Babe’s hyper-metamorphic abilities. This results in conclusions like reading Babe’s sheepdog trials triumph, watched by television audiences including the farm animals, as ‘the transformation of a national site of competition into a gateway to a newly constituted global order’,20 rather than as a utopically appealing fable of better interspecies relations. Even utopias need a leavening of reality.21

Babe: Pig in the City Pig in the City’s failure to match Babe’s commercial success was analysed in market terms in the New York Times as the consequence of its pre-announced Thanksgiving 1998, opening unalterable because of the release of associated children’s merchandise, which forced a losing box office battle with A Bug’s Life (John Lasseter, 1998).22 Elsewhere, its failure was attributed to ‘a groundswell of opinion that George Miller’s movie is disconcertingly darker than the original’,23

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or Geoff Brown in The Times hyperbolically complaining that the makers ‘have let darkness dominate to a grotesque degree’, and wondering whether the film was made for ‘children, adults, or their own [the makers’] psychiatrists’.24 However, there have been more positive reactions.25 For example, ‘The New Cult Canon: Babe: Pig in the City’,26 applauds it as unafraid, unlike many bland contemporary children’s films, to include material playing on primal childhood anxieties before resolving them happily, the process Bettelheim demonstrates in fairy stories. Pig in the City is certainly less easily assimilable than Babe, partly because it elaborately riffs on the original’s themes, but also because of its refusal to overindulge retrospective pleasures. Its wariness of reiteration probably alienated some audiences – children’s attachment to comforting repetition being well known (noted by Freud, among many others).27 This refusal is clear from the initial catastrophe, where Babe accidentally removes the first film’s second centre, Arthur Hoggett, from all but the sequel’s coda, leaving the piglet and Esmé Hoggett (never close in the first film) stranded in a foreign city after the plan to save the farm through Babe’s celebrity appearance misfires. Bereft of Arthur’s reassuring presence, and with only Ferdinand the duck and the singing mice following them, they enter an unpredictable urban space populated by threatening humans (when Ferdinand lands unwittingly at the Metropolis Gun Club, he is almost blasted to pieces), assorted unfamiliar urban cats and dogs and various simians. Here, home, such as it precariously is, is the Flealands Hotel, run by the eccentric niece of the theatrical entrepreneur Fugley Floom (a very grotesque Mickey Rooney) as an illegal animal refuge. In an echo of Pinocchio’s seduction by the stage (‘Hi diddle de dee / An actor’s life for me’), Babe, separated from Esmé by another accident, is seduced into joining Floom’s simian performers by the lure of money to save the farm. But the stage offers him as little as it does Pinocchio, as, denied any transformative role, he is degraded to playing himself as meat with just his head visible on a platter, emblematic of many moments in Babe stressing his preordained fate – e.g., the chef who follows Arthur in guessing the piglet’s weight, whose double pursues Babe in the sequel’s Metroplis Institute of Medicine fundraising, and Esmé rhapsodising to Duchess about what her ‘little porkchop’ can be turned into – ‘ham, bacon... chitterlings, pickle his feet...Save his blood for black pudding’. Different though the streetwise urban creatures are from the farm animals, they play out patterns of prejudice and hierarchy analogous

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Babe surveys Pig in the City’s Metropolis

to the first film’s conflicts between the ‘stupid’ animals that are eaten and the domestic and/or working ones who aren’t, with barely restrained enmity between cats and dogs, and with the apes, who are Floom’s employees, and dress like people, asserting superiority over everyone but the humans. The apes provide witty, linguisticallyaccomplished versions on the humans’ and their favoured animals’ insistence on seeing Babe only as food – e.g., the chimpanzee Bob ornately asking, ‘so will this pink lunchness fulfil his destiny nourishmentally speaking?’ Later, after the acting troupe’s disbanding, the apes, when Babe joins them searching for food, use him callously to create a diversion by suggesting that some ferocious guard dogs they need occupied while they search, are sheep he can herd. The apes are the last to accept Babe as the leader of the Flealands animals, with the orangutan Thelonius (Thelonius Monk, another adult joke), when thanked for his role in saving one of the baby chimp twins at the fundraising, relenting gruffly with ‘Thank the pig’.

Babe’s Epiphany Separated by further accidents from Esmé, Babe, looking out over the sheepless city, has an epiphany, realising that being a sheep-pig may not be his urban vocation. Instead, he devotes himself to acts typical of his ‘kind and steadfast heart’, such as putting his sensitive nose to new uses in tracking down the impounded Flealands residents, saving the life of the aggressive pitbull, rescuing the crippled

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dog Flealick, and saving the lives of the goldfish and one of the chimp twins. (In a child-surrogate reading, he learns to adjust to circumstances and deploy his talents in accord with them.) Made leader of the hotel animals, he benevolently enlarges the community, against initial opposition, by admitting various strays, and asks for an end to the enmity between cats and dogs. This seems agreed, but only when the piglet’s diffident half-articulated suggestions are enforced by his pitbull protector’s gangsterly ‘what the pig says goes’. The moment, with its eco-political idealism depending on threats of force, punctures comically the scene’s wishfulfilment aspects, as also does the apes’ return from their search for food with a jar of jellybeans which are fed to the mostly carnivorous animals, all foodchain realities suspended. And while the dogs and cats may be reconciled, nothing is offered to heal the war between cats and mice, highlighted when the mice unsuspectingly blunder into a room to find a huge choir of cats singing threateningly an arrangement of ‘Three Blind Mice’.

The Metropolis Institute of Medicine Pig in the City’s later part, as Babe searches for the Flealands animals impounded by the authorities, takes place in and around the Metropolis Institute of Medicine, which includes a children’s hospital (where earlier Babe performed with Floom’s troupe), a research institute (presumably bad news for primates especially), a grand ballroom where the fundraising finale takes place, and a huge kitchen to feed the guests. Here, the focus of critique is no longer factory farming, but implicitly the use and abuse of animals for medical research, as well as for entertainment. The informers who betray the animals to the authorities are an opera-loving couple living opposite Flealands. Marjorie Garber (in her essay appended to J. M. Coetzee’s book The Lives of Animals,28 a separate publication of the two chapters of his novel Elisabeth Costello,29 where the fictional novelist denounces in the most extreme terms human–animal abuse, making direct analogies with the Holocaust) notes ‘how Babe’s pig factory opening directly evokes both German expressionist film and the spectre of the Nazi death camps’.30 Though these allusions are adult-orientated, their more generalised sinister aspects must clearly impress child viewers. And though the parallel between the couple and Nazi persecutors is made less overt by the substitution

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of Italian (Rossini, Verdi) for Germanic music, the point of oppressors rejoicing in high culture is there to be taken. Coetzee’s chapters are, of course, enormously different from Babe’s comic fable, built as they are around lectures, overt philosophical debates, replies and counter-replies (e.g., the Jewish poet’s refusal to accept the novelist’s Holocaust analogy), with an at-times self-contradictory central character. What is clear, though, is that both ask the audience to imagine the plight of animals victimised by human cruelty, whatever its rationalisations. In a rather antic way, the piglet’s anthropomorphising is paralleled by a benign ‘porcinification’ of two of the characters, in, as befits the films and their hero, the least pejorative sense – e.g., in both films the pink roundness of Magda Szubanski as Esmé, and in the second the judge with undeniably porcine features who discharges her, and finally the farce of the Metropolis charity occasion where Esmé, trying to rescue Babe, accidentally becomes inflated to a vast pink spheroid.

Utopia Regained – ‘A Little to the Left of the Twentieth Century’ Babe’s hints of a utopic ending are, as noted, ambiguous. The piglet, improbably remaining his tiny self, will never be eaten – indeed, Pig in the City begins with a skywriter turning a vapour trail spelling ‘HAM’ into ‘CHAMPION’). Can more be asked for than this local individual resolution? Is one meaning of Arthur’s closing repetition of ‘that’ll do, pig’, that more cannot reasonably be demanded, given ‘the way things are’ in the greater world as distinct from the narrative microcosm? There is no evidence that Arthur has adopted his actor self James Cromwell’s much publicised vegetarianism (indeed, conversion to proselytising veganism during the film’s making), or stopped rearing sheep for meat.31 That the farm remains a relative haven, free from the horrors of factory farming, housing many animals not reared for meat, is as much as can surely be said. Adding to other ambiguities is the fact that Babe meets no other pigs across both films, so that we never know how he regards his untransformed fellow suids, or they him, or even whether he knows the fate of the farm’s and showground’s sheep (the phrase ‘on the hook’ is omitted from the film’s altered version of the book’s password). The narrator describes the sequel’s more intricate utopic coda as ‘a little to the left of the twentieth century’, a phrase demanding

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interpretation. One possible meaning is that it divagates from the twentieth century’s thrust towards commodification; another that it is a nostalgic backwater ‘left’ behind modernity; yet another, most positively, that it is ‘left’ in the ethico-political sense of reimagining a better communitarian way. Money from selling Flealands not only saves the farm but enables Floom’s niece and the urban animals to migrate to the valley, forming with the original inhabitants a new community watching together as a recovered Arthur gets a tap working to bring water to an inter-species trough. As one might expect in such a dreamlike ending, with its echoes of Edward Hicks’ celebrated paintings of ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’ (based on Isaiah 11:6–8: ‘The wolf shall also dwell with the lamb [remembering that the sheep call the dogs “wolves”] and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child [Babe?] shall lead them’), the utopia’s specifics are unspoken. Indeed, as Babe rescues Flealick earlier, it is Flealick who seems prefiguringly to imagine the narrative’s ending, which might possibly suggest that it is the crippled dog’s fantasy. The narrator’s last speech amusingly admits that utopias cannot solve personal problems, relating how the poodle has left the pitbull and their children for another dog and that Flealick, the crippled dog on wheels, finds the countryside too slow and chases trucks. The apes are positioned differently, the chimpanzees having undressed ‘to live as chimpanzees’ (a positiveseeming statement, though it contradicts Babe’s shapechanging), while the orangutan Thelonius, another of the films’ transmogrifiers, as ever dandyishly dressed, seems almost to be courting Esmé while she hangs out washing. What we should think of this is left open. In a brief comic cameo, the pitbull unsuccessfully attempts to pass on his aggression to his children, who clearly take after their mother. These skittish variations on the two films’ thematics end with a longed-for moment of repetition, Arthur’s addressing Babe again with his taciturn, now famous, and by the endpoint of the double narrative, multiply meaningful, ‘that’ll do, pig’.

Notes 1. See IMDb entries for Babe () and Babe: Pig in the City () [accessed 7/4/2013]. 2. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (London: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009); Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (Amherst, New York: Prometheus, 1988), pp. 9–11.

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3. Philip Kemp, ‘Babe’, Sight and Sound, December 1995, p. 40. 4. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), Ch. 9. 5. Susan McHugh, ‘Bringing Up Babe’, Camera Obscura, 49, vol. 17, issue 1 (2002), pp. 149–87. 6. See Tom O’Regan, ‘New Stories for a Digital Age: Australian Filmmaking Faces its Future’ in Bronwen Levy and Ffion Murphy, eds, Story/Telling: The Woodford Forum (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2001), pp. 70–73. 7. [accessed 22/5/2013]. 8. M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 247. 9. Gail F. Melson, Why the Wild Things are: Animals in the Lives of Children (Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 19. 10. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), pp. 126–27. 11. Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4 (October 1974), pp. 435–50. 12. John Burt, Animals on Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), pp. 187–88. 13. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 7–11. 14. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (New York: Signet Classics, 1960), pp. 56–65. 15. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983), p. 103. 16. Terms borrowed from Bennett Roth, ‘Pets and Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Contribution’, Psychoanalytic Review 92, 3 (June 2005), p. 453. 17. Burt, Animals on Film, pp. 39–41. 18. ‘Babe’, Variety, 24 July 1995, p. 24; ‘Babe: Pig in the City’, Variety, 30 November 1998, p. 64. 19. McHugh, ‘Bringing up Babe’, pp. 159, 163, 171. 20. Ibid. 21. There is no space here to consider McHugh’s remarks on television and gender in the film, as well as the oddity of such claims that the film exhibits ‘a startling disregard for the conventions of continuity editing’, that the overvoice exudes ‘the smug authority of an unreliable narrator’, and that the word ‘pig’ has a ‘feminine coding’. 22. Richard Weintraub, ‘Studio is Disappointed on Babe Sequel’, New York Times, 30 November 1998. 23. Paul Banfield, ‘How the “Babe” Sequel Butchered the Image of Cuddly Screen Hero’, Los Angeles Times, 18 December 1998. 24. Geoff Brown, ‘Little Lamb to the Slaughter’, The Times, 3 December 1998, p. 35.

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25. Roger Ebert, ‘Babe: Pig in the City’, Chicago Sun-Times, 28 November 1998. 26. [accessed 16/5/ 2013]. 27. See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (London: Penguin Freud Library, 1991), p. 291. 28. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. and Introduction Amy Gutmann (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999). 29. J. M. Coetzee, Elisabeth Costello, London: Secker & Warburg, 2003. 30. Marjorie Garber, The Lives of Animals, pp. 81–82. 31. On Cromwell, see < http://www.takepart.com/article/2011/12/27/jamescromwell-you-dont-own-another-creature> [accessed 18/6/2013].

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‘A film specially suitable for children’: The Marketing and Reception of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Peter Krämer

In September 1968, four months after the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the UK, Stanley Kubrick wrote to the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) to ask for a change in the film’s rating from A, which, at the time, excluded children under 16 unless accompanied by someone aged 16 or older, to the non-restrictive U.1 Kubrick stated that he felt ‘a strong personal responsibility’ towards MGM, which had financed and was now distributing the film; a U rating would increase MGM’s chances to make its money back at the British box office. In support of his request, Kubrick referred to statements by a number of educational organisations in various countries confirming the film’s appeal to, and value for, child viewers as well as numerous letters he had received from young children and ‘reviews from around the world which describe the film, not only as an original masterpiece, but as a film specially suitable for children.’ Around the same time, the BBFC received a copy of a letter that the Film Board of National Organizations in the United States had sent to MGM.2 The letter reported that the board had ‘suggested 2001 as entertainment for youthful audiences as well as for more mature viewers’. A visit to a screening of the film had confirmed the correctness of this suggestion: The rapt attention of large groups of young people is at once noticeable, and inquiries among them bring out the fact that they’re going more than once and bringing their parents. Although we knew that the film would have unique appeal for young teenagers, as a reflection of the space age in which they’re growing up, 37

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it’s apparent that the younger children are getting it, too, with the complete approval of parents who are delighted to have juvenile imaginations stirred creatively. As a result, in February 1969 the BBFC issued a U rating for the general release of 2001 in the UK, without any cuts having been demanded. The BBFC explained its decision in a letter to MGM: ‘Our original concern about this picture was that certain sections of it could be alarming for young children. We always felt that these sections were heightened by the large screen and the stereophonic sound’ used for the initial, limited 70mm (so-called roadshow) release – mostly in Cinerama theatres, which had huge, curved screens – but not for the 35mm release in regular cinemas in 1969.3 Thus, it was not the film’s content, but its overwhelming audiovisual power, which motivated the perhaps overcautious BBFC initially to restrict the access of children to the film, whereas the American observer quoted previously judged this power more positively, because it was seen to capture the attention of young viewers and to stir their imagination. Indeed, in the US, there were no restrictions on children’s attendance during the film’s roadshow release in 1968, nor during its general release in 1969. The film did not carry the ‘suggested for mature audiences’ label which the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had introduced in 1966, and when it was belatedly rated in 1969 – according to the new ratings system introduced in November 1968 – the film received a child-friendly G (the equivalent of the British U).4 Today, it is difficult to accept that, in the late 1960s, 2001 was widely perceived by educators and parents, the filmmaker and his distributor, young letter writers and some reviewers as ‘a film specially suitable for children’. Indeed, it has long been believed that, due to its avant-garde aesthetics, the film was initially rejected even by adult audiences and professional critics, instead finding an enthusiastic audience among countercultural youth who experienced it as a psychedelic trip.5 What is more, 2001 seems to exemplify a broader shift in American film culture of the second half of the 1960s away from traditional (classical) Hollywood entertainment and towards aesthetically-innovative and thematically-challenging films, which have often been subsumed under the heading ‘Hollywood Renaissance’ or ‘New Hollywood’.6 In particular, this shift has been associated with what was, in effect, a suspension of Hollywood’s self-regulatory Production Code in 1966 and the Code’s replacement with a ratings system in 1968, and thus with a drastic departure from Hollywood’s long-standing ambition to make films which, in

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principle, were suitable for everyone, including children.7 There are indeed many indicators for the rising prominence of taboo-breaking films after 1966, and for the declining importance of films addressed to, and able to reach, the whole family.8 There were numerous complaints about the scarcity of ‘family films’ and ‘children’s films,’ and until 1971 the cinema audience was, in fact, contracting, focusing ever more narrowly on educated, urban youth, with the majority of the population (including most parents and their young children) rarely, if ever, going to the cinema.9 When I started conducting research on 2001 more than ten years ago, I was very much influenced by received claims about the film’s status as an expensive avant-garde film, about its initial lack of success with critics and audiences, about its place within the ‘Hollywood Renaissance’ and its opposition to traditional family entertainment.10 However, since then I have tried to offer a new perspective on the film in a series of publications which draw on diverse script materials, memos by Kubrick and his collaborators, letters written to Kubrick by regular cinemagoers as well as numerous press clippings.11 My argument is that Kubrick conceived of 2001 as an optimistic response to the deep pessimism of his previous film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Whereas Dr. Strangelove concluded with the explosion of a ‘doomsday device,’ bringing about the end of all human life on the surface of the Earth, 2001 offered an alternative vision of humanity’s future: through an encounter with the artefacts of an extra-terrestrial civilisation, it could be reborn – like the astronaut David Bowman, who is transformed into a ‘Star Child’ at the end of the film. Despite the drastic changes Kubrick made late in the four-year production history of the film (notably the removal of various elements – a scientific prologue, voiceover narration and some dialogue – which helped to explain what was going on in the story), 2001 was marketed towards a general, rather than a specialised audience, and was indeed successful right from the start (the film was released in the US in April 1968), being widely understood as a hopeful and indeed transformative cinematic experience. This chapter builds on my earlier publications, using some of the same archival sources, but also exploring in much more detail than before the place of children in the audience. In the first section, I examine the marketing campaign for the film, demonstrating that, while this campaign was addressed to an all-inclusive mass audience, it also specifically targeted children. In the second section, I analyse, once again, the letters Kubrick received from cinemagoers in the late 1960s and the 1970s, paying particular attention to those written by

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parents who had seen 2001 with their children, and to letters written by children.

Marketing and Release When, on the basis of an extensive novelistic treatment written by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick and entitled Journey Beyond the Stars, MGM decided to finance Kubrick’s Science Fiction film in February 1965, the studio and the filmmaker immediately embarked on a major campaign to publicise this new project.12 That month, MGM issued a long press release and Kubrick started talking to the press.13 From the outset, MGM and Kubrick emphasised that their new film was an important production, aimed, it was implied, like other Hollywood blockbusters, at an all-inclusive mass audience. The initial press release, which consisted mostly of a long statement by Kubrick, noted that the film would have ‘a cast of international importance’ and was to be shot on various locations around the globe; it would ‘be filmed in the Cinerama process, and in color’.14 Both in its original three-strip variant (using three cameras and projectors) and its recent single strip incarnation, Cinerama was associated with a string of massive box office hits in the US, including travelogues as well as feature films such as the spectacular slapstick comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Stanley Kramer, 1963).15 When the press release mentioned international locations and described the film as ‘an epic story of adventure and exploration,’ dealing with the likelihood that space travel ‘will transform our civilization, as the voyages of the Renaissance brought about the end of the Dark Ages,’ it evoked other important box office trends – namely international adventures (such as Around the World in Eighty Days, Michael Anderson, 1956) and historical epics, that is, films dealing with momentous developments in (usually Western) history, which had dominated US box office charts since the late 1940s.16 Publicity for the film also highlighted the fact that it was dealing with a topical issue of the utmost importance and of interest to everybody. Thus the press release declared: ‘Space is one of the great themes of our age, yet, it is one still almost untouched in serious art and literature’.17 The press release promised that, more so than previous Science Fiction films, Kubrick’s movie would be a ‘scientificallybased’ attempt to depict what space travel will be like in the year 2001, with ‘permanent bases […] on the moon’ and ‘the electrifying

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discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence’.18 At the same time, the film’s publicity always foregrounded Kubrick’s status as an eminent filmmaker. Hence, the press release began with the sentence: ‘Stanley Kubrick, who received worldwide acclaim as the director of Lolita and most recently Dr. Strangelove, will bring Journey Beyond the Stars to the screen for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.’19 A wide range of materials in the Stanley Kubrick Archive indicate that MGM and Kubrick kept the press interested in their new film throughout its protracted production history. When the film’s release was in sight, MGM placed trailers in cinemas and countless advertisements in a range of media (notably radio, posters, newspapers and magazines) which, together with the studio’s and Kubrick’s ability to generate (unpaid-for) articles in the press and their merchandising deals with numerous companies (selling watches, jewellery, fashion, pens and much else),20 led Variety to announce in March 1968 that 2001: A Space Odyssey – as the film was now called – was ‘said to have the most extensive in-depth advertising, publicity and promotional campaign in [MGM’s] history.’21 Importantly, this campaign was, to a large extent, directed at women and children, rather than focusing primarily on men and youth. Thus, children were presumably the main consumers of the 2001-themed buttons, puzzles and models on sale; ads for the film were placed in school newspapers;22 and the fast food chain Howard Johnson printed 3 million copies of a coloured, eight-page ‘children’s menu’ which contained a comic strip about a family with two young children going to the movie premiere of 2001.23 After the screening, the children talk about the strong impression the film has made on them. ‘I can hardly wait for the year 2001 so I can be a space stewardess,’ says the girl, while the boy declares: ‘I’m going to be a space pilot.’ A week after the film’s premiere on 2 April 1968, Variety examined its marketing and audiences. Referencing ‘a widespread revolution’ in the outlook of contemporary youth, the paper stated, on the basis of the observation of people at a New York screening on 6 April, that ‘audiences are a lot more hip to “far-out” experiences than many practicing (and older) critics.’24 Variety judged that MGM ‘undoubtedly erred in promoting 2001 as a super-Destination Moon [a realistic Science Fiction classic from 1950, PK] without hinting at the sense of mystery and mysticism that pervades the entire film,’ thus potentially wrong-footing prospective viewers. The distributor had acknowledged its mistake, Variety reported, by beginning to move the artwork of its advertisements away ‘from the spacecraft drawings

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Figure 2-1 In the future world of 2001: A Space Odyssey, parents going into space can stay in touch with their children

to an eery close-up of Keir Dullea in his space helmet.’25 The article concluded that ‘the film’s biggest potential audience remains today’s tuned-in youth.’ This has become a commonplace assertion in writing about the film, but it overlooks that the special appeal 2001 had for older teenagers and young adults does not negate the possibility of it also being successful with other audience segments. Indeed, Variety pointed out, once again on the basis of observing the audience at an actual screening, that ‘[t]he probable appeal of 2001 to children […] should also be substantial.’ Some reviews of the film considered its suitability for children. The Catholic Film Newsletter deemed 2001 to be ‘Morally Unobjectionable for Adults and Adolescents,’ but not suitable ‘for General Patronage’ due to its sophistication and the potentially disturbing impact of certain images on children.26 And the Motion Picture Herald wrote: ‘Naturally this philosophical element will be over the heads of children addicted to science fiction.’27 Yet, the review asserted, the film offered plenty of attractions to keep children interested and entertained. A review in a Long Island paper described 2001 as a profoundly religious film and compared it favourably to ‘Sunday School, going to church, [and] reading the Bible,’ thus suggesting its particular suitability for children.28 Boys’ Life, a magazine for children with a circulation of 2.5 million, praised 2001, by declaring that everyone who had seen the film ‘must surely know what going to the moon is like’.29 Advance ticket sales, before the film’s premiere, had been excellent.30 Since 2001 was widely marketed as a family film, a good percentage of these advance tickets must have been bought for children. Throughout April and May 1968, the film’s box office performance

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was compared to that of Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), the biggest hit in American film history, which was on yet another successful re-release in 1967/68.31 Thus, 2001 was seen to fit in nicely with the epics that made up so many traditional roadshow releases which had long been occasions for the whole family to go to the cinema together.32 Indeed, despite the increasing emphasis in the press on the film’s youth audience,33 the ‘Exhibitor’s Campaign Book’ MGM prepared for the film’s general release in 1969 featured both the close-up of an astronaut in his space helmet that Variety had discussed as a sign of the studio’s shifting focus on youth audiences, and the drawings of spacecraft used in the initial advertising campaign.34 While some of the items featured in this booklet, which was circulated to cinemas booking the film and contained material to be used for advertising or publicising 2001, saw older teenagers and young adults (especially college students) as an important target audience, there was also, once again, a lot of emphasis on children, notably by highlighting the Howard Johnson children’s menu and Spring-Bok jigsaw puzzles. Not surprisingly, then, even a whole year after the film’s premiere, some journalists still assumed that going to see 2001 was a family affair. Hence, an article in the New York Daily News about space exploration from May 1969 recommended a visit to neighbourhood cinemas, where 2001 was finally opening, ‘[i]f you want to see how you and your children can hope to travel among the planets some day’.35

Children in the Audience We have firsthand accounts of the experiences families had with 2001, because both parents and children wrote to Kubrick. The letters from parents expressed emotions ranging from outrage to gratitude. At one end of the spectrum, a mother told Kubrick that she and her husband had taken their children to a drive-in to see a double-bill pairing 2001 with Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (Wolfgang Reitherman et al., 1968): the latter film was ‘not shown until 11pm, hours after the utterly worthless 2001 had bored the children to sleep.’36 This woman wondered how one could possibly justify the film’s ‘length, its preceding a movie geared for children, and a hike in regular admission prices’. A father sent ticket stubs to Kubrick to demand money.37 His 11-yearold daughter had bought four tickets for the whole family as a present for the parents’ wedding anniversary: after the screening, ‘she cried because she felt she wasted [the money].’

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The letters make it obvious that these correspondents did not merely judge 2001 to be inappropriate for children, but to be generally incomprehensible. Hence, the mother quoted earlier described the film as ‘an insult to coherence, art, space age reality and purse [...] Either give me some plausible explanation or refund the admission price.’ Similarly, another woman, who had seen 2001 with her husband and three children, wrote: ‘Now, Sir, I am a high school graduate of normal or slightly above normal intelligence and so is my husband [...] We didn’t understand a thing.’38 However, this woman’s thoughtful and passionate letter indicated that she felt not only disturbed but also enriched by her encounter with 2001.39 The experience of enrichment is precisely what we find at the other end of the spectrum. A letter written by a mother and co-signed by her husband and children stated: ‘The whole family feel they want you to know how much your film [...] was appreciated by us, in every way’.40 Interestingly, this woman also noted that she was ‘very glad my son talked me into seeing it’. Children also appear to have seen 2001 without their parents. Several young correspondents reported that they saw the film multiple times. While their initial outing was probably with their parents, it is somewhat unlikely that parents would have come along to all the later ones as well. Thus, one correspondent, who did not give his age but must have been quite young (as is indicated by his proud statement that he owned ‘a model of the “moon-bus”’ from the film), revealed that he had seen 2001 four times and declared it to be ‘the best movie I ever saw’.41 This boy represents a particularly intensive and also expansive form of engagement with 2001: asking questions about the film (‘Is the “monolith” a living thing?’), planning to read Arthur C. Clarke’s tie-in novel to gain a better understanding of the film’s story and themes, collecting models and listening to the soundtrack album so as to be able to immerse himself in the world of the film at home. This desire led other correspondents to demand that the film should be made available for home viewing. Hence, one fifthgrader wrote: ‘Please tell the people who make Viewmaster [a plastic viewing device for stereoscopic slides] to make reels of it too. All the kids would buy it.’42 He even asked Kubrick whether he could ‘have a tape of the whole film’. Other young correspondents, both boys and girls, asked for film stills, posters, autographs, the script, models and props so as to extend and deepen their engagement with 2001.43 Most fundamentally, of course, young correspondents were involved in this process of extending and deepening their film

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experience through the act of writing to Kubrick. For some, this act was sufficient in itself, not requiring a response from the filmmaker. Thus, one 14-year-old girl merely wanted to tell Kubrick how ‘great’ she thought the film was.44 But other letter writers were hoping for the kinds of material gifts I have listed previously or for a written reply. A young boy (no age given, but, judging by the handwriting, probably younger than 10), for example, told Kubrick that he had liked 2001. However, ‘[t]he last part of the movie, I and my whole family didn’t understand. What was going on? We thought that you could write me a letter and tell my family and I what was happening.’45 Similarly, an 11-year-old boy stated: ‘I enjoyed [the film] very much up until the last 20 minutes. Could you explain it to me?’46 For some correspondents, there was more at stake than explanations of the film’s story and explications of its meanings. Often inspired by the film (and sometimes eerily echoing the statements made by the children in the Howard Johnson comic strip), they were budding writers, scholars, filmmakers and engineers, who asked for Kubrick’s support. One boy, who described himself as ‘an aspiring writer of 14,’ thought that a particular Science Fiction novel would make a great movie and asked Kubrick whether he wanted to adapt it, or, if not, whether Kubrick could give him advice on how to transform the novel into a script.47 A 13-year-old boy told Kubrick that he was ‘writing a research paper’ about 2001: ‘I would be much obliged if you would send me some of your personal comments, and indicate what you think was most challenging in making the movie.’48 Another boy, aged 14, asked for Kubrick’s help because he and his friends ‘are going to make our own realistic space movie for our speech class.’49 An 11-year-old boy declared: ‘After seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey I have decided to become a spacecraft designer.’50 Similarly, a 13-year-old boy wrote that ‘when I am older, I hope to get involved in the field of astronautics.’51 Although we do not know what became of these young 2001 enthusiasts and their grand ambitions, there are some letters from the 1970s which indicate that the film had a lasting impact. In 1972 and 1973, two friends (one male, one female) who were about to go to college wrote several letters to Kubrick, sending drawings and short stories, and telling him about the influence his film, which they had seen several times in the preceding years, had on them. The young woman wrote: ‘Until I saw your movie 2001 I didn’t think motion pictures were also a true art form.’52 But since 2001 had changed her mind about movies, she had decided to become an ‘art student’ so as

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to prepare for a future career in the film business. The young man, who had started writing Science Fiction, declared: ‘Upon seeing the movie my life was changed. I became more interested in reading books and my appreciation for classical music was born [...] 2001 has been the most influential thing in my life to date.’53 Similar claims have been made by many filmmakers, who have stated that childhood encounters with 2001 were an important influence on their later career decision; these range from Gaspar Noe to Lana (formerly Larry) Wachowski and James Cameron.54 Film scholars, especially those who came to specialise in Science Fiction, have also noted the formative experiences they have had with 2001.55 Early exposure to 2001 could have a lasting impact, even when it did not influence people’s future career decisions. A young man, aged 17, for example, wrote to Kubrick in 1977 to tell him that ‘[e]verything was very confusing to my eight-year-old mind’ when he had first seen the film in 1968, but when he had watched it again in 1975, ‘I began to like it – especially the visuals’.56 He had continued watching 2001 in the cinema and on videotape (an off-air recording), and had also become a Science Fiction fan attending Star Trek conventions. Thus, even a negative childhood experience with 2001 could lead to repeat viewings and belatedly exert considerable influence. This is confirmed by another letter reporting that the writer’s first viewing of the film (during his childhood) had not made much of an impression, but after he had read Clarke’s novel and Jerome Agel’s The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 (1970), he had watched the film again and was now deeply impressed by it: ‘I have thought more of life in other worlds, and a possibility of communication with these beings.’57

Figure 2-2 open

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The Star Child has the Earth at its feet and its future is wide

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For some young viewers of 2001, then, their encounters with the film and related materials eventually turned into an educational experience, influencing their views on subjects ranging from the artfulness of cinema to the existence of extra-terrestrial life. Indeed, teachers had been aware of the film’s educational potential all along. Across 1968 and 1969, it appears to have been quite common for children to see the film on school outings, and for the film to be the subject of school work, as in the case of the boy mentioned earlier who wanted to write a ‘research paper’ and the group of friends who planned to make a ‘space movie’ for ‘speech class’. There is also a letter from a young girl who told Kubrick: ‘My class and I went to see [2001] [...]. We enjoyed it very much but we didn’t understand the part of the apes and the metal slab,’ nor the rapid ageing of the astronaut at the end: ‘Would you please explain to us what you are trying to say to us or what happened to him?’58 A high school student wrote: ‘Most of our biology class viewed your film and would like to hold a large, organized discussion on some of the points brought out in the movie,’ specifically those dealing with ‘evolution’ and ‘God’.59 Had Kubrick prepared ‘any discussion sheets available for groups interested in analyzing the film’? Thus, going with their school classes, with their parents, with friends or on their own, many children saw 2001 in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and while parents’ and children’s letters to Kubrick occasionally report boredom and confusion, the vast majority describe their experience of the film in positive terms. Children wrote about the immediate impact of the film, the discussions they had about it later, the material they gathered (ranging from books to models) so as to deepen and expand their engagement with 2001, and important changes in their outlook on the world and their place within it (to do with the existence of extra-terrestrial life or with their own career plans) which they ascribed to the film’s influence. In much later statements, filmmakers and film scholars have looked back on their childhood encounters with 2001 as key moments in their development towards their present careers.

Conclusion 2001: A Space Odyssey delivered on its early box office promise. It stayed in American cinemas almost continuously throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, and by the end of 1972, Variety ranked it among the 20 top-grossing films of all time up to this point in the

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US (if inflation is not taken into account).60 While the advertising for the film’s 70mm re-release in 1970 used a ‘psychedelic’ picture of the Star Child and the tagline ‘The Ultimate Trip’,61 suggesting that countercultural youth were the main target audience at that time, from 1965 to 1969 publicity, advertising, merchandising and promotional activities for the film had tried to appeal to an all-inclusive mass audience, certainly including older teenagers and young adults, but also young children and their parents. Judging by the statements of national organisations dealing with children, by comments in the trade press, by letters written to Kubrick in the late 1960s and the 1970s, and by memories of early encounters with 2001 reported much later by filmmakers and scholars, the attempt to attract children to the film was very successful. Indeed, for many young viewers the experience of seeing 2001 resonated widely and deeply across their childhood and also their later lives. Despite all of this, I am not proposing to attach the label ‘children’s film’ to 2001: A Space Odyssey, because this generic category is usually understood to refer to films which are primarily, even exclusively, addressed to, and suitable for, children, which clearly has never been the case with Kubrick’s film.62 However, we can conclude that during its original release in the late 1960s, 2001 was presented to the American public as a ‘family film’. In his book on the Hollywood family film, Noel Brown lists ‘five primary non-textual manufacturing processes through which family films attain their generic identity’: marketing strategies, ratings, critical responses, merchandising and the scheduling of television broadcasts.63 While I have not been able to determine whether early broadcasts of 2001 were scheduled at family-friendly times, this chapter has demonstrated that the marketing for this film and its merchandising did specifically target children, and that some reviewers as well as other commentators (including Kubrick himself) highlighted the film’s particular suitability for, and appeal to, children. In addition, as we have seen, in 1969 the film was rated G. While this rating, as introduced by the MPAA in November 1968, was initially meant merely to signal that the film in question was, in principle, suitable for all age groups, in the 1970s it would acquire a more specific meaning: ‘G’-rated films came to be seen as being particularly appealing to children and perhaps rather unattractive for older cinemagoers (unless they were parents accompanying their offspring).64 Somewhat ironically, the opposite seems to have happened to 2001: over the years, this G-rated film has increasingly become associated with youth

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and adult audiences, while its particular appeal to children has been neglected. This has, I think, a lot to do with the fact that ‘family films’ have a lowly critical status,65 whereas 2001 has become widely recognised as one of the very best films ever made.66 For most people writing about 2001 it has become incongruous, perhaps inconceivable, to apply the label ‘family film’ to Kubrick’s ‘masterpiece’. Furthermore, since the 1970s, advertising and publicity for the film (on the occasion of theatrical re-releases, television broadcasts and video or DVD releases) as well as any tie-in products still available (the soundtrack album, Clarke’s novel, original merchandise now traded as collector’s items) would appear to have been targeted at adults and teenagers rather than young children. Thus, judging by several of Brown’s nontextual (or contextual) criteria, 2001 is not in fact a family film anymore, although it used to be one. This case study demonstrates, then, that, as far as contextual criteria are concerned, particular films can move into and out of the ‘family film’ category, depending on whether we examine their original release or their later circulation. It is also entirely possible that a film such as 2001 may be presented and understood as a family film in one country, while its marketing and merchandising, rating and critical reception in another country distance it from this category. Indeed, a particular film may be constructed and function as a family film for certain demographic groups (e.g., parents and children, educators and journalists working for child-orientated publications) while, at the same time in the same country, other groups (e.g., college students, highbrow film critics and academics) perceive it as the exact opposite of family entertainment. Thus, the kind of contextual approach to genre analysis proposed by Brown for the family film (and by Steve Neale for Hollywood genres more broadly)67 requires comprehensive re-examination – grounded in the detailed study of advertising and publicity, reviews and ratings, statements by filmmakers and cinemagoers, etc. – of even the most familiar films in the Hollywood canon. If 2001: A Space Odyssey can be shown to have functioned as a family film for many people in the late 1960s, then almost anything would seem to be possible, and no genre label can ever be taken for granted. Instead of placing a given film once and for all within a particular genre (as was common with traditional genre analysis focused only on textual characteristics), a genuinely contextual approach to film genre requires us to identify the potentially widely-diverse generic categories at work in the presentation and reception of each film in different socio-historical and institutional circumstances.

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Notes 1. Kubrick to BBFC, 11 September 1968, in file on 2001: A Space Odyssey, British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), London. 2. Marie Hamilton, Film Board of National Organizations, to Haven Falconer, MGM, 5 September 1968, file on 2001, BBFC. 3. BBFC to Michael Havas, MGM, 7 February 1969, file on 2001, BBFC. 4. See http://www.mpaa.org/film-ratings/. 5. See, for example, R. Barton Palmer, ‘2001: The Critical Reception and the Generation Gap’ in Robert Kolker, ed., Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 13–27; Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), p. 191. 6. Peter Krämer, ‘Post-Classical Hollywood’ in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds, The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 295–301. 7. Peter Krämer, The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 47–49. 8. Krämer, The New Hollywood, Ch. 2; Hall and Neale, Epics, Spectacles and Blockbusters, Ch. 9; Noel Brown, The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2012), Ch. 4. 9. Krämer, The New Hollywood, pp. 58–62; Brown, The Hollywood Family Film, pp. 145–47. 10. See Peter Krämer, ‘“Dear Mr. Kubrick”: Audience Responses to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the Late 1960s,’ Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, vol. 6, no. 2 (November 2009). . 11. Krämer, ‘“Dear Mr. Kubrick”’; Krämer, 2001: A Space Odyssey (London: BFI, 2010); Peter Krämer, ‘“Could you tell us how to create a StarChild?”: Special Effects, Science Fiction und Publikumsreaktionen auf 2001: A Space Odyssey’ in Michael Wedel, ed., Special Effects in der Wahrnehmung des Publikums: Beiträge zur Wirkungsästhetik und Rezeption transfilmischer Effekte (Berlin: Springer VS, forthcoming 2015). 12. See Krämer, 2001, pp. 31–40. 13. ‘Stanley Kubrick to Film Journey Beyond the Stars in Cinerama for MGM,’ MGM press release, 23 February 1963; facsimile in Piers Bizony, 2001: Filming the Future (London: Aurum, 2000), pp. 10–11; A. H. Weiler, ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon,’ New York Times, 21 February 1965, p. X9. 14. ‘Stanley Kubrick to Film Journey Beyond the Stars in Cinerama for MGM,’ p. 10. 15. See Krämer, 2001, pp. 33–34; Krämer, The New Hollywood, pp. 112–14; Hall and Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters, pp. 140–45. 16. See Krämer, 2001, pp. 35–37; Krämer, The New Hollywood, pp. 19–27, 111–14; Hall and Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters, Chs. 7–8. 17. ‘Stanley Kubrick to Film Journey Beyond the Stars in Cinerama for MGM,’ p. 10. 18. Ibid., p. 11.

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19. Ibid., p. 10. 20. Bernd Eichhorn, ‘Branding 2001,’ Kinematograph, no. 19 (2004), pp. 120–25. 21. ‘Odyssey on Time; O’Brien Comes Home,’ Variety, 27 March 1968, pp. 1, 3. 22. MGM’s ‘Director of Group Sales,’ Ann Bontempo, also sent out letters to schools, declaring that 2001: A Space Odyssey ‘is highly recommended for viewing by students’ and promoting ‘special student performances’; undated letter in 2001 clippings file, Performing Arts Research Center, New York, Public Library at Lincoln Center, New York. 23. Eichhorn, ‘Branding 2001,’ pp. 124–25. A copy of the children’s menu can be found in SK/12/5/15, Stanley Kubrick Archive (SKA), University of the Arts, London. 24. ‘Kubrick’s Sure 2001 to Click,’ Variety, 10 April 1968, pp. 5, 24, here p. 5. 25. Ibid., p. 24. 26. Review of 2001, Catholic Film Newsletter, 18 April 1968, unpaginated leaflet, SK/12/6/14/32, SKA. 27. Richard Gertner, Review of 2001, Motion Picture Herald, 10 April 1968, p. 793. 28. Bob Harris, Review of 2001, Long Island Daily Review, 2 May 1968, p. 2. 29. ‘Movies and TV,’ Boys’ Life, July 1968, unpaginated clipping, SK/12/6/14/32, SKA. 30. See, for example, Charles McHarry, ‘On the Town,’ New York Daily News, 25 March 1968, unpaginated clipping, SK/12/6/14/2/3, SKA. 31. ‘Kubrick’s 2001 Smashes Record,’ Hollywood Reporter, 18 April 1968; ‘MGM’s 2001 Takes Top NY BO Grosses,’ Hollywood Reporter, 15 April 1968; MGM press release, 9 May 1968; unpaginated clippings, SK/12/5/2/3, SKA. 32. See Hall and Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters, Chs. 3–8. 33. Krämer, 2001, p. 92. 34. ‘Exhibitor’s Campaign Book,’ copyrighted 1969, in the press book collection of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 35. ‘Stop at the Moon?,’ Daily News, 28 May 1969, SK/12/6/14/2/3, SKA. 36. Letter in folder SK/12/8/4, SKA. To protect the anonymity of this and other correspondents, I will identify letters by their dates and the correspondents’ home towns; here 11 August 1969, West Palm Beach. 37. Letter dated 8 May 1968, Brooklyn, SK/12/8/4, SKA. 38. Letter dated 4 June 1968, Central Falls, Rhode Island, SK/12/8/4, SKA. 39. See my discussion of correspondents’ productive and pleasurable engagement with the film in Krämer, ‘“Dear Mr. Kubrick”’. 40. Undated letter from Burnley, UK, SK/12/8/4, SKA. 41. Letter dated 17 December 1970, Sunnyvale, California, SK/12/8/4, SKA. 42. Letter dated 12 January 1969, Duluth, Minnesota, SK/12/8/4, SKA. 43. Undated letter, Hempstead, New York; letter dated 1 September 1968, Mulvane, Kansas; letter dated 19 May 1968, no place; letter dated 5 April 1972, Zion, Illinois; all in SK/12/8/4, SKA. 44. Letter dated 30 September 1968, Hayward, California, SK/12/8/4, SKA.

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45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Undated letter, Highland Park, New Jersey, SK/12/8/4, SKA. Undated letter, Birmingham Farms, Michigan, SK/12/8/4, SKA. Undated letter, no place, from Steve, SK/12/8/4, SKA. Letter dated 10 January 1969, Pittsburgh, SK/12/8/4, SKA. Undated letter, Duncanville, Texas, SK/12/8/4, SKA. See letter dated 19 June 1968 from a 15-year-old boy from Flushing, New York, SK/12/8/4, SKA. Letter dated 1 September 1968, Mulvane, Kansas, SK/12/8/4, SKA. Letter dated 2 June 1968, Philadelphia, SK/12/8/4, SKA. Letter stamped 9 July 1973, Easton, Pennsylvania, SK/12/8/4, SKA. Undated letter (from late 1972 or early 1973), Easton, Pennsylvania, SK/12/8/4, SKA. See James Bell, ‘Directors’ Poll,’ Sight and Sound, September 2012, p. 69; Aleksandar Hemon, ‘Beyond the Matrix,’ New Yorker, 10 September 2012. [accessed 10/9/2012]; Rebecca Keegan, The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron (New York: Crown, 2009), pp. 10–11. See, for example, Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. ix; and Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. xi. At this point, I should point out that watching 2001 at a young age was a formative experience for me as well. Letter dated 9 June 1977, Hammond, Louisiana, SK/12/8/4, SKA. Undated letter, Columbus, Ohio, SK/12/8/4, SKA; Jerome Agel, ed., The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 (New York: Signet, 1970). Letter dated 10 February 1969, Bowie, Maryland, SK/12/8/4, SKA. Letter dated 27 November 1968, Dubuque, Iowa, SK/12/8/4, SKA. Krämer, 2001, pp. 91–93. Ibid., p. 92. On ‘children’s films’ as a generic category in Hollywood cinema since the 1960s, see Peter Krämer, ‘“The Best Disney Film Disney Never Made”: Children’s Films and the Family Audience in American Cinema since the 1960s’ in Steve Neale, ed., Genre and Contemporary Hollywood (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 185–200. Brown, The Hollywood Family Film, pp. 6–8; emphasis in the original. Krämer, ‘“The Best Disney Film Disney Never Made’”, pp. 191–92. Ibid., pp. 186, 191–92; Brown, The Hollywood Family Film, pp. 9–11. Krämer, 2001, pp. 10–11. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000), Ch. 7.

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‘Why Can’t They Make Kids’ Flicks Anymore?’: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the Dual-Addressed Family Film Adrian Schober

Mel Stuart’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was released by Paramount in June 1971 and marketed with the colourful tagline which promised a good time to be had by all: ‘It’s scrumdidilyumptious! It’s everybody’s non-pollutionary, anti-institutionary, pro-confectionary factory of fun!’ Unfortunately, this promise did not translate into box office returns during Willy Wonka’s initial theatrical run. While recouping its $2.9 budget, ‘Willy Wonka ended the year at number 53 on the box office chart for 1971, grossing about $4 million. Overseas, it didn’t do much better. It merely played for three days in one theatre in Munich [where the film was shot].’1 Like Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939), a film which has often served as a point of critical comparison, Willy Wonka found its audience belatedly. When the film was aired on US television in the mid-1970s and NBC opted to sacrifice the first 45 minutes because of a drawn-out football game between the Washington Redskins and Oakland Raiders, this elicited ‘angry calls from parents of tearful, denied children.’2 One may discern here the beginnings of the cult of Willy Wonka, which director Stuart attributes to the film’s exposure on network television, cable and home video. He believes that the children who watched the film on initial release were now parents passing it on to their own children.3 Thus, measured in terms of cult appeal, Willy Wonka has earned its place in the canon of so-called family films, though critical recognition has been begrudging. Perhaps this is because the film does not fit easily into the children’s and family film canons. Henry Blinder’s reappraisal seems about right: ‘With the possible exception of The 53

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5000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953), Stanley Kramer’s bizarre, live-action production of Dr Seuss’ story, Willy Wonka stands as the strangest “children’s” film ever made. It’s really in a category of its own, neither a children’s film nor an adult film.’4 He notes that Willy Wonka is ‘now a TV perennial. Its popularity is growing, although it will never be as beloved as The Wizard of Oz. The film is definitely an acquired taste: too unsettling at first, but given a chance through subsequent viewings it really grows on you.’5 Indeed, it is only through subsequent viewings that we can appreciate the rich, multi-layered qualities and dual address of the film. Here, I will argue that Willy Wonka reflects an important shift in the family genre, deploying a mode of dual address that almost wilfully blurs the line between adult and child entertainment. At the same time, this is symptomatic of ongoing tendencies in popular entertainment. More precisely, this dual address may be seen as a forerunner to a certain type of multivalent family film now synonymous with contemporary Hollywood animated features. The first part of this chapter will address Willy Wonka’s production and reception within the context of two separate but related genres: the family film and the children’s film. The second part will discuss how exactly the film constructs this dual audience of adults and children through, most notably, satire, low versus more highbrow forms of humour and intertextuality. In his lively and personal account of the making of the film, the late Stuart recalls how his 12-year-old daughter first brought Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Knopf, 1964) to his attention and thought it would make a good movie.6 Stuart’s background was in documentaries, with only two feature films to his name: the romantic comedy If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969), and the comedy-drama I Love my Wife (1970).7 By his own admission, there was nothing to suggest that he would be the ideal director for a film version of Dahl’s book.8 When he read the book, he was immediately struck by its cinematic possibilities; it seemed to lend itself to unusual set design. And although the book was specifically written for children, Stuart decided early on to craft a fantasy grounded in realism that ‘could attract both children and adults alike.’9 Stuart approached his good friend and long-time producing partner David L. Wolper, later known for the landmark TV mini-series Roots (1977), who ‘agreed that the concept was very interesting, and, more important, unusual. Best of all, outside of Disney, the market for family films was slim. There was a chance to fill a niche that had a built-in audience.’10

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Accordingly, Wolper formed an unusual association with the Quaker Oats Company to produce high-quality educational and entertainment films for children, with plans for two feature films.11 The first (and only) feature film resulting from this association was Willy Wonka. The food giant would agree to put up the money as long they could use it as a promotional tie-in for a new candy bar, partly why the film’s title was changed from Charlie to Willy Wonka (that is, the company wanted the candy bar in the title). ‘We sell products to young families, so why shouldn’t we get into family entertainment as well?’,12 William Donaldson is quoted as saying shortly before the film’s release, speaking on behalf of Quaker Oats. Ironically, something went wrong with the formula and the candy bar never materialised. That the film was conceived specifically to fill the void in family entertainment is reiterated by Wolper in various newspaper items around this time. Wolper explicitly states: ‘There’s no question about why we made the picture. Everywhere I go I’m asked why Hollywood doesn’t make more pictures for the entire family. Well, this is it.’13 And while his tone is otherwise optimistic regarding the future market for children’s and family films, he elsewhere complains: ‘There’s more talking than attending. They [parents, adults] don’t support family films as much as they should at the box office. They talk about the need for them, then go see “Language of Love” or something like that.’14 Wolper here echoes a comment made earlier by Jack Valenti, long-serving president for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), regarding audience hypocrisy: ‘It is both amusing and frustrating to hear the complaints and then watch the next family film die at the box office because those who cried out for this type of film were nowhere to be found when the theatre advertised for patrons.’15 Ironically, Peter Krämer links the decline of the family film with the new ratings system adopted by the MPAA in 1968, which was ‘designed to warn parents about films which were unsuitable for children, thus, in effect, removing children from the audience of a significant part of Hollywood’s output.’16 Replacing the more conservative Motion Picture Production Code (the so-called Hays Code), this system opened up the floodgates to more X- and R-rated films featuring graphic depictions of sex and violence, which led to a corresponding scarcity of G-rated products.17 More recently, Noel Brown has linked the family film’s decline to television cornering the family market, as well as to the shift from a more adult- to youth-orientated mainstream audience, which Hollywood was slow

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to exploit.18 Quaker Oats’ financing of Willy Wonka thus speaks volumes about Hollywood’s reluctance to back a G-rated family venture widely regarded as risky and unlucrative. From this standpoint, William Otterburn-Hall, predicting a major ad-campaign from Quaker Oats in the coming year, was certain that other major firms will watch the fate of this [independently-financed] film with more than artistic interest. If it makes the right noises at the box office, they’ll step in, too: not to take over established film companies, but on a picture-by-picture basis. And, be sure, these films will be geared to family audiences: no film that sells into the kitchen or living room will risk upsetting consumers!19 The fact that Willy Wonka failed to make the right noises at the box office would seem to bear out Wolper’s assessment about the lack of public support for family films.

Figure 3-1 Director Mel Stuart posing with his cast of Oompa-Loompas on the set of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

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Putting the box office performance of the film into context, Stuart has acknowledged that the early 1970s was a period of great social and political upheaval in the US, dominated by sexually explicit and/ or violent films, such as William Friedkin’s The French Connection, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs and Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (all 1971). ‘Where did Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory fit in to that group of commercial and critical hits at a time like that?’ Stuart asks, rhetorically. ‘It didn’t.’20 Yet Stuart lays much of the criticism for Willy Wonka’s box office failure with its distributor, Paramount: I was disappointed in the way that Paramount marketed and released the film. The only memorable part of their involvement was a buffet dinner and a screening they hosted in Hollywood in May [1971]. After that, they treated the film like an orphan. I don’t think they ever had a coherent strategy to sell it. When the prestigious Radio City Music Hall wanted to showcase the film with a premiere and a single-city run, Paramount vetoed the idea and released Willy Wonka into general distribution, where it was lost in the crowd of summer films.21 Paramount’s cavalier treatment of Willy Wonka thus seems to have been based on a lack of vision; a failure to imagine a cross-generational audience for the film. One may speculate that the studio dismissed it as a ‘children’s film’, which (as children were seen to account for only a small share of the market) was not worth the hard sell. Yet there doesn’t seem to have been much of a conception of the differences between children’s and family entertainment in 1971. Examining the wide-ranging responses from critics to Willy Wonka helps place the film in generic context. Rather enigmatically, the New Yorker’s influential critic, Pauline Kael, pithily described Willy Wonka as a ‘fantasy with music for children that never finds an appropriate style; it’s stilted and frenetic, like Prussians at play.’22 Perhaps Kael’s complaint about style is due to the film’s unusual form of dual address, tied to differences in humour (deadpan, slapstick, etc.) and jarring shifts in tone. Like so many critics, she fails to recognise in Willy Wonka qualities that mark this out as a family, and not a children’s, film. Margaret Tarratt of Films and Filming devoted her entire review to comparing it (unfavourably) with The Wizard of Oz: ‘After seeing Willy Wonka we are forced to reflect sadly that it takes more than midgets and lollipops to make another Wizard of Oz.’23 For her,

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the Oompa-Loompas fell short of the Munchkins in the MGM classic. It is perhaps understandable that Tarratt – and other critics – would connect Willy Wonka with The Wizard of Oz which, as Neil Sinyard points out, is still probably the archetype of the ‘ideal fantasy for children.’24 That Willy Wonka was conceived as a musical (implicit in the Oompa-Loompa’s verse from the novel) is also partly a legacy of The Wizard of Oz, as well as of family films from the preceding decade. As Stuart relates, this was not his original intention, yet the persuasive Wolper would ‘begin the attack with stirring appeals like, “The Wizard of Oz made money. The Sound of Music was a blockbuster. Oliver was a hit. They all had songs in them”. I fought the idea but finally gave in.’25 Yet, Munchkins and Oompa-Loompas aside, comparisons between The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka are superficial. Several critics saw Willy Wonka as an unsatisfactory entry in the ailing children’s film genre. ‘The children have so few films to claim as their own,’ lamented Howard Thompson in the New York Times. ‘Much as it pains us to say so, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is not one of them.’26 ‘Whatever happened to kids’ movies for kids?’,27 echoed Benjamin DeMott in the same newspaper. Positioning himself in terms of Romantic ideologies of childhood, DeMott related this to a general feeling ‘roused by both movies, namely, some newish notions about the function and purpose of children’s shows seem to be attaining currency, and that these notions shouldn’t be allowed to kill off the homely older ideas that once dominated this field.’28 Rather presciently, he diagnosed a worrying tendency in films such as Willy Wonka and The Tales of Beatrix Potter (Reginald Mills, 1971) deliberately to impair involvement with the implied child audience through irony, satire, knowingness, scepticism, as well as special effects. However, it is perhaps more accurate to characterise Willy Wonka’s construction of point of view as a complex interplay of detachment and involvement, which also undergirds the dual address of the film. Judith Martin of the Washington Post similarly linked Willy Wonka to changes in the nature of children’s entertainment, though she is not quite able to link this to the film’s deployment of dual address. Willy Wonka, she noted, ‘has all the ingredients that Disney has made almost a modern tradition in children’s films – attempts at humor based on the use of cliché references small children don’t even know [...] and on crudely drawn national stereotypes (German glutton, American car salesman).’29 Though it is uncertain which Disney films she has in mind, this more adult-directed humour is an essential feature of Pixar and DreamWorks animated features and certain live-action family

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films and TV shows. However, if Martin was astute enough to praise the film for making ‘some valiant and long-overdue attempt to relate children’s movies to their audience’,30 through the satirical treatment of the children, she was unable to appreciate how this aspect might actually appeal to both young and old: ‘No adult is going to be laughing at the unsubtle characterizations of gum-chewing, acquisitive, television-addicted children, but some 8-year-old might.’31 After discussing Willy Wonka within the context of ‘children’s movie’, using the more pejorative term ‘juvenile movies’, ‘no worse than standard children’s fare’, she dismissed it as an ‘unimaginative dream [...] and that’s the saddest part about “family pictures”. Nobody seems to be able to think of fresh visions for the young.’32 In contrast, noted critics such as Charles Champlin (The Los Angeles Times), Joseph Gelmis (Newsday), Arthur Knight (Saturday Review) and the late Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times) all praised the film, even if they couldn’t agree on whether it was children’s or family entertainment. Critics who emphasised the film’s cross-generational appeal singled out its edginess and innovation, multilevel humour and sharp satire. For example, Champlin saw in Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka a barely concealed contempt for the children, which ‘is a surprising element in the sentimental field of children’s wares, but it’s also invigorating and I suspect the kids will appreciate it as much as the parents.’33 Variety’s otherwise mixed review identified the ‘Sidebar incidents and dialog’ as the ‘sharpest elements, particularly the running satire on TV news programming cliché. The film certainly does not underestimate the perception of younger and older audiences.’34 However, from Ebert we find one of the most enthusiastic reviews: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is probably the best film of its sort since The Wizard of Oz. It is everything that family movies usually claim to be, but aren’t: Delightful, funny, scary, exciting, and most of all, a genuine work of imagination. Willy Wonka is such a surely and wonderfully spun fantasy that it works on all kinds of minds, and it is fascinating because, like all classic fantasy, it is fascinated with itself.35 Thus, Ebert saw the film as appealing to a large cross-section of the audience, working ‘on all kinds of minds.’ Like Tarratt, he located Willy Wonka within a filmic tradition that includes The Wizard of Oz, though his final appraisal about the film’s merits is diametrically opposed. Unlike Martin, he saw in Willy Wonka something very different to films of its day which ‘doesn’t cut corners or go for cheap

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shortcuts like Disney.’36 In summary, contemporary film critics’ responses were varied and inconsistent. But it would seem that Willy Wonka represents both a continuation of, and departure from, traditional forms of children’s and specifically family entertainment. In its conception and execution Willy Wonka is rooted in an adultinflected dual address, which underpins Hollywood family films made between the 1930s and early 1970s. As Brown persuasively argues, this was supplanted by the undifferentiated address of ‘kidult-inflected’ family films from the late 1970s onwards, which by ‘the early 1980s had almost totally subsumed the traditional, outmoded, dualaddressed family movie.’37 Yet Brown acknowledges how the current crop of Hollywood animated features, such as the Toy Story (1995– ) and Shrek (2001–10) franchises, ‘attempt an updated version of the traditional “dual-address”, in which adults and children are addressed separately, rather than the “undifferentiated address” now prevalent in live-action blockbusters.’38 Interestingly, Brown perceives in these narratives ‘didactic elements reminiscent of classical-era Hollywood entertainment.’39 This is certainly true of Willy Wonka, which Stuart characterises as a ‘clear-cut morality tale’, albeit ‘infused with a strong sense of irony.’40 And as much as Willy Wonka is rooted in this traditional mode of dual address, the film anticipates its more contemporary practice in Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks animated features. I’d argue that such features are much more self-consciously multivalent, built on a range of interpretations, double meanings and shifting subject positions. ‘In-jokes’ and postmodern, intertextual references are a sine qua non of these features.41 As Stuart frequently recalls, he did not set out to make a children’s film; nor, for that matter, a family film. From the outset he was adamant ‘that it would be an adult film. That the language would be for adults and not children. To my way of thinking children would get it eventually, and children are brighter than people take them for.’42 Similarly, in enunciating a break from children’s films: ‘I was not making a Disney picture – I was making a picture for adults.’43 (Although Uncle Walt would have recoiled at the idea that his films were made solely for children.) And in his enlightening assessment of the film’s continuing popularity: ‘It is intended to be an adult film that can also be enjoyed by children, not vice versa. That’s why I think the children who are taken with the movie continue to enjoy it as they grow older.’44 Stuart explains: What I wanted to avoid at all costs was some sort of saccharine approach, appealing to the ‘children’s audience.’ To put it simply,

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I wanted to enjoy viewing it. Since the story was visually centered around children, in order to reach an older audience it was essential that the verbal quality of the film be adult, with a continuing supply of references that were subtly ironic, cynical, literary, and sometimes even surrealistic. These are amply supplied by Dahl and [screenwriter David] Seltzer.45 In some sense, Willy Wonka is really two movies joined at the hip: the first being the movie that Roald Dahl wanted to make, based closely on his classic children’s novel; and the other, the final version that Wolper–Stuart–Seltzer ultimately produced/directed/ re-wrote. Tellingly, the first draft of Dahl’s screenplay was, according to Stuart, unworkable, ‘in many ways a replica of the novel.’46 Stuart and others would rework the book’s plot and add new elements. When Seltzer, then a young, inexperienced screenwriter working for Wolper Productions, was hired to improve the screenplay, he not only supplied much of the film’s memorable dialogue (giving Wonka a flair for literary quotation), but conceived many of the comic sketches. He also had a hand in the Slugworth/Gobstopper subplot, which, importantly gives Charlie moral agency. Whereas Stuart relates how Dahl eventually agreed with the changes, his recent biographer Donald Sturrock claims that he ‘disliked many of the small changes.’47 Clearly, these changes were not so small. While Stuart downplays this in his rather diplomatic account of his working relationship with the temperamental children’s writer, according to undetermined sources Seltzer rewrote 30 per cent of the screenplay. Dahl, though, retained sole writing credit. After he thought about campaigning against the film and publicly disowning it, ‘Roald eventually came to tolerate the film, acknowledging that there were “many good things” in it [...] But he never liked it. Even after it was acknowledged as a classic, he would dismiss it as “crummy”.’48 On one level, this clash, rupture, in creative vision suggestively points to the dual address of the film. On another, it may be argued that Dahl’s novel already makes use of this dual address. This is in contradistinction to Dahl’s alleged use of ‘single address’, which is how Barbara Wall accounts for the author’s popularity with child readers: Dahl puts himself in league with an implied child reader against the inevitable disgust of grown-ups. He is frequently seen as a subversive writer; if he is so, it is not because the values in his stories

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are subversive, but because he ranges himself, not merely, like Blyton, with children, but with children against adults.49 However, apropos of values which Wall implies are less than subversive, the dual address of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory arises out of a strong critique of permissive middle-class parenting and is ‘ultimately pro-establishment in the way it seems to impress on adults the need to set limits on children.’50 That Dahl’s pronouncements on childhood out of bounds are directed at both parents and children is more than implied in the Greek chorus of the Oompa-Loompas, who clearly pinpoint the blame for Veruca’s brattishness:

Who spoiled her, then? Ah, who indeed? Who pandered to her every need? Who turned her into such a brat? Who are the culprits? Who did that? Alas! You needn’t look so far To find out who these sinners are. They are (and this is very sad) Her loving parents, MUM and DAD.51 Along these lines, the incorrigible children and their parents have been read as satiric portraits. In enlarging upon these satirical elements, essential to the film’s mode of dual address, Stuart offsets the more lowbrow ‘childish’ forms of humour, based largely on gross exaggeration, slapstick, farce, nonsense and whimsy easily recognisable from Dahl’s children’s books, with more adult-directed, even highbrow forms of humour, deadpan comedy and irony. Much of this centres on the follies of rampant consumerism, or ‘Wonkamania.’ It seems that just about everybody, young or old, would desperately like to find a golden ticket. In one memorable skit, a psychiatrist listens with deadly earnest to the raving of a client whose belief in his own dreams the doctor dismisses as a ‘manifestation of insanity.’ But when the client tells him that he dreamed of an archangel who told him where to find a golden ticket, the doctor immediately demands to know where the ticket is. In another, a woman’s husband has been kidnapped and held for ransom. Mrs Curtis declares that she’ll do anything – anything – to get her Harold back. But when a clichéd, stony-faced detective informs her that the kidnappers want her case of Wonka bars, she asks: ‘How long will they give me to think it over?’ Likewise, much

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of the deadpan humour arises from the film’s entertaining use of media reportage to advance the narrative. When anchorman Stanley Kael on the ‘Evening Report’ relays the worldwide mass hysteria surrounding the search for golden tickets, it is with great gravitas that is meant to satirise the self-important, over-serious and facile tendencies of modern news programming: Four down, and one to go. And somewhere out there, another lucky person is moving closer and closer to finding the last of the most sought after prizes in history. Though we cannot help but envy him, whoever he is, and might be tempted to be bitter in our losing, we must remember there are more important things – many more important things. Offhand I can’t think of what they are, but I’m sure there must be something. This underplayed approach, less explicitly framed as humorous, is one that we would normally associate with adult sensibilities. The multi-layered humour of Willy Wonka often relies on elisions, spaces or absences in the text which the viewer must fill in based on his/her cultural knowledge or experience. In one particularly amusing sketch, a technician (The Goodies’ Tim Brooke-Taylor) programmes a computer to reveal the precise location of the three remaining golden tickets, according to the ‘Computonian law of probability.’ The computer spits out on a card: ‘What would a computer do with a lifetime supply of chocolate?’ The technician then proceeds to aggressively press the computer’s buttons: ‘I am now telling the computer exactly what he can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate.’ Clearly, the vulgar implication is intended to be an adult’s, and not child’s, joke. But if this humour is more aligned with lowbrow tastes, relying on gaps that most older viewers will have no trouble filling, then at other times this is more sophisticated, challenging, therefore exclusionary, linked to what French theorist Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘cultural capital’ (i.e., accumulated knowledge, skills, education, underpinning distinctions in taste, class and status). When Wonka plays the opening notes from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro on the miniature organ as the group are about to enter the Chocolate Room, schoolteacher Mrs Teavee declares, ‘Rachmaninoff’, thus demonstrating her cultural ignorance. But she is not the only one who might have been ignorant. As Stuart explains, he chose these opening notes ‘not realizing that the vast majority of the audience would not recognize the melody [...] The joke would have played much better if we had used

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the far more recognizable notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: da-dad-dad-dum.’52 Yet, taken as a more highbrow example of humour, this is perfectly consistent with a family film that works on multiple levels. Another in-joke, even less well-signalled, is when a Latino TV newsreader presents a picture of lucky golden ticket finder Alberto Minoleta, a multimillionaire casino owner from Paraguay whose ticket is later exposed as a fake. Few adults, let alone children, would catch on that the picture is actually of Martin Bormann, Nazi politician and close advisor to the Führer. Stuart explains why this joke misfired: ‘Twenty-five years after World War Two, very few cared who Martin Bormann was, so the scene was never as successful as I had hoped.’53 Does this joke belong in a children’s film? Probably not. But, as stated earlier, Willy Wonka was not conceived as a film for children. Willy Wonka doesn’t contain savvy, chic, postmodern references to films or TV shows that audiences have grown accustomed to with Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks, or The Simpsons. Rather, this intertextuality derives from a script that is a rich tapestry of literary quotations and highfalutin allusions, as written by Seltzer for Willy Wonka. Wonka evokes a literary Bohemian, with an obfuscating and infuriating tendency to (mis)quote Shakespeare (‘Where is fancy bred? In the heart or in the head?’; ‘So shines a good deed in a weary world’), Oscar Wilde (‘The suspense is terrible, I hope it’ll last’) and sundry poetry (e.g., Keats, Masefield, Ogden Nash). According to Stuart: ‘Miracle of miracles, most of the children had no trouble understanding and appreciating these references. If they didn’t understand them the first time around, they caught up with them when they saw the film in later years.’54 But again, I’d argue that a full appreciation of many of these references requires greater cultural capital. And while much of the wit and wordplay might seem merely playful, eccentric, absurd, often they are loaded with the most adult sarcasm, mockery and irony. When this use of language is married with Wonka’s penchant for non sequiturs, the effect is not only mystifying, but surreal. Thus Veruca: ‘Who ever heard of a snozzberry?’; Wonka: ‘We are the music makers / And we are the makers of dreams’ (from the opening lines of Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s ‘Ode’). Such personality quirks make the candy maker seem positively unhinged. Through the character of Willy Wonka, Stuart manipulates the film’s often jarring shifts in tone, which are further connected to the film’s deployment of dual address. From his first appearance on the screen, when he pretends to limp, then performs an unexpected

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acrobatic feat, Wilder plays Wonka as a trickster figure. This scene was entirely of Wilder’s invention, and, indeed, one of the conditions upon which he agreed to take on the role. But this unpredictability encompasses sadistic, manic and aggressive tendencies. In Blinder’s appraisal: Wilder’s totally original character is so disorienting that he makes the trip through the chocolate factory a very uncomfortable, offbalance experience for the audience as well as for the children. We don’t trust him, and feel that no one, not even our hero Charlie, is safe. Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka embodies the film’s wonderful and strange quality, its uneasy edge that makes it somewhat inaccessible and yet still so intriguing after repeated viewings.55 The disorientating feature of Wonka’s character is linked to surrealism and horror in the nightmare boat ride down the chocolate river in the SS Wonkatania. Wonka’s ravings (‘Are the fires of hell aglowing? / Is the grisly reaper mowing? / Yes! The danger must be growing’) are accompanied by dark, disturbing ‘subliminal’ images projected over the background (e.g., a centipede crawling over a man’s face and, most shockingly, an image of a chicken’s head being cut off). Did Stuart perhaps go too far? Not according to the director: ‘The cuts of the violent images were purposely made short so they’d be

Figure 3-2 An unhinged Wonka (Gene Wilder), during the nightmare boat ride in the S.S. Wonkatania

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shocking, not lingering. I felt that the abrupt termination of the ride with a sudden cut to a lighted set would quickly dispel anxiety on the part of the younger audience.’56 As Stuart points out, some have read this sequence as a bad acid trip (even Violet asks, ‘What is this – a freak-out?’), although Stuart denies that this was his intention: ‘It was simply a deliberate attempt to introduce an element of danger in the trip through the factory.’57 In any case, Willy Wonka may be counted as an early example of a family film that pushes the boundaries of what is age-appropriate, linking to current anxieties about the New Hollywood which, in films such as Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Night (2008; rated PG-13 ‘for intense sequences of violence and some menace’) and Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are (2009; rated PG), seems more and more determined to push these boundaries in its aggressive pursuit of a broader audience cross-section. Willy Wonka highlights ongoing debates about the nature and function of children’s and family entertainment. When released in the summer of 1971 (during a season previously viewed as the least profitable window for new releases), the film fell short of critical and commercial expectations. This seemed to further signal the decline of the family genre, widely dismissed as irrelevant and anachronistic. The film’s relative failure may be partly attributed to the way critical opinion forced this film into a paradigm that it did not fit. While grasping its lineage to The Wizard of Oz and other family fare, more discerning critics saw in the film qualities that were essentially novel. In my analysis, I have singled out the film’s highly sophisticated and innovative use of dual address, which incorporates satire, humour and intertextuality along with ‘edgy’ elements to challenge and subvert culturally prescribed distinctions between children’s and adult entertainment. While acknowledging the film’s rooting in traditional modes of dual address, I have sought to reposition Willy Wonka as a proto-contemporary, multivalent, dual-addressed family film. On the strength of this ‘double’ performance, Willy Wonka deserves to be seen as an important entry in the family genre.

Notes 1. Mel Stuart with Josh Young, Pure Imagination: The Making of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (New York: LA Weekly Books/St Martin’s Press, 2002), p. 105. 2. Robert Hanley, ‘Children Wait for Willy Wonka as NBC Plays out Football Tie’, New York Times, 24 November 1975, p. 1.

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3. Stuart and Young, Pure Imagination, pp. 105–7. 4. Henry Blinder, ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ in Danny Peary, Cult Movies 2 (London: Vermilion, 1983), pp. 167–69 (p. 167). 5. Ibid. 6. Stuart and Young, Pure Imagination, p. 1. 7. Despite a highly prolific and respected career in documentary films and television as both director and producer, which scored him four Emmys, a Peabody and an Oscar nomination, the testimonials to Mel Stuart (who died from cancer in August 2012) almost invariably carry the headline, ‘Willy Wonka director.’ 8. Stuart and Young, Pure Imagination, p. 3. 9. Ibid., p.3. 10. Ibid., p. 7. 11. ‘Oats May Bring Back Family’, Variety, 13 August 1969, p. 5. 12. ‘Business Eyes Movie Profit’, St Petersburg Times, 1 March 1971, p. 6B. 13. Vernon Scott, ‘Family Fare’, St Petersburg Times, 3 July 1971, p. 15B. 14. Norman Goldstein, ‘Wolper Makes “Wonka” to Fill Family Void’, The Miami News, 15 July 1971, p. 4B. 15. Norman Goldstein, ‘“Family Film” is Only Dirty Word Left in Hollywood’, The Tuscaloosa News, 19 December 1970, p. D5. 16. Peter Krämer, ‘“It’s Aimed at Kids – the Kid in Everybody”: George Lucas, Star Wars and Children’s Entertainment’ in Yvonne Tasker, ed., Action and Adventure Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 358–70 (p. 362). 17. Ibid. 18. Noel Brown, The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2012). 19. William Otterburn-Hall, ‘Chocolate Factory Geared for Family Audiences’, The Phoenix, 20 February 1971, p. 21. 20. Stuart and Young, Pure Imagination, p. 105. 21. Ibid., p. 104. 22. Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), p. 656. 23. Margaret Tarratt, ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’, Films and Filming, 18.4 (1972), p. 50. 24. Neil Sinyard, Children in the Movies (London: B.T. Batsford, 1992), p. 18. 25. Stuart and Young, Pure Imagination, p. 60. 26. Howard Thompson, ‘Chocolate Factory’, New York Times, 1 July 1971, p. 61. 27. Benjamin DeMott, ‘Whatever Happened to Kids’ Movies for Kids?’, New York Times, 12 September 1971, p. 10. 28. Ibid. 29. Judith Martin, ‘A Modern Fairy Tale’, The Washington Post, 22 July 1971, p. C13. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Charles Champlin, ‘“Wonka” Fare For Families’, Los Angeles Times, 28 July 1971, pp. 1, 10.

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34. ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’, Variety, 26 May 1971, p. 13. 35. Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert’s Four-Star Reviews, 1967–2007 (Kansas City, Missouri: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2007), p. 859. 36. Ibid. 37. Brown, The Hollywood Family Film, p. 157. While Brown implies that dual address was effectively rendered obsolete by the inherently familyorientated nature of television, which contributed to the decline of the family film, it was a feature of 1960s ‘children’s’ programming such as The Addams Family, Batman, The Bugs Bunny Show, The Flintstones, The Jetsons and Rocky and Bullwinkle. It is tempting to speculate whether TV influenced Willy Wonka’s mode of dual address which is further suggestive in the playful eccentricity, colourful tone and visual aesthetic. 38. Ibid., p. 206. 39. Ibid. 40. Stuart and Young, Pure Imagination, p. 117. 41. However, it could be argued that the locus classicus for this type of multivalent family film was a groundbreaking animated musical fantasy made outside of Hollywood and across the Atlantic. I refer to Yellow Submarine (Charles Dunning, 1968, UK) centred of course on The Beatles, which incorporates surrealistic visuals, music, nonsense, wordplay and non sequiturs, along with a multitude of literary, art and pop culture references to secure its dual audience of adults and children. Without positing a direct influence as such, Willy Wonka exhibits many of these multivalent characteristics. 42. Mel Stuart’s Wonkavision, no other credits (Warner Brothers, 2011). 43. Pure Imagination: The Story of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, writ./ prod./dir. by J. M. Kenny (Warner Home Video, 2001). 44. Stuart and Young, Pure Imagination, p. 113. 45. Ibid., pp. 113–14. 46. Ibid., p. 14. 47. Donald Sturrock, Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), p. 494. 48. Ibid. 49. Barbara Wall, The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 193–94. 50. Adrian Schober, ‘Wonka, Freud, and the Child Within: (Re)constructing Lost Childhood in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ in Debbie Olson and Andrew Scahill, eds, Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema (Lanham: Lexington Publishers, 2012), pp. 67–94 (p. 73). 51. Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 99. 52. Stuart and Young, Pure Imagination, p.82. 53. Ibid., p. 24. 54. Ibid., p. 116. 55. Blinder, ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’, p. 168. 56. Stuart and Young, Pure Imagination, p. 79. 57. Ibid., p. 113.

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‘This Is Halloween’: The History, Significance and Cultural Impact of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas James M. Curtis

In the early 1980s, a young CalArts graduate named Tim Burton went to work for Disney Pictures as an animator. Burton soon realised that his atypical and sometimes macabre sensibilities did not quite fit in with the upbeat, optimistic fairy-tale narratives on which he and his co-workers were primarily occupied. Because of this, Burton took it upon himself to create a story very much his own – one that told the tale of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween, who travels outside his own realm and discovers Christmas. In this story, Jack’s experiences with the Yuletide holiday would so excite his senses that he would ultimately resolve to stage his own grotesque and morbid takeover of the holiday. Taking the title of his story from a line in Clement Clarke Moore’s ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ (known more popularly as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’), Burton worked exhaustively to create storyboards and artwork to flesh out his ideas and even enlisted the help of his associate Rick Heinrichs, who constructed a three-dimensional model of the Pumpkin King. Despite all of his hard work, Disney repeatedly passed on Burton’s idea, compelling him ultimately to leave the company a few years later. However, Disney’s interest in Burton’s material revived after the commercial successes of his highly popular (and progressively ‘darker’) films Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Beetlejuice (1988), and Batman (1989). Disney still owned the film rights to Burton’s original concept, and approached him in 1990 regarding the possibility 69

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of turning his original concept into a full-length feature film.1 Burton accepted, and production began in 1991. After two years of meticulously painstaking stop-motion animation filming, The Nightmare Before Christmas – produced and developed by Burton, and directed by Henry Selick – was released in October, 1993. Nevertheless, after an initial screening of the completed project, Disney decided to distribute the movie under their Touchstone Pictures label due to its macabre nature and dark subject matter,2 fearful of damaging its brand identity and alienating its primary audience. The Nightmare Before Christmas went on to become a critical success, receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews by world-renowned critics like Roger Ebert, while also netting $50 million in its first theatrical cycle (against the initial $18 million outlay). Yet the real commercial success of the film came later. The Nightmare Before Christmas has become a mass-market phenomenon, generating everything from action figures to video games, lunchboxes, collectible-card games, Halloween costumes, and much more besides. Moreover, its characters have found a home at the Haunted Mansion Holiday at Disneyland, and in 2006, the film was re-branded as a ‘Disney Digital’ release. What is more, Disney launched yet another marketing campaign in 2013 to celebrate the film’s twentieth anniversary, and D23 (the ‘official’ Disney fan club) featured several props from the film’s production during its ‘Disney Fanniversary Celebration’ – a commemoration of various Disney milestones over the years – which toured America throughout the early part of 2013.3 What has enabled Burton’s macabre children’s film, once the proverbial black sheep of the Disney family, to be welcomed into the fold? Is the film’s current status purely the result of its commercial success? Furthermore, does the official re-branding of The Nightmare Before Christmas as a ‘Disney’ film mark a significant cultural shift in the ways in which we view what is ‘acceptable’ for children and, more specifically, children’s cinema? This analysis seeks to answer these questions (and more) by examining the history, production, and reception of Burton’s classic film. The opening of The Nightmare Before Christmas finds its protagonist, Jack Skellington (voiced by Chris Sarandon), in a sort of existential crisis. Disillusioned with his responsibilities as the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town (a grotesque community of ghosts, goblins, witches, and other ‘monsters’ whose sole existence is to perpetuate the holiday that serves as the namesake for their town), Jack begins to seek other ways to fulfil his increasing need to separate himself from

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Figure 4-1 Producer Tim Burton posing with the models of the Pumpkin King and Sally

his Pumpkin King identity. After wandering through what seems an endless forest of dead trees and nothingness, Jack happens upon a circle of doors, each leading to a different holiday’s core community (including such festivals as Easter, Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day), much like the Halloween Town from which Jack hails. Soon after, Jack finds himself swept into Christmas Town and becomes enraptured by everything he sees there; so much so, in fact, that he decides to usurp the role of Santa Claus (Ed Ivory) – whose name, suggestively, he mishears as ‘Sandy Claws’ – and to have all of the citizens of Halloween Town become the new creators of the Yuletide holiday. Through the misadventures that follow, Sally (Catherine O’Hara), the stitched-up rag doll creation (and veritable prisoner) of the clearly Victor Frankenstein-inspired Dr Finklestein (William Hickey), serves as Jack’s guiding moral centre. The climax of the film occurs as Jack’s plan to commandeer Christmas fails miserably; the citizens of Christmas Town are utterly horrified by the grotesque ‘gifts’ Jack leaves for the children and by the ‘Skeleton man’ that is ‘masquerading as Santa Claus’. Jack’s presence is so unwelcome that a military response is organised, and he is literally gunned down from the sky. However, in this moment of defeat, as Jack lies literally in

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pieces in a graveyard after being shot down, he realises that what he had been searching for had been dwelling within him all along – his own established sense of identity. Immediately thereafter, Jack saves Sally and Santa Claus from the villainous Oogie Boogie (Ken Page, as the film’s gluttonous antihero) and the film concludes as Jack and Santa Claus, respectively, restore order both to Halloween Town and Christmas Town.

Nightmare as Children’s Film The Nightmare Before Christmas is a ‘children’s film’ on several levels. The individuation Jack undergoes over the course of the narrative is perhaps the clearest example of its child orientation. At the outset of the film, Jack is bored; he tells us as much himself in the song ‘Jack’s Lament’, when he croons ‘Yet year after year / It’s the same routine / And I grow so weary of the sound of screams / And I, Jack – The Pumpkin King – have grown so tired of the same old thing’. As Karen Coats argues, ‘when a child develops the capacity to be bored, it is a signal that he or she is developing a separate sense of self, a need to assert his or her own desires over and against the desires of the [parent or community].’4 This development of a sense of self is the very definition of individuation which, in psychological terms, is: A state in which a person is differentiated, to some degree, from other parts of his or her social and physical environment. This state can be produced by both individual and social factors, as well as by physical aspects of the environment. If a person chooses to become more individuated, he or she must be cognisant of others in the immediate environment and, on the basis of social comparison processes, must determine how he or she can differ from them.5 Seen through this psychoanalytic lens, The Nightmare Before Christmas is a ‘children’s film’ because Jack’s process of self-discovery is analogous to childhood processes of individuation. Jack’s inherent identity as ‘The Pumpkin King’ at the outset of the film is parallel to the inherent identity of the child as product of his/her parents; his identity at the film’s conclusion is equal to the successfully individuated child’s identity following adolescence. His need to escape his inherent identity parallels the child’s need to separate its own

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identity from the parent in order to successfully individuate. When Sally (towards the mid-point of the film) places an old, framed picture of Jack in his hands, stating ‘You’re the Pumpkin King’, it is significant that he cracks the frame over his knee and exclaims ‘Not anymore!’ Here, Jack is literally and symbolically shattering his inherent identity, allowing for the creation of a new one. Because of this symbolic gesture, we realise that later in the film, when Jack, beaten and battered through his misadventures in Christmas Town, cries defiantly – ‘That’s right! I am the Pumpkin King!’ – he has successfully established his own sense of self. While the identity is, in name, the same title that Jack possesses at the beginning of the film, the sense of self that it underscores is significantly different, and is one that is constructed and realised through Jack’s own process of self-discovery. Jack is a symbolic child, and the journey he takes over the course of the film parallels those taking place among the film’s child audience. Thus, through Jack, The Nightmare Before Christmas offers its child audience a ready source of identification with their own analogous developmental processes. There are other, more specific aspects implying a child audience, namely: i) the film beginning with the lines: ‘A long time ago, longer now than it seems, in a place that perhaps you’ve seen in your dreams’; the motif of the ‘distant past’ has long been associated with fairy tales, a genre predominantly associated with children; ii) Jack’s sense of wonder during his first visit to Christmas Town can easily be compared to the general sense of wonderment commonly attributed to childhood; iii) the ways in which Jack conducts his ‘experiments’ – those he undertakes in order to understand the nature of Christmas – are conducted in a very childlike manner; he uses the equipment incorrectly and haphazardly, breaking microscope slides and destroying the items he ‘experiments’ on several times in the process; iv) more importantly, Jack’s frustration at his inability to understand Christmas provides the child audience with a source of identification for their own inability to understand the complexities of the adult world; and finally, v) Jack’s narrative journey locates the film within the context of classical children’s narratives. Specifically, Jack undertakes what is known by children’s literary critics as the ‘circular journey’, a predominant narrative trope in children’s fiction.6 This pattern of home, away, and home again is present with little variation in many other child-orientated films, such as The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), Pinocchio (Norman Ferguson, 1940) and E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982).

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Nightmare as Family Film However, many critics observed the difficulties in labelling Nightmare a ‘children’s movie’, one noting that it was ‘too spooky for small kids’,7 and another that it was ‘darker than [the] usual offering […] [and] deviate[d] from [Disney’s] tried-and-true family-fare formula’.8 To be sure, there are several aspects that would be lost to its intended child audience. As we learn at the outset of the film, the citizens of Halloween Town are under a perpetual deadline (consider the ever-looming ‘x-number of days until next Halloween’ sign that hangs above the town square); this lifestyle of continual deadlines and pressures is surely more readily identifiable to Nightmare’s adult audiences. Related to this is Jack’s assigning of various ‘jobs’ to the residents of Halloween Town following his decision to remake Christmas in his own horrific image; in this scene, every citizen literally has their own ‘part’ to play, and the coming together of a vast community for the purposes of a common goal has socio-political implications that only adult viewers would fully appreciate. Indeed, there are several political allusions in the film; the Mayor declares that he is ‘only an elected official’ early in the movie, establishing himself as a mere figurehead with no real power. This is emphasised later during the ‘town meeting’ scene, in which the Mayor does nothing more than operate a stagelight while Jack conducts the meeting. Two more clearly adult references can be found in separate musical numbers from the film. The first occurs during ‘Jack’s Lament’, in which he sings, in reference to Hamlet’s address to Yorick’s skull, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘And since I am dead, I can take off my head / To recite Shakespearean quotations’. Furthermore, the entirety of ‘Sally’s Song’, in which Sally pours out her predicament in regards to her relationship with Jack, addresses a more mature audience accustomed to complexly romantic emotions. Arguably, though, the bulk of the adult-orientated thematic material in the film takes place in Oogie Boogie’s underground lair; here, we see Oogie’s gambling problem (his addiction to throwing dice), robot gangsters, cannibalism, and Oogie’s very overtly sexual attraction to Sally (consider the scene in which Sally lures Oogie away from Santa with her detached leg); all of these things would most likely not be comprehended in their entirety by a child audience. Because of the clear comingling of child and adult themes, the film blurs generic lines. While Burton originally intended Nightmare as a ‘children’s film’, its adult references complicate a solid

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positioning of Burton’s creation within that genre. In other words, labelling it a ‘children’s film’ undermines its full scope. Nightmare’s appeal to both a child and adult audience positions it as a ‘family film’, a genre that saw a specific resurgence around the time that Nightmare was created.9

The Role of the ‘Monster’ Following the success of Nightmare in 1993, several children’s and family films – such as Casper (Brad Silberling, 1995), Halloweentown (Duwayne Dunham, 1998), Monsters, Inc. (Pete Docter, 2001), and Burton’s own Corpse Bride (2005) – have featured standout, sympathetic ‘monster’ protagonists, with Monsters, Inc. taking the human identification to an entirely different level, one in which the very act of ‘scaring’ humans becomes little more than the bureaucratic drudgery found in many office environments. These changes in attitudes regarding acceptability in the children’s film – changes that his own Nightmare helped to advance – have allowed Burton to revisit past works largely underdeveloped due to the prevailing conservatism then surrounding children’s movies. A pertinent example is Frankenweenie (1984), one of Burton’s earliest creations: a live-action, 30-minute short about a boy named Viktor Frankenstein (a more than obvious nod to Mary Shelley’s nineteenth-century Gothic novel), who devises a plan to revive his beloved dog ‘Sparky’, recently killed by a moving vehicle. Though every bit as dark as the GothicRomantic source that Burton no doubt drew upon, Frankenweenie ends on a much more optimistic note, as Sparky (unlike the monstrous character on which he is based) is finally allowed to live. However, this final note of positivity was not enough to sway Disney in the film’s favour; as Aurélien Ferenczi notes, ‘the short had originally been intended to be screened before [a re-release of] Pinocchio, but Disney became scared and pulled it from the cinema circuit.’10 Though initially spurned by Disney for its controversial content, Frankenweenie has not only been re-produced and re-released under the Disney banner, but has been expanded from a 30-minute short into a full-length feature film, something Burton had always wanted to do with the project.11 One of the elements of Nightmare that distinguishes it from other children’s movies of the period is its unusual positioning of its protagonist. In previous children’s films, especially those with

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strong Gothic elements, the dichotomy of hero/protagonist and villain/monster/antagonist was, generally speaking, fairly clear-cut. Consider, for example, the dichotomous depiction of the heroine and the Evil Queen in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand et al., 1937), or, alternatively, the dynamic between Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty (Clyde Geronimi, 1959), and the prince who ultimately destroys her. However, with Jack Skellington, Burton presents us with a protagonist that obscures these traditional genre lines: the protagonist, although mostly sweet and only occasionally fierce, is the ‘monster’ – quite literally, a walking skeleton – and from the outset of the film, child audiences are invited both to identify and to empathise with Jack’s internal struggle.

Treatment of Gender Another prominent, unconventional feature of Burton’s film is its treatment of gender. As Misha Kavka points out, ‘the Gothic must [...] be understood as a blurring of boundaries between the masculine and the feminine, where monstrosity is associated with the copying, mirroring, or incursion of one gender form onto or into the other.’12 Because of this Gothic ideal, it is important to recognise the ways in which traditional gender roles are performed and subsequently subverted, especially in the depiction of Jack and Sally throughout the narrative. Though it is more than conceivable that a sceptical feminist audience would be critical of Sally’s initial domesticity and perpetual subservience to Jack, many of her more dominant, heroic actions supersede her ‘traditional’ femininity. Alan Bond argues that ‘through the performance of these gender-oriented tasks, Sally subsequently breaks from gender stereotypes’ and that ‘Sally is a hybrid character of the archetypes [the Cassandra, the Messiah, and the Dark Lady] that exemplify modern feminist intellectuals.’13 Seen this way, Sally is an active hero, offering young girls a source of feminine power and inspiration. Hitherto, female characters in the majority of children’s films, especially Disney’s, played a passive role; a secondary function to the predominantly male heroic journey and status. Subsequently, this gendered bias began to change; one example is Esmeralda in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Gary Trousdale, 1996), who plays an active role in shaping the outcome of the filmic narrative. However, the full realisation of the feminine hero in children’s films (as exemplified by Sally in Nightmare) is perhaps best seen in Selick’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s graphic

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Figure 4-2 Jack recovers his ‘true’ identity of the Pumpkin King after being shot from the skies in his ‘Sandy Claws’ persona

novel Coraline (2009), in which the title character, through her own wit and bravery, overcomes the evil snares of her ‘Other Mother’ and saves both her parents and the souls of three deceased children in a display of feminine power and agency unparalleled in the genre. Jack Skellington, Nightmare’s male protagonist, hardly adheres to notions of traditional masculinity. Despite the implicit, royally patriarchal connotations of his title, the Pumpkin King, one could hardly imagine an established male Disney hero, pre-Nightmare, who could elucidate such pensiveness and self-reflexivity as is presented in ‘Jack’s Lament’, a musical number in which Jack seeks to find meaning in his own existence. He broods over the mundane mediocrity of his own life and his growing sense of emptiness – ‘Oh there’s an empty place in my bones / That calls out for something unknown / The fame and praise come year after year / Does nothing for these empty tears’ – exemplifying a level of self-introspection and rumination wholly atypical of traditional, male Disney heroes. Furthermore, even when Jack is forced into conventionally masculine gender roles (for example, his role as scientist during his Christmas ‘experiments’, and his usurping role as Santa Claus), ultimately he falls short in achieving the ends he initially seeks. He utterly fails as a scientist, destroying equipment and throwing books around in frustration at his incomprehension. All of the children he delivers to as ‘Santa Claus’ are horrified at his ‘presents’, and he is ultimately shot down before he is allowed to finish his run as Santa. The distinctive treatment of

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gender – both in Jack and Sally’s portrayal – sets Nightmare in sharp contrast to earlier films in the Disney canon that reinforce stereotypical gender roles in their attempts to remain faithful to their fairytale source material.

Nightmare as Dark Comic Fairy Tale The Nightmare Before Christmas is also, at its most basic level, a fairytale. The fact that it tells an original and distinctive story does not deny, however, that Jack’s resolution of his internal dilemmas, adventures in Christmas Town and beyond, and victory over the villainous Oogie-Boogie all smack of the Grimms’ narratives. Even Jack’s story itself seems, by the film’s conclusion, to impart the traditional fairytale moral – in this case, the notion that one must ultimately find contentment with one’s own self, community, and lot in life. What sets Nightmare apart from classical fairy-tale narratives is its insistence on the monstrosity of its protagonist, the mingling of black (or dark) comedy into the narrative, and Burton’s evident NeoVictorian influences.14 Given the tendency of dark comic narratives to impose witty (and oftentimes satirical) action upon otherwise serious topics such as death, destruction, and the like, the idea of a skeletal Pumpkin King – himself the embodiment of death – taking over the duties of Santa Claus (a red-faced, corpulent man almost literally bursting with life and who clearly serves as Jack’s polar opposite) with disastrous results marks a clear illustration of the dark comic elements in Nightmare. Further examples include the Mayor’s (whose facade consistently switches back and forth between a flesh-coloured, jovial smile and a horrific, white-faced, toothy frown) constant physical bumbling – as when he takes a dramatic tumble down Jack’s front steps after switching to his ‘evil’ face – and the comical actions of Sally’s detached limbs (such as when one of her severed arms knocks Dr Finkelstein about the head). These dark comic elements, a standout feature in the death-laden landscape of Halloween Town, are also prominent tropes in children’s Gothic fiction, particularly by authors like Road Dahl (e.g., The Witches, 1983, and James and the Giant Peach, 1961). Julie Cross, in her discussion of humour in Gothic children’s narratives, argues that: These over-the-top grotesques/caricatures [like Jack and the other citizens of Halloween Town] are an important source of early

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humour. Such exaggerated types do not require subtlety, and they are so ridiculous that they can have the effect of reducing tension through humour […] they can even provide psychological management of the uncanny by the comic as the caricature’s threat or its disturbing quality is diminished through comic ridicule.15 Many children’s films, following Nightmare, foster the notion of psychological management of the uncanny through dark comic treatment. Two examples can be seen in Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and Corpse Bride. It is no secret that Roald Dahl was extremely displeased with Mel Stuart’s 1971 film adaptation of his 1964 children’s classic, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The film, renamed Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, often deviates from the text on which it was based, portraying the punishments of the ‘bad’ children in a cheesy, slapstick fashion devoid of the dark undertones of the source text. Such was not the case with Burton’s adaptation, in which the quasi-sinister implications of the children’s punishment are readily apparent and in which the possibility of death seem very real and constant throughout the tour of Wonka’s factory. However, despite this darker aura, by the end of Burton’s version of Dahl’s novel, the children who succumbed to the dark, grotesque punishments inflicted by Wonka are seen slowly filing out of the factory, attempting – in a markedly humorous way – to adapt to the new forms they have been given through their respective punishments or comically lamenting their failures in the factory. The same dark elements that pervade Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are present in Burton’s Corpse Bride, so much so that there is a scene in which a dancing coterie of corpses, led by ‘Bonejangles’, the walking skeleton, engages in a song that centres festively around ‘a murder most foul’. Furthermore, Emily, the ‘corpse bride’, often has her own ghastly aura diminished through comic happenings; for example, she loses an organ or appendage several times throughout the film, usually resulting in slapstick humour, as when one of her legs lodges in a tree root, causing her to tumble in the dirt, or when one of her eyes dislodges itself during an otherwise serious, hysterical moment of genuine emotion. Both Bonejangles and Emily serve to illustrate the kinds of comic ridicule that Cross observes, and perpetuate the type of grotesque (though psychologically-beneficial) representations of comic death that films like Nightmare have rendered ‘appropriate’ for children. Subsequent examples of this type of black humour can be seen in contemporary child-orientated films like ParaNorman

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(Sam Fell and Chris Butler, 2012), in which walking corpses are made objects of slapstick comedy. One final quality that distinguishes Nightmare from earlier family films – especially Disney’s – is its deployment of the dark elements that are the very substance of the film. Indeed, the most objectionable content in The Nightmare Before Christmas seems to be the abundance of death, violence and the presence of the proverbial ‘monster’. Of course, Disney films dating back to the 1930s can hardly be said to be devoid of these elements, even if they are not totally suffused with them. Yet Disney’s first animated feature, Snow White, is replete with ‘dark’ elements. It is made explicit that the Huntsman has been sent to cut out Snow White’s heart and bring it to the Queen, who herself undergoes a horrific transformation into a haggard old witch; it is this same witch who later plummets from a cliff (presumably to her doom) in one of the movie’s final scenes. Furthermore, a subsequent Disney ‘classic’, Sleeping Beauty, features nearly all of the same dark elements as Snow White, with an equal focus on monstrosity and death in Maleficent’s transformation into a great, black dragon and her subsequent demise at the hands of the Prince. These are but two examples. At the same time that Nightmare was being produced, Disney Pictures was also hard at work creating what would eventually become one of their most critically and commercially successful animated features – Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991). In many regards, Beauty and the Beast – with its monstrous main character (the Beast), a dark and looming Gothic landscape and castle, and the death of one of the film’s human characters, Gaston – is just as much a Gothic film as Nightmare. However, the Gothic aspects of Burton’s film are sustained throughout its entirety, whereas they remain incongruities in Beauty and the Beast and other similar Disney films, where their periodic infiltration fulfils dramatic purposes and intentionally elicits fear. In contrast, Burton’s film relates to a long line of Gothic television and cinema that gives comic treatment to the presence of death and the ‘monster’ in order to subvert and effectively diminish (rather than emphasise) their negative psychological impact. Burton’s Nightmare no doubt partly inherits its comic treatment of the Gothic from American television shows from the 1960s – such as The Munsters (1964–66) and The Addams Family (1964–66) – and films like Labyrinth (Jim Henson, 1986). The pervasive presence of these dark Gothic elements in Nightmare have a similarly beneficial psychological effect, allowing their audience the

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opportunity for sustained exposure to frightening possibilities, thus diminishing the fear of those possibilities through familiarity.16

Nightmare: History, Reception and the Future of Children’s and Family Cinema Retrospectively, we can appreciate the elements of The Nightmare Before Christmas that differentiated it from other children’s films of its time. However, we cannot ignore the fact that these innovations ensured that it was excluded from the traditional Disney canon and relegated to a lesser Disney-owned film company (Touchstone) for production and release. In defence of the company’s decision, the early 1990s was an extremely unstable period in American history for the free and open acceptance of artistic expression in the entertainment industries. Significant right-wing religious conservative movements (such as the so-called ‘Moral Majority’)17 had flexed considerable political muscle during the mid-to-late 1980s in an attempt to exercise artistic censorship, and although their primary focus was on the music industry, many major film companies (Disney included) no doubt similarly felt these pressures. That being the case, it is understandable that Disney was reluctant to commit to Burton’s highly unorthodox and macabre story, especially given the increasing focus of media conglomerates during the early 1990s on ‘family’ entertainment, and the socio-political pressure to maintain the rigid, conservative standards of what was acceptable in the genre. Despite the many hurdles Burton and company had to overcome in order to make his vision a reality, The Nightmare Before Christmas was finally completed and later released in the fall of 1993. Ferenczi tells us that on its release the film did very good business (over $50 million in the USA against a budget of $18 million), but Disney […] held back on the merchandising that is usually piled up in the Disney stores with each new production, and [they] showed little interest in releasing the film abroad.18 Disney’s lacklustre marketing campaign, coupled with the decision to distribute via Touchstone, suggests that they had low expectations for the film. Nor did they anticipate its subsequent cultural impact. The Nightmare Before Christmas was not only a commercial success,

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but it also garnered more-than-favourable critical notices, which led to a worldwide release in 1994 and an expanded programme of associated merchandise. Since its initial release, Nightmare has developed into a marketing and merchandising phenomenon. Whereas one would have been hard-pressed to find a single Jack Skellington figurine on the shelf of a Disney store during its first year of release, one can now buy Nightmare Before Christmas clothing, accessories, perfume, action figures, video games, dolls, board games, posters and more at a continually-expanding number of merchandising outlets. Furthermore, 2006 saw its re-release in theatres, with one very notable alteration – the movie was marketed as a ‘Disney Digital 3-D’ production. While more cynical film industry analysts would see this as little more than an attempt by Disney to rectify what was clearly a past marketing mistake, film scholars like Noel Brown attribute this change, at least in part, to the commercial phenomenon of the post-1980s Hollywood ‘family film’, in which companies such as Disney utilise ‘the ability, and the need, to exploit products across numerous horizontally-integrated platforms.’19 Seen in this way, Burton’s film has, through its commercial exploitation, been reconfigured from its core identity as a dark, progressive ‘children’s film’ (that nonetheless appeals to adults as well) into a marketing goliath that fits more within the current, commercially-laden definition of the ‘family film’. I would further argue that the transition of The Nightmare Before Christmas from a Touchstone to a Disney movie (and therefore to a more ‘traditional’ canon of children’s film) speaks of broader sociocultural implications that go far beyond simple commercialism. It seems that the current cultural climate of entertainment media and literature is now wholly saturated with sympathetic ‘monsters’ like Jack Skellington. From Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–8), to Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels (2001–13) and their True Blood television adaptations (2008– ), to other popular television series such as Being Human (2008–13) and The Vampire Diaries (2009– ), one can hardly visit an entertainment media outlet or bookstore that is not inundated with various works of ‘monster’ fiction that contain conventionally monstrous characters who remain readily identifiable with their human audience through their specific, ‘human’ qualities. Indeed, it would appear that what we are currently experiencing is a veritably insatiable cultural desire for the sympathetic ‘monster’, be it werewolf, vampire, ghost, zombie or any number of other supernatural entities. Even the zombie, arguably the

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perpetual non-human, outsider, ‘other’, and physical embodiment of death itself, has been afforded sympathetic treatment with films like George Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005), Andrew Currie’s Fido (2006), and especially Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies (2013). Because of this socio-cultural fixation on the monstrous and the grotesque, the ratings and standards for what were previously deemed ‘acceptable’ in child-orientated films have now been greatly relaxed; this is, no doubt, due in no small part to the boundary-pushing impact of earlier children’s films like Nightmare. Through this examination of the cultural and commercial impact of The Nightmare Before Christmas, I have attempted to show how films like Burton’s can influence the ways in which we determine ‘acceptable’ themes and issues for children’s and family films. Hopefully, this analysis will open the door to further critical work on both Nightmare and on the larger socio-cultural questions that this discernible shift in the perception of the ‘monster’ raises. If this cultural fixation on the Gothic embodiments of the grotesque (what I call the ‘romanticising’ of the monster) exists outside the limited realm of fiction writing and entertainment media, does this lead us to the possibility that what we have historically conceived of as the ‘other’ is no longer the ‘other’? If so, how do we begin to define the ‘other’ in a postmodern society that not only accepts but clearly embraces the idea of the outsider or monster? If the ‘other’ embodies little more than the fear of death, are we showing our own humanistic progress by attempting to overcome it through humanising, or making comic ridicule of these monstrous creatures, or are we merely deflecting those fears? All of these larger, socio-cultural questions, once addressed, are pertinent to the future of children’s and family cinema and serve to allow us actively to examine and analyse what we consider acceptable in the genre.

Notes 1. Aurélien Ferenczi, Masters of Cinema: Tim Burton (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2011), p. 49. 2. Ibid., p. 54. 3. D23, the Official Disney Fan Club Website [accessed 20/5/2013]. 4. Karen Coats, ‘Between Horror, Humour, and Hope: Neil Gaiman and the Psychic Work of the Gothic’ in Anna Jackson et al., eds, The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 77–92.

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5. Claudio Barbanelli, ‘Individuation and the Five Factor Model of Personality Traits’, European Journal of Psychological Assessment, vol. 13, no.2 (1997), pp. 75–84. 6. Perry Nodelman, The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (New York: Pearson, 2002), p. 148. 7. Chris Hicks, ‘“Nightmare” Is Pleasant Surprise But Too Spooky for Small Kids’, Deseret News, 22 October 1993. 8. Todd McCarthy, ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’, Variety, 8 October 1993. 9. Noel Brown, “Family’ Entertainment and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema’, Scope: an Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, Issue 25 (February 2013). 10. Ferenczi, Masters of Cinema: Tim Burton, p. 15. 11. Ibid., p. 12. 12. Misha Kavka, ‘The Gothic on Screen’ in Jerrold E. Hogle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 209–28. 13. Alan Bond, ‘Skeletons, Rag Dolls, and Ambiguous Swamp Creatures: Gender in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas’, Dialogues @ RU, vol. 4 (2008), pp. 2–4. 14. For a more in-depth discussion of the Neo-Victorian elements in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, see Kara M. Manning, ‘“That’s the Effect of Living Backwards”: Technological Change, Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books, and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland’, Neo-Victorian Studies, vol. 4, no.2 (2011), pp. 154–79. 15. Julie Cross, ‘Frightening and Funny: Humour in Children’s Gothic Fiction’ in Jackson et al., eds, The Gothic in Children’s Literature, pp. 57–76. 16. See Bruno Bettelheim’s psychoanalytical study of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Random House, 1976), for a discussion of how seemingly dark and menacing figures allow the child an outlet for coming to terms with underlying facets of his/her own psyche. 17. For a fuller discussion of the Moral Majority movement (and an examination of other major conservative religious movements in America), see William C. Martin’s With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996), p. 191. 18. Ferenczi, Masters of Cinema: Tim Burton, p. 10. 19. Brown, ‘“Family” Entertainment’, p. 1.

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5

Sabu, the Elephant Boy Jeffrey Richards

The 1930s was the pre-eminent era of the child star. Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney topped the list of box office attractions both in Britain and the United States. But Hollywood produced many other child stars, notably Judy Garland, Deanna Durbin, Jackie Cooper, Gloria Jean, Sybil Jason, Bonita Granville, Dickie Moore, Freddie Bartholomew, James Lydon, Ann Rutherford, Jane Withers and Bobby Breen. In Britain there was only one indisputable child star and – almost incredibly – he was Indian. The story of Sabu (1924–63) is more romantic than any film script: a journey from unknown, uneducated Indian mahout (elephant rider) to Hollywood star and World War Two hero. Britain had no tradition of family or child-centred films. But they became the order of the day in Hollywood after concern about the cycles of gangster, horror and sex films that accompanied the arrival of sound led in 1934 to the strengthening and strict enforcement of the Hays Code. As Sarah J. Smith put it, ‘the sanitisation of Hollywood took place almost overnight.’1 There was no British equivalent of the folksy small town family sagas such as the Andy Hardy, Henry Aldrich and Jones Family series. When cinema turned to classic nineteenth-century novels for safe and acceptable family viewing, it was Hollywood, not Britain, which produced the film versions of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Swiss Family Robinson, The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Jane Eyre, The Little Princess, Captains Courageous and Alice in Wonderland. Hollywood provided no fewer than seven adaptations from the works of the great family entertainer Charles Dickens (Dombey and Son, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield); Britain could only manage two (Scrooge and The Old Curiosity Shop).2 87

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The attempts to create a British Shirley Temple in Binkie Stuart and Hazel Ascot failed: audiences preferred the real thing. There had been children’s matinees from the earliest days of the cinema. But there were no films made specifically for children. The programmes at the matinees tended to be made up of slapstick comedies, cartoons, serials and action films, often cowboy films, which were proven to be the children’s favourites. As Terry Staples has written: ‘The films that children saw in the twenties at matinees were the same as everyone else saw at other times.’3 But there were periodic investigations by concerned bodies into the effect of the cinema on children, and they regularly expressed concern that the films shown to them were almost always American, and represented intellectual, physical and moral dangers, particularly the prominence of violence in the fare on offer.4 The arrival of the talkies prompted renewed concern about the deleterious effects of films and, in the late 1930s, the various cinema chains organised regular Saturday matinees as children’s clubs with their own creeds, songs and badges and improving programmes of road safety instruction, charitable collections and citizenship education. However, the film programmes continued to be the same as in the 1920s: short comedies (with Laurel and Hardy particular favourites), serials, B westerns and cartoons. Staples says almost the only exceptions to American domination of the matinee screens were the British comedies of Will Hay.5 It was not until 1943 that J. Arthur Rank set up a Children’s Film Department at GB Instructional to make films especially for children and this was succeeded in 1951 by the Children’s Film Foundation which until 1987 made feature films and serials specifically for showing at the children’s matinees. But the CFF product still had to compete with the B westerns of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, Hollywood series such as Bomba the Jungle Boy and Francis the Talking Mule and revivals of 1930s and 1940s comedies featuring the likes of George Formby, Old Mother Riley and the Crazy Gang. In this context, Sabu’s film debut Elephant Boy (1937) was, as Staples put it, ‘unique’ in British cinema.6 In its combination of exotic jungle footage, lovable animals and a central child character for audience identification, it was providing a British equivalent to Hollywood’s Tarzan series. Sabu acquired instant stardom when he appeared in Elephant Boy, a film begun by Robert Flaherty in Mysore and completed by Zoltan Korda at Denham Studios in England. Robert Flaherty was renowned as the director of a series of visually stunning and poetically imaginative documentaries, shot

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entirely on location and exploring the lives of men and women in the wilds. Films such as Nanook of the North (1922), Moana (1926) and Man of Aran (1934) had earned him the reputation of being ‘one of the masters of cinema’.7 Alexander Korda was one of his admirers and when Flaherty approached him with an idea for a film about a boy and an elephant in India, Korda saw the opportunity to produce something which would add to the cultural prestige of his company, London Films. Knowing Flaherty’s methods, Korda agreed to finance a year’s filming in India, and Flaherty signed a contract which gave Korda total control over the final print. Korda suggested basing the film’s narrative on Kipling’s short story, ‘Toomai of the Elephants’, for which he secured the rights, and Flaherty worked out a narrative plot line with Korda’s scenario chief, Lajos Bíró. In February 1935, Flaherty, his wife Frances, his brother David, his eldest daughter Barbara and a small production team, including cameraman Osmond Borradaile, left for India. Permission had been gained from the Maharaja of Mysore to film in his state, a disused palace was placed at their disposal, and it was in the stables of the Maharaja that Borradaile discovered an illiterate 11-year-old boy, Selar Shaik, son of one of the Maharaja’s mahouts, who had died some time earlier. Borradaile persuaded Flaherty to cast the boy as the young mahout, and he rapidly developed a rapport with the elephant Irawatha, who was to play Kala Nag in the story. Selar, with his boyish good looks, radiant smile and innate charm, was a natural before the camera and took to filming with ease. Flaherty proceeded to shoot 55 hours of film illustrating the importance of elephants to Indian life and highlighting the skill of the mahouts. But none of this footage was sent back to London. By the time the original budget of £30,000 had inflated to £90,000, an alarmed Alexander Korda sent his brother, the director Zoltan, out to India, and he reported back that there was a film – but it had no story.8 Consequently, in June 1936, Korda recalled the production to London, commissioned writer John Collier to fashion a simple narrative from the Kipling story and appointed Zoltan to shoot the narrative scenes at Denham Studios. This meant that Selar had far more dialogue than Flaherty had given him in the completed footage. It included a lengthy prologue spoken directly to camera. Selar, who spoke no English, learned it phonetically and took the whole experience in his stride. The outcome was an 80-minute film which was roughly half-Flaherty and half-Korda. It also meant that Korda found himself with a potential new star, whom he renamed Sabu.9

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Kala-Nag gently places Toomai (Sabu) on his back in Elephant

The first 40 minutes is mainly a visually impressive ethnographic documentary about a boy and an elephant. From the charming opening shots of the elephant tenderly lifting up leaves to reveal the boy Toomai curled up asleep beneath them, the film proceeds to establish the relationship between boy and elephant, as Toomai uses Kala-Nag to help him steal melons from a roof, Toomai washes and grooms him, Kala-Nag is recruited as one of the tame elephants to assist the government hunter Petersen round up wild elephants for government service, the elephants set off for the jungle and the stockade is built. At this point, the story, with most of the sequences shot at Denham, takes over. Toomai’s father is killed by a tiger; KalaNag is handed over to another mahout who ill-treats him, causing the elephant to run amok. Toomai tames him, but fearing that he will be shot, he runs away with the elephant and they witness the legendary elephant dance. Toomai is now able to lead Petersen to the wild elephants and he is acclaimed as a great hunter and will be trained by the head tracker Machua Appa. The climactic elephant hunt is evidently part of Flaherty’s Mysore footage and provides an effective climax to the film.10 Some critics denounced the adulteration of Flaherty’s work by Korda. Typical was John Grierson who, while complaining about the

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Korda element (‘with its synthetic studio camp scenes and West End voices, it brings the film at every turn to an artificial, different plane’), praised Flaherty’s work with Sabu and the elephants, scenes ‘seen with affection, felt. So far as I am concerned, nothing in cinema this year is likely to show anything like it, and despite the cluttering incidentals of Kiplingesque nonsense, I am grateful.’ Of Sabu, Grierson wrote: ‘In his youth and innocence giving a dignity to the Indian people one has never seen before on the screen.’11 Graham Greene, in the Spectator (16 April 1937), denounced the whole project, in particular ‘the bad cutting, the dreadful studio work, the pedestrian adaptation so unfair to Kipling’s story’, in Zoltan Korda’s half of the film.12 He compared Elephant Boy unfavourably to Basil Wright’s documentary Song of Ceylon, which he praised as a great example of poetic cinema.13 But Wright wrote to the Spectator (30 April 1937) complaining that Greene had been deeply unfair to Flaherty and his ‘unique feeling for cinema, his depth of human understanding and [...] his intense personal sincerity.’14 Greene contrived to review the film without once mentioning Sabu. Other critics realised that he was one of its greatest attractions. The Yorkshire Post called Sabu ‘very attractive [...] intelligent and natural’, and The Manchester Guardian said he played Toomai ‘with considerable charm’.15 They were highlighting precisely those qualities that made him an instant star. The film was a box office hit, grossing £100,000. But since the film had cost £150,000 to make, it constituted a loss.16 After its initial general release, Elephant Boy would later be included in children’s matinee programmes. Sabu’s romantic story was recounted in a book for children by Frances Flaherty and Ursula Leacock, Sabu the Elephant Boy (J. M. Dent, 1937), lavishly illustrated with stills from the film and with a scrawled hand-written introduction by Sabu himself. It recounted his friendship with the elephant Irawatha, his involvement in the filming and his eventual departure for England, with the hope that he would return to be reunited with his elephant. The success of Elephant Boy seems to have inspired a few film-makers to attempt child-centred domestic productions. They included Chips (1938) – sea scout captures smugglers; Scruffy (1938) – two burglars reform and adopt runaway orphan and mongrel dog; and Just William (1939) – comic exploits of William Brown and his boy gang ‘The Outlaws’. But they were mainly inexpensive ‘B’ pictures and none produced an enduring British child star to rival Sabu. Sabu had travelled to England with his older brother Dastagir. He was enrolled in a private school at Beaconsfield, rapidly learned

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English and was groomed for stardom by Alexander Korda. Frances Flaherty wrote: ‘The studio went wild about him. His acting amazed them. They insured his life for £50,000 and set their best writers to work writing for him the story of another film.’17 Sabu became an instant celebrity, sculpted by Lady Kennet, painted by Egerton Cooper, broadcast on the BBC and televised at Alexandra Palace.18 Korda did not make the mistake of losing control of Sabu’s next vehicle. He commissioned a story from the novelist A. E. W. Mason, author of The Broken Road, a classic novel of British India featuring the friendship of an Indian Prince and a British boy, and what became of them when they grew up. This provided one of the themes of the 20,000-word novella The Drum, which Mason wrote. A script was developed from the story by Lajos Bíró, Arthur Wimperis, Patrick Kirwan and Hugh Gray. Central to the script was the anxiety of the British to maintain peace and the idea of friendship, the friendship of the Indian Prince Azim and the cockney drummer boy Bill Holder, which Mason saw as ‘a symbol of the friendship which is common between British people and the Pathans of north-west India’,19 and the friendship established between Azim and Captain and Mrs Carruthers, cemented when she saves his life from assassins sent by his uncle. The Britishness of the British Empire is stressed, with the very pukka English characters complemented by the presence of a canny Irish doctor and a kilted Scottish regiment (which launches into a wild highland dance at one stage, and whose sergeant-major delivers a toast in Gaelic).20 Osmond Borradaile was despatched with a camera crew to shoot scenes in Technicolor on the North-West Frontier, at Peshawar, in the Khyber Pass and, with the cooperation of its ruler the Mehtar, in the state of Chitral.21 The Indian scenes and location filming in North Wales were seamlessly blended together with the scenes shot at Denham to produce a colourful, exciting and consistently engrossing ‘film of empire’. The Drum was the second in Korda’s imperial trilogy, coming between Sanders of the River (1935, set in Nigeria), and The Four Feathers (1939, set in the Sudan). All three were directed by Zoltan Korda, designed by Vincent Korda and produced by Alexander. All three proclaimed the virtues and values of the British Empire. While Sanders centred on civil administration, The Drum was a military film, drawing freely on the heroic scarlet and gold imagery of the Indian Army and the exhilarating literary and filmic tradition of adventure and excitement on the North-West Frontier, stirring regimental ceremonial, and the Kiplingesque concept of ‘The Great

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Game’, dangerous secret service work in the defence of the Empire. The Drum involves the setting up of a British protectorate in a key border state. Sabu, top-billed, is excellent as Prince Azim, charming, loyal, brave and authoritative. It is instructive to compare the performances of Sabu and Desmond Tester. Tester as Bill Holder is very obviously ‘acting’, his performance consciously constructed. Sabu, on the other hand, seems completely natural and unselfconscious. Here Sabu plays the ‘Good Native’, Prince Azim, opposed to the ‘Bad Native’, Azim’s uncle, the power-mad fanatic Ghul Khan (Raymond Massey). In deploying a child to demonstrate the virtues of Empire and to effect a rapprochement between the British and the Indians, The Drum is a British analogue of the Shirley Temple Kipling-derived vehicle Wee Willie Winkie (1937). The Drum was a critical and popular success. Made at a cost of £136,000, The Drum brought in £200,000 at the box office.22 The film received a different reception in India.23 The Indian press waged a campaign against it as anti-Indian propaganda. The Muslim League complained that the film sought to divide the Muslim community. There were objections to scenes of the Muslims at prayer and a mullah preaching holy war. The film was accused of fomenting fears of a Muslim takeover of Hindu India, with Ghul Khan depicted not as a nationalist rebel seeking the liberation of India but as a conqueror aiming at personal power. The Indian National Congress complained that Sabu was being used as a tool of imperial propaganda, shown putting his friendship with the British ahead of freedom for his people. Film India said: ‘The popularity of Sabu in The Drum is the popularity of a faithful dog or a household servant, not of ordinary human beings.’24 When the film was released in Bombay, the two cinemas showing it were picketed and there were violent demonstrations. In Delhi, there were similar protests, and the owner of a cinema showing the film was forced to flee to Ceylon. It was eventually banned in various Indian provinces. In 1939, RKO Radio Pictures sought to cast Sabu in the title role of Gunga Din. Korda refused to release him: he was planning something different for Sabu. His third Korda vehicle was to be inspired by the Arabian Nights. The Thief of Bagdad had been a hit for Douglas Fairbanks Sr in 1924. But Korda had an entirely new story developed, scripted by Lajos Bíró and Miles Malleson, turning the thief into a boy, to be played by Sabu. The result would be one of the great fantasy films, but it is a miracle that anything emerged at all, as the film had six different directors and survived a shift of production

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from Britain to America, necessitated by the outbreak of the war. Filming began early in 1939, with Ludwig Berger as director. But difficulties rapidly appeared. Berger insisted on Oscar Straus as the composer, and he produced a series of Viennese operetta tunes that were deemed totally inappropriate. Korda hated the music and was dismayed by Berger’s style, but to sack him would require compensation, so Korda took to co-directing scenes with Berger and effectively countermanding his orders until Berger withdrew from the production. Most of his footage was scrapped. While continuing to direct some portions of the film himself, Korda set up three other units headed by Michael Powell, American director Tim Whelan and associate producer William Cameron Menzies. Straus was replaced by Miklós Rózsa, who had demonstrated his ability to score exotic subjects in The Four Feathers, and his score became one of the film’s assets. Unable to shoot scenes as planned in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa because of the war, Korda relocated the production to America, and Zoltan Korda directed the sequences in the Grand Canyon and at the General Service Studio in Hollywood. Despite all of this, the conception remained that of Alexander Korda, who oversaw everything and who deployed the best talent that Denham Studios could offer. The resulting film, premiered in time for Christmas 1940, 20 months after shooting began, won three academy awards for Technicolor photography, set design and special effects, three of the things providing the cohesive vision of the film, together with the score.25 The infectious joie de vivre, poetic dialogue, soaring imagination and sumptuous production values set it above others of its kind. Neither the 1960 nor the 1979 remakes approached it in inspiration. The story of the Thief centres on Abu, the irrepressible boy thief, who befriends Ahmad, the ruler of Bagdad (John Justin), dethroned and blinded by his evil vizier Jaffar (Conrad Veidt). Jaffar seeks the hand of the Princess of Basra (June Duprez) who loves Ahmad. The film sees the leading characters encounter a series of wonders: the Temple of the Goddess of the All-Seeing Eye with its giant guardian spider, the Flying Horse, the Magic Carpet, the murderous multi-armed Silver Maid, the Genie of the Lamp and the Blue Rose of Forgetfulness. In the end, Ahmad and his Princess are united and the evil Jaffar killed by an arrow fired by Abu as he attempts to escape on the Flying Horse. The forces of good and evil have perfect embodiments in the persons of the two stars, Conrad Veidt and Sabu. Michael Powell found Sabu ‘enchanting’. He thought:

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The triumph of the film and the reason for its perennial success is Sabu. It was a stroke of genius on Korda’s part to buy [...] the rights to [...] The Thief of Bagdad and remake it with a child. For a boy there is no future and no past – only the present. He speaks the truth or tells lies with equal facility, according to circumstances. His reactions to danger are immediate and unsubtle. All this is in Sabu’s performance as the little thief, and he is kind and wise and just, and would certainly make a good warrior king for his people, only – he just wants one more adventure first.26 Korda himself defined the role of Sabu as an identification figure for audiences when he wrote in a foreword to the book of the film: ‘At heart we are all Abus, and we yearn to perform his kind of legerdemain – the kind that gives happiness to mankind. The Thief of Bagdad is the closest we may ever come to realising that ideal.’27 The film made 1 million dollars at the box office. The snag was that it had cost 2 million to produce.28 It proved perfect escapism for the dark days of 1940–41, and some may have seen an allegory for the current situation in the defeat by a brave, loyal and enterprising boy of an evil, black-clad, German-accented dictator, whose philosophy is that men respect only three things: ‘The lash that descends, the yoke that breaks, the sword that slays. By the power and terror of these you may conquer the earth.’ Its success inspired in Hollywood a new genre of family film – the Oriental extravaganza which plundered the Arabian Nights tales for subjects. Also, three of the four stars of Thief, June Duprez, Conrad Veidt and Sabu remained in Hollywood to pursue their careers. Korda’s final film with Sabu was The Jungle Book (1942), directed by Zoltan and designed by Vincent Korda. Adapted by Laurence Stallings from five of Kipling’s Jungle Book stories, it involved no filming in India. The jungle was recreated on ten acres of California’s Sherwood Forest and on the back-lot of the General Service Studio. The result was a beautifully realised jungle fantasy, complete with ruined city and native village. The adventures of Mowgli are narrated by an elderly storyteller (Joseph Calleia), whose role echoes the prominence of storytellers (John Justin, Allan Jeayes) in The Thief of Bagdad, referencing the universal childhood experience of being told stories. When a tiger kills his father, baby Natu wanders off into the jungle and is found and raised by the wolves. He makes friends with the animals but later returns to the village of men. Thereafter, he encounters both love and prejudice, fights and kills Shere Khan – the

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tiger who killed his father – encounters and deals with three greedy treasure-hunters and finally saves the animals from a raging jungle fire before returning to the jungle and his animal friends. The film unobtrusively teaches lessons, exposing the evils of greed, which drives the treasure-hunters to murder, and superstitious prejudice which causes the villagers to turn on Mowgli, as a witch-child, whip him, imprison his mother and set fire to the jungle. Notable features were the remarkable animal photography and Miklós Rózsa’s evocative score, with musical motifs for each of the animals. But the film owes much of its success to Sabu. He is the ideal embodiment of Mowgli, the wild jungle boy, who appearing naked in the native village can at first only growl and sniff but who gradually learns the ways of man. His relationship with the animals is beautifully observed. It is perhaps Sabu’s finest screen performance. The New York Herald-Tribune said: ‘The chief asset of this particular literary classic on the screen […] is the presence of Sabu in the role of Mowgli […] he gives a direct and unswerving portrayal which holds the production together far more than the script or the spectacular staging.’29 Korda biographer Paul Tabori called it ‘one of Korda’s most successful and harmonious achievements’.30 Budgeted at £250,000, the film made ‘a handsome profit’.31 Like Elephant Boy and the Tarzan films, it combined the appeal of animals, the jungle

Figure 5-2 Sabu as Mowgli in Korda’s Technicolor production of The Jungle Book

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and youthful adventure. The four Korda productions could all be described as classic ‘family films’. Each features a young, orphaned protagonist on a journey of self-discovery, the central importance of friendship (between man and boy, between boy and boy, between boy and animals), wild, exotic locales and animals (preferably anthropomorphic). Like Harry Potter, Sabu’s young heroes had special powers (communication with animals, magic). The films were also consciously promoted and marketed as vehicles for Sabu. It was producer Walter Wanger who recognised the importance of the success of Thief of Bagdad and the appetite of the public for Technicolor escapism and persuaded Universal to commission Arabian Nights (John Rawlins, 1942). Michael Hogan’s script appropriates several of the plot-lines of Thief. The Caliph of Bagdad, Haroun al-Raschid, is dethroned by his evil Vizier Nadam and his ambitious half-brother Kamar-al-Zaman. Kamar is obsessed with dancing girl Sherazade, who falls in love with Haroun. Haroun is befriended by quickwitted young tumbler Ali-Ben-Ali and a troupe of acrobats and by their aid, the villains are defeated and the hero and heroine united. Jon Hall, who had originally been considered for the John Justin role in Thief, was cast as Haroun and Maria Montez, a Spanish beauty born in the Dominican Republic, as Sherazade. Sabu was put under contract by Universal and cast to repeat his Abu characterisation as Ali-Ben-Ali. Jon Hall, handsome and dashing, could handle the swordplay and the dialogue, and Sabu was as engaging as ever. Despite Montez’ thespic ineptitude, the film had ravishing Technicolor photography, lavish sets, scantily clad harem girls, action scenes and romance. No matter that it had no magic and none of the poetry or imagination or scale of Thief; it was a huge hit with the public.32 Universal had perfected a formula for exotic melodrama with wholesome family appeal. For the women, there was handsome, dashing hero Jon Hall; for the men, glamorous Latin beauty Maria Montez; and as an identification figure for the children, the resourceful teenage sidekick Sabu. There were exotic locations, spectacular action scenes, romance and Technicolor. Hall and Montez were teamed in five more Universal melodramas, derided by the critics and lapped up by the entertainment-hungry wartime population. Universal alternated oriental extravaganzas with South Seas melodramas for Hall and Montez. In White Savage (Arthur Lubin, 1942) and Cobra Woman (Robert Siodmak, 1944), Sabu repeated his Abu character as the loyal, energetic, quick-witted friend of the hero. The difference

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from Thief was that the emphasis now was not on the boy, but on the glamorous Montez and the dashing Hall. They were primarily HallMontez films, not Sabu films. In 1944, Sabu became an American citizen and immediately volunteered for service in the Army Air Corps. His role in the Hall-Montez films was taken by another Hollywood ‘exotic’, the half-Turkish, half-Czech Turhan Bey. Sabu served as a rear gunner in B24 bombers in the Pacific, emerging as an authentic war hero, loaded with medals and citations. When he returned to Universal, the Hall-Montez films had ended. Sabu made his screen comeback in Tangier (George Waggner, 1946), a noirish, 75-minute exotic thriller starring Montez, its title, a nightclub setting, corrupt police chief and Lisbon plane presumably intended to evoke memories of Casablanca. Third-billed Sabu, unusually wearing a suit, was cast as a guitar playing native guide, who smiled a lot and sang three songs but otherwise had very little to do. It was Michael Powell who came to Sabu’s rescue in 1947, when he cast him in his latest film, Black Narcissus, which turned out to be a masterpiece. The Powell-Pressburger adaptation of Rumer Godden’s novel featured the experiences of a group of Anglican nuns who are sent to set up a convent in an abandoned Indian palace in the Himalayas. A subplot centres on the Young General, heir to the local Rajput ruler who has given the nuns the old palace. He comes to the convent to acquire an education but ends up eloping with one of the pupils, the sexy teenage Kanchi (Jean Simmons). Powell had thought Sabu perfect for the role of the Young General, and he and Emeric Pressburger had built up the part.33 Clad in a succession of gorgeous outfits and dripping with jewellery, Sabu is indeed perfect as the charming, eager to please, eager to learn young aristocrat. The film was shot almost entirely in Pinewood Studios, where a totally convincing Himalayan environment was created, thanks to the production design of Alfred Junge and the cinematography of Jack Cardiff, who both deservedly won Oscars. Fascinatingly, where The Drum had celebrated the presence of the British in India and their positive contribution to bringing peace, order and justice, Black Narcissus could be seen as an allegory of the retreat from Empire, as the good intentions of the nuns are negated by the culture of the people and the geographical environment, and they are forced to withdraw. It can be seen as the film which confirmed Sabu’s transformation from child or teenage star to adult ‘exotic’. Powell and Pressburger then agreed to produce a film which they would not write and direct. The End of the River (1947)

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was to be the directorial debut of an old friend, Derek Twist, who had edited Powell’s film Edge of the World (1937). It charted the trials and tribulations of a young South American Indian confronting the perils and temptations of civilisation. Top-billed, Sabu played the Amerindian boy Manoel, registering his bewilderment at his encounter with civilisation very convincingly. Sabu is excellent and much of the film is imaginatively shot, but the subject was too grim and downbeat for the audiences in austerity Britain.34 Back in Hollywood, Sabu was successively cast in Indian roles in Man-Eater of Kumaon (Byron Haskin, 1948) and Song of India (Albert S. Rogell, 1948). The story of Man-Eater demonstrates why Sabu could never have become a mainstream romantic lead in Hollywood. Director Haskin and writer Lewis Meltzer devised a story which centred on a romance between an educated Indian woman doctor who returns to her village, falls in love with a white hunter who wants to marry her and is torn between staying in the village and returning with him to America. However, veteran producer Sam Bischoff vetoed the script, claiming it would never play in the American South: ‘What will they think in Memphis of a white man falling in love with a dark woman?’ So they had to devise a new script centring on a devoted but childless Indian couple, touchingly played by Sabu and Joanne Page, who are faced with having to separate as he needs a child in order to rule as village headman. However, when the wife acts as bait for the man-eating tiger, leading to the white hunter (Wendell Corey) killing the beast, the villagers relent and allow the couple to adopt an orphan child, whose parents had been killed by the tiger.35 Columbia’s Song of India, title and music courtesy of RimskyKorsakoff, was an engaging eco-thriller, again largely studio-shot. It reunited two of Hollywood’s leading exotics, Sabu and Turhan Bey. Turhan Bey plays Gopal, Rajah of Hakwar, who defies tradition to enter the Forbidden Jungle and hunt and trap wild animals. Sabu plays a local villager, Ramdar, who raids Gopal’s camp and frees the captured animals, concerned that the equilibrium between man and nature is being disturbed. It was while filming Song of India that Sabu met and fell in love with small part actress Marilyn Cooper. They were married in 1948, produced two children, Paul and Jasmine, and enjoyed a very happy marriage. By now, Sabu seems to have thought of himself as American. An American citizen, married to an American, an American army veteran, with a very American passion for hot rod cars, he raised his children as

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Americans. Returning to India in the mid-1950s for the first time since 1936 (when he left for London to complete filming of Elephant Boy), he felt it was no longer his home. But the colour of his skin meant that he was fated only to play ethnic roles: Indians, South American Indians or South Sea islanders. By the 1950s, Sabu was in his mid-twenties, and faced the dilemma of all child stars: what happens when childhood ends? At this point, there seem to have been four options. Some were able to make the transition from child star to adult star. Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland managed that transition. Some, like Jackie Cooper and John Howard Davies, gave up acting for a career in producing and directing. Some left the film industry completely and found careers in other fields; Shirley Temple (politics and diplomacy) and Freddie Bartholomew (advertising) took that route. A final route for former child stars was the decline into drink, drugs or despair. It was this route which led to Bobby Driscoll dying of a drugs overdose at 31, and John Charlesworth committing suicide at 26. Initially, Sabu, who was short of stature and retained his boyish good looks, continued to play the same ethnic roles in which he had made his name, but increasingly in Grade Z quickies for Poverty Row organisations: Savage Drums (William Berke, 1951), Jungle Hell (Norman A. Cerf, 1954), Jaguar (George Blair, 1956) and Sabu and the Magic Ring (Blair, 1957). Like many fading Hollywood stars who sought to prolong their careers in European productions, Sabu travelled to Italy to appear in Hello, Elephant (Gianni Franciolini, 1952) and Treasure of Bengal (Gianni Vernucchio, 1954), and to Germany for Mistress of the World (William Dieterle, 1960). But Sabu also showed a willingness to diversify in order to support his family. In the early 1950s, with film work scarce, with his house having burned down and as he became embroiled in a paternity suit brought by a young dancer, he accepted an offer from Tom Arnold’s Circus to go to England and perform in his familiar role with elephants as the dhoti-clad, turbaned elephant boy. For several years, he performed this role in circuses in Europe. He also began a successful real estate career. Then, in the early 1960s, he made a cinematic comeback in big budget A-features as a character actor. In the safari movie Rampage (Phil Karlson, 1962), set in Malaya but filmed in Hawaii, trapper Robert Mitchum and hunter Jack Hawkins seek to capture for a German Zoo a cross-breed tiger/leopard called ‘The Enchantress’. Sabu headed the supporting cast in the role of the Malay head tracker Talib. In the Walt Disney drama, A Tiger Walks

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(Norman Tokar, 1963), about the effects of a tiger escape on a rural community, Sabu played Ram Singh, the tiger’s Indian circus trainer. Whether or not a career as a character actor beckoned, we will never know. In 1963, at the age of 39, Sabu died suddenly of a heart attack. To this day, he remains the only Indian star to enjoy a global reputation. Let Michael Powell have the last word: Sabu was my friend until his wickedly premature death [...]. He was kind, direct, strong and intelligent. He never had the slightest bit of star fever about him. He said: ‘I and my family are eating well and sleeping well, and that’s all that matters to me’. Marilyn, his lovely American wife, adored him. His two children, Paul and Jasmine, talk about him as if he were still alive. He always will be for we who loved him; and for children in the world, so long as there is a print of The Thief of Bagdad which holds together long enough to be projected.36

Notes 1. Sarah J. Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship (London: I.B.Tauris, 2005), p. 73. 2. On Hollywood, see Noel Brown, The Hollywood Family Film (London: I.B.Tauris, 2012). 3. Terry Staples, All Pals Together: The Story of Children’s Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 22. 4. On the history of children’s matinees in Britain, see Staples, All Pals Together; Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, pp. 141–73; Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010), pp. 67–85. For oral evidence of children’s cinema-going experiences, see Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: I.B.Tauris, 2002). 5. Staples, All Pals Together, p. 73. 6. Ibid., p. 76. 7. Karol Kulik, Alexander Korda: The Man Who Could Work Miracles (London: W. H. Allen, 1975), p. 186. 8. Paul Tabori, Alexander Korda (London: Oldbourne, 1959), p. 193. 9. Reference books generally give Sabu’s real name as Sabu Dastagir. But Philip Leibfried, Star of India: The Life and Films of Sabu (Albany, Georgia: BearManor Media, 2010), p. 17, reveals that Sabu was originally called Selar Shaik. His elder brother, later his manager, was called Dastagir. But this name was mistakenly entered as the family name when the brothers arrived in England and it became their surname. The brother was thenceforth known as Shaik. It was Alexander Korda who devised the name Sabu.

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10. On the making of Elephant Boy, see Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Innocent Eye: The Life of Robert J. Flaherty (London: W. H. Allen 1963), pp. 173–84; Kulik, Korda, pp. 186–95; Charles Drazin, Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011), pp. 174–78; Osmond Borradaile, Life Through a Lens (Montreal and London: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001), pp. 67–87. 11. World Film News, vol. 1, no. 12 (March 1937), p. 5. 12. David Parkinson, ed., Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993), p. 191. 13. Ibid., p. 412. 14. Ibid., p. 566. 15. World Film News, vol. 2, no. 2 (May 1937), p. 23. 16. Drazin, Korda, p. 179. 17. Calder-Marshall, The Innocent Eye, p. 182. 18. David Flaherty, ‘Sabu’, World Film News, vol. 2, no. 1 (April 1937), p. 11. This is an interesting first-hand account of Sabu’s early days in England. 19. Prem Chowdhry, Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 90. 20. Roger Lancelyn Green, A. E. W. Mason (London: Max Parrish, 1952), pp. 218–21. 21. Borradaile, Life Through a Lens, pp. 88–101. 22. Drazin, Korda, p. 195. 23. Chowdhry, Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema, pp. 57–123. 24. Ibid., p. 91. 25. Drazin, Korda, pp. 206–9; Kulik, Korda, pp. 224–26, 230–32, 242–44; Tabori, Korda, pp. 210–14. 26. Michael Powell, A Life in Movies (London: Heinemann, 1986), pp. 323–25. 27. Drazin, Korda, p. 211. 28. The Motion Picture Herald, 25 January 1941, pp. 71, 77. 29. The New York Herald-Tribune, 12 April 1942. 30. Tabori, Korda, p. 228. 31. Ibid., p. 227. 32. Matthew Bernstein, Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 441. 33. Powell, A Life in Movies, p. 580. 34. Christopher Challis describes the filming in Are They Really So Awful? (London: Janus Publishing, 1995), pp. 54–71. 35. Joe Adamson, Byron Haskin (Metuchen, New Jersey and London: Scarecrow Press, 1984), pp. 156–59. 36. Powell, A Life in Movies, p. 324.

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The Classical Hollywood Family on Screen: Living with Father and Remembering Mama Bruce Babington

‘In each of Middletown’s homes lives a family, consisting usually of father, mother and their unmarried children, with occasionally some other dependents’ – Robert and Helen Lynd, 1929.1

The Literal Family Film The term ‘family film’ running through this collection is here narrowed to what will be called ‘the literal family film’, i.e., a narrative centred on the interactions of a nuclear family that falls within the larger grouping of family films – productions for the largest possible audience including, importantly, children, in which the family may or may not be the narrative focus. Obviously, this eliminates family-centric films about, but not for, the family, which are unsuitable for younger audiences. Thus Ah, Wilderness! (1935) and Summer Holiday (1948) are ‘literal family films’, but Desire Under the Elms (1958) and A Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962), dealing with family tragedies, are not. ‘The literal family film’ is discussed here in its classical Hollywood phase from circa 1933/5 (the dates of the film adaptations of Little Women and Ah, Wilderness!, the genre’s immediate sources) to the mid-to-late 1950s. Its core instances are the following: Ah, Wilderness! (Clarence Brown, 1935), Little Women (George Cukor, 1933; Mervyn LeRoy, 1949), the Andy Hardy series (1937–46/58), Our Town (Sam Wood, 1940), Meet me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), Life with Father (Michael Curtiz, 1947), I Remember Mama (George Stevens, 1948), Summer Holiday (Rouben Mamoulian, 1948), Father of the Bride (Minnelli, 1950), Cheaper 103

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by the Dozen (Walter Lang, 1950), Father’s Little Dividend (Minnelli, 1951), On Moonlight Bay (Roy Del Ruth, 1951), Belles on their Toes (Henry Levin, 1952), By the Light of the Silvery Moon (David Butler, 1953) and The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (Levin, 1959). To these may be added, peripherally, two sets of films, the first dominated by Douglas Sirk’s Universal comedies of 1951–52, The Lady Pays Off (1951), Weekend with Father (1951), Has Anybody Seen My Gal (1951), No Room for the Groom (1951), Meet Me at the Fair (1952), and Take Me to Town (1952), romantic and family comedy hybrids (crossed by Sirk with the social satire the genre eschews), in which, typically, both or one of the couple is the surviving parent of a child or children, the usual plot thus requiring with the couple’s union the building of a new hybrid family. Four of these films utilise the conceit of the child choosing his/her parents, by intervening to secure a preferred parentage, the basis of later films – The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (Minnelli, 1963) and Sleepless in Seattle (Norah Ephron, 1995).2 The second set features Mary Pickford’s child/adolescent impersonations in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Marshall Neilan, 1917), The Poor Little Rich Girl (Maurice Tourneur, 1917), Pollyanna (Paul Powell, 1920) and Little Lord Fauntleroy (Alfred E. Green and Jack Pickford, 1921), where a child, literally or metaphorically orphaned, either restores to emotional health the original nuclear family or the surviving parts of it, and/or creates happiness and unities among relatives and friends. Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm were reworked with Shirley Temple and Little Lord Fauntleroy with Freddie Bartholomew in 1930s versions, with other Temple films working similar resolutions to Pickford’s. Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964) varies this plot with the magical nanny taking the child’s role of reforming the dysfunctional family. However, this discussion prioritises the core films, all set in long-established nuclear families, with parents old enough to have adolescent as well as small children, and especially Life with Father and I Remember Mama. ‘The literal family film’ still flourishes, since, despite muchanalysed changes in the family in North American and Western societies, some inflection of the nuclear group is still an overwhelmingly familiar environment to most viewers. But postclassical films, e.g., Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990), Father of the Bride (Charles Shyer, 1991), Little Women (Gillian Armstrong, 1994), etc., inhabit different socio-historical contexts, as the following example illustrates. In the romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail (Nora Ephron, 1998), Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) introduces the two young

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children with him to Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan). She assumes they are his, but he explains that one is his father’s child and the other his grandfather’s, so that, bewilderingly, the little girl is his aunt and the little boy his several-decades-younger brother. Joe comments on this thoughtfully: ‘We are [long pause] an American Family.’ The joke plays the contemporary complications of ever-climbing divorce rates, serial monogamy, and multiply-sourced combination families against ideas of the older stable American family, particularly its idealised representation in classical family comedies. Whether classical or post-classical, though, the genre’s attractions are obvious, with audiences bound to screen events duplicating their own family roles, with many points of identification with characters, familiar environments and situations. Foregrounding the reproductive function of love and sexuality, the literal family film in its necessary comic modality demotes from centrality the romantic couple’s love (seen 20 to 30 years on), diffusing it into parent/children relationships, with families in Talcott Parsons’ terms ‘“factories” which produce human personalities’, i.e., socialising the children and stabilising the parents.3 Though romantic love often preoccupies the older children (Richard and Muriel in Ah, Wilderness! and Summer Holiday; Esther and John in Meet me in St. Louis; Emily and George, treated with exceptional pathos in Our Town; Marjorie and William in On Moonlight Bay and By the Light of the Silvery Moon), even in the latter case where the younger couple’s romance structures two films, it is viewed not as individuality’s quintessence but as cyclic repetition, i.e., from the perspective of the reproducing (in all its senses) family and society, literally from the parents’ viewpoint in the ‘Spring isn’t everything’ finale of the O’Neill films where Nat and Essie see themselves as ‘completely surrounded by love’. It doesn’t matter that youthful first love may not last; the important thing advanced by their films’ rhetoric is the children’s passage to (a socially approved) maturity, and future assumption of parental roles, their assertion of (limited) individuality and (constrained) freedom within the family’s protection. In Ah, Wilderness! and Summer Holiday, deriving from a great and complex play, this involves more tumultuous intellectual and emotional disruptions (Marx, Wilde, Shaw, Swinburne and The Rubaiyat, and the temptations of illicit sexuality) to be negotiated more ambivalently than usual. These youthful relationships, though endearing, are lightweight, and often comically naïve, e.g., Clarence Junior’s ludicrous conversations with

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Mary Skinner in Life with Father, William Sherman’s unconvincing radicalism in On Moonlight Bay, the silliness of Buckley Dunstan, Kay’s boyfriend/husband in Father of the Bride and Father’s Little Dividend, and Mickey Rooney’s risible combination of romanticism and randiness as Andy Hardy. These films’ families tend to be fairly large, between the older pattern of five or six children which Parsons saw as a ‘different system’ and the smaller 1950s nuclear family4 (with Cheaper by the Dozen’s and Belles on their Toes’ 12 extraordinary anomalies along with the 17 – across two families – of The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker; kinds of reductio ad near absurdum of family life). The more restrained expansiveness, besides asserting family’s primacy over the individual, allows typically a range of differently sexed and aged children affording multiple situations between parents and children, between siblings at different stages of development, and between viewers and any of these. In Meet me in St. Louis, the Smiths’ four daughters embody stages towards socialised femininity, Tootie, Agnes, Esther, and the rather frightening Rose, while in Life with Father, the sons, Harlan, Whitney, John and Clarence Junior similarly represent a series of masculine trajectories. A tone of gentle comedy pervades the genre, its serene celebrations depending on a retrospection of ‘the way we were’ (or, rather, ‘the way we wish we had been’) 20–80 years before the films’ production (the early 1900s the preferred time, with Little Women in the 1860s the extreme). Only a few – the Andy Hardy series, Father of the Bride and Father’s Little Dividend – are set in the original audience’s present, but then in a small town or big town’s leafy suburban pastoral (see Meet me in St. Louis). These variations on Thornton Wilder’s Grovers Corners – as distinct from the modern, more satirically-inclined Sirkian sites – are an intensely idyllicised version of ‘Middletown’. The Lynds in their 1929 and 1935 studies of their anonymised ‘Middletown’, in settling on Muncie, Indiana (pop. c. 30,000), chose a site with ‘a small negro and foreign-born population’, so that ‘instead of being forced to handle two major variables, racial change and cultural change, the field staff was enabled to concentrate upon cultural change’.5 Among the differences between the films’ ‘Middletown’ and the sociologists’ (apart from Muncie’s bigger population and industrial base) are that the films’ omission of these groups is a nostalgic strategy to reproduce earlier, less difficult times in their idealised communities, rather than an analytical tool, and that ‘cultural change’, though not wholly denied, is minimised,

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evaded, or seen in its happiest, least conflictual aspects. Nostalgia is everywhere, not only through idyllic mise-en-scène, and the portrayal of a life of unhurried tempi (see the moving though more overtly ambivalent opening of Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942), but through pervasive musicalisation, with the films often approaching the condition of American folk musicals with their fragments of old songs, following the pattern of O’Neill’s source play, and with Summer Holiday, Meet me in St. Louis, On Moonlight Bay, By the Light of the Silvery Moon and even Belles on their Toes crossing genres fully. Stephanie Coontz writes that contemporary nostalgia for the 1950s is ‘real and deserves to be taken seriously, but it usually shouldn’t be taken literally [...] what people really feel nostalgic about has little to do with the internal structures of 1950s families’,6 arguing that faced with difficult changes in the family, worried reaction fixes on a time of imagined stability and optimism. Coontz’s contemporary nostalgists are positioned vis-à-vis the 1950s as the makers and viewers of the classical period films were to the films’ earlier families, presented as less anxious about those obsessive questions of 1940–50s popular sociology and psychology, what men, women, husbands, wives, children, and true masculinity and femininity should be. O’Neill’s ‘Comedy of Recollection’, Ah, Wilderness! (1933 reviewing 1906), was the single most important influence on the genre, immediately made into the 1935 film. Its author commented on his play’s complex self consciousness, ‘a waking dream’, ‘a nostalgia for a youth I never had [...] the way I would have liked my boyhood to have been’, defending its yearning not as literally desiring the past’s resurrection, but as the evocation of ‘a past time which, whatever may be said against it, possessed a lot which we badly need today to steady us’.7 O’Neill’s comments articulate the genre’s more sophisticated possibilities of self-reflection, clearly evident in Meet me in St. Louis and the films directly derived from his play. Lesser films, such as Moonlight Bay and Silvery Moon, imitate the greater ones (Wesley’s disruptions = Tootie’s, William’s faux radicalism = Richard’s, Mr Wingate’s supposed adultery = Richard’s encounter with Belle, the American entry into the Great War = the spectre of New York in St Louis, but all less substantially). Like Poussin’s shepherds, these pastorals’ inhabitants cannot wholly avoid the tombal inscription ‘et in arcadia ego’, signalling nature’s definitive interruption of every idyll – e.g., Beth’s demise in Little Women, the shock of Frank Gilbreth’s death in Cheaper by the Dozen, though the film version of Our Town tries by postponing Emily’s death to the future through making it a dream. However,

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social (as distinct from unavoidable natural) change can largely be reversed by generic tendencies to, if not delete, marginalise anything likely to unsettle the family as a site of pleasure, or, where realism insists on its presence, to contain it through narrative optimism. In the more complex films, this process may, however, produce unsettling moments that resist pacification. Major sub-textual ‘difficulties within the nostalgia’ (to use Andrew Britton’s phrase)8 are the destabilising presence of the drunken choirmaster Simon Stimson in Our Town, the Doppelgänger pairings of Nat and Essie, Sid and Lily (wounded versions of the parents) in Ah, Wilderness! and Summer Holiday, and the shadow texts from the darker reaches of classic American literature and history in Meet me in St. Louis traced by Britton. A lesser-known instance is Margaret Mead’s reading of the complexities surrounding Stanley Banks’s difficulties as husband– father, culminating in his incestuous wedding-scene nightmare in Father of the Bride, and his antipathy towards his granddaughter in Father’s Little Dividend: A daughter’s marriage and permitted absorption in grandchildren may mute the wife’s energetic attitude towards her new activities [i.e., new midlife job or interests] but that involves a severe problem for the husband who has to face the fact that he is a grandfather. In a country that gives so few rewards to age, who wants to be a grandfather? The woman of his unlicensed daydreams is still a slim girl in her teens, now younger than his married daughter, with each step that she takes towards maternity puts him more definitely out of the running.9 Actually, Male and Female, the source of the above, dates from 1949, two years before Father of the Bride, which Mead could not have seen when she wrote. The point, though, is that although the great anthropologist-sociologist-explorer of contemporary American family life was obviously not writing about Spencer Tracy’s both idealised and beleaguered paterfamilias, she might have been, since the content and incisiveness of her analysis are precisely mirrored by the film. For all the genre’s determined sunniness, it and the other representative examples above illustrate how trenchant its critical intelligence can be. As remarked, such dissonant complexities are always enclosed by the genre’s will to believe and give pleasure, and it depends on a film’s or scene’s particular force how much potential they have to resonate within and beyond the films’ closures.

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Life with Father (1947) and I Remember Mama (1948) Life with Father and I Remember Mama, almost exactly contemporaneous, directed by major Hollywood figures (Michael Curtiz and George Stevens, respectively), are both the penultimate products of a four-tiered repackaging across different media – highly popular fictionalised family memoirs, successful Broadway stage adaptations translated into well-loved films, and finally metamorphosed into television sitcoms invoking cinematic memories.10 Their use of big stars rather than the usual character actors in the parental roles (William Powell and Irene Dunne in Father, Irene Dunne in Mama) signals membership of a subgroup of literal family films in which, though the family is (as always) predominant, emphasis falls more on the parents than the children, e.g., Father of the Bride and Father’s Little Dividend, Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on their Toes. Both films centre on largeish families of four children, though Life with Father’s is predominantly male, with four sons, and I Remember Mama’s female, with three girls. Mood constitutes another difference, with Life with Father primarily comic, while I Remember Mama, though not lacking comedy, is infused with pathos, like another Stevens film with literal family film affiliations, Penny Serenade (1941). While many family comedies of the period, with their retrospective leanings, could be called memory films, Life with Father and I Remember Mama are very overtly so, as their titles indicate, with Mama’s events explicitly related by the eldest daughter, Katrin (Barbara Bel Geddes), author of the memoir which the film brings to life, and Father’s implicitly, by Clarence Day Jr (Jimmy Lydon), the author of the literary source memoir, who, as eldest son, is the implicit teller. Both films’ openings create tropes of the present visiting the past; in Father, a hand reaching for a pocket stereoscope via which monochrome photos of old (1883), upper-middle-class New York are shown; while in Mama, an ornate picture frame holds sketches of scenes to come featuring San Francisco, c. 1910. Though both are, unusually, set in cities, they share something of the pastoralising big-town-as-small-town tendency of Meet me in St. Louis, with Madison Avenue in Father a quiet residential area far from the Bowery and Chinatown and Mama’s San Francisco, made homely through the extended family interactions of the Norskamerikanere (Norwegian American) immigrants. The families are, though, greatly separated by class, with Clarence Day Sr a banker, while I Remember Mama’s Hansens are

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the core films’ only working-class family, their difference from the Days encapsulated in Mama’s words at the family’s weekly meetings when the books balance, ‘Is good. We do not have to go to the bank’. In his analysis of the 1950s American nuclear family’s functioning, Parsons – the period’s preeminent sociologist – noted ‘psychopathological conditions’ that interfered with the ‘idealised’ process described, two of which, ‘fields of enormous extent and complication’, were the ‘authoritarian’ father and the ‘overprotective’ mother.11 The other major deviance, homosexuality, seen as ‘radically in conflict with the place of the nuclear family in the social structure’, is like the other two left aside for the norm.12 But while homosexuality has little obvious trace in the literal family films of the time (though aspects of Jo in Little Women have been read this way), and certainly none in Life with Father and I Remember Mama, the two films, with the greater centrality given to parents, can be seen to function as mitigations or denials of Parsons’ two other ‘pathologies’, the ‘authoritarian’ father and the ‘overprotective’ mother.

Life with Father Following the immensely popular stage version as closely as I Remember Mama follows van Druten’s proto-cinematic play, Life with Father’s comedy focuses primarily on Clarence Day Senior’s (William Powell) frustrated attempts to impose order on his household of four sons, and his wife, Vinnie (Irene Dunne). The Andy Hardy films’ pre-narrative tableau announced its members not as the Hardy family but as ‘Judge Hardy’s family’. Clarence Senior outpatriarchs this in telling the employment agency’s manageress who wants to investigate his house’s character, ‘Madam, I am the character of my house’. Seeing his home as a refuge from an outside world of Democrats and Tammany Hall politicians, his attempts at domestic regulation are marginally successful as long as Vinnie’s supervisions appease him – as when we see her early on instructing a new maid about his breakfasting demands. But order in the domestic sanctuary is precarious, as new maids depart frightened by his behaviour, leaving newer ones unable to satisfy him, without his ever realising he is the cause. Even his wife has been listening to a feminist lecturer who believes women should have opinions, leading her to contradict

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her husband on tariffs, drawing his rebuke: ‘I wish to Heaven you wouldn’t talk about matters you don’t know anything about [...] Listen to me if you want to know anything about the events of the day.’ He finds particularly aggravating Vinnie’s attraction to crassly fashionable objects, a rubber plant and a china pug dog, and protests in vain at Cousin Cora (Zasu Pitts) and Mary Skinner (Elizabeth Taylor) staying over on their New York trips, but is repeatedly outmanoeuvred by Vinnie. In numerous sequences, Vinnie evades his attempted post-mortems on her housekeeping, but, when cornered, so baffles his demands that she should run the home like an office with bewilderingly illogical justifications of her idiosyncratic accounting ‘system’ that he finally he gives in to her plan to simplify things by opening accounts at the department stores she frequents which, she argues, will do the bookkeeping for her. By doing this, he grudgingly takes leave of aspects of his conservatism in joining the credit society. Clarence Sr, played by that urbanely witty and most likeable of stars, William Powell, is never simply tyrannical but portrayed as a conservative non-conformist (like Clifton Webb’s Frank Gilbreth in Cheaper by the Dozen, more modernist in outlook with his time and

Figure 6-1 Husband–Father (William Powell) and Wife–Mother (Irene Dunne) in Life with Father

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motion experiments using his many offspring as guinea pigs, but conservative in morals and torn between democracy and benevolent despotism). He is to be enjoyed for his self-dramatisation by his family and the audience as much as he himself savours his role of the put-upon and inevitably defeated battler for the male’s demanding (it might seem too demanding) ‘instrumental’ role. In fact, his authoritarianism is constantly questioned by his other actions, e.g., his good-humoured acceptance of Harlan bringing a forbidden dog into the house, his remark when John complains that some girl has kissed him that he won’t complain when he is older, his sympathy with Whitney’s desire to skip memorising his catechism to play baseball. Equally, Clarence’s affection for ‘dear Vinnie’ is stressed, as when he and the second son, John, agree, after Vinnie has taken to her bed, that things downstairs are ‘lonesome’, when he tells her that without her ‘the house was like a tomb. No excitement’, and in the memory of romantic love (see the Smiths’ ‘You and I’ duet in Meet me in St. Louis), where he joins Vinnie at the piano to sing ‘Sweet Marie’. Clarence Senior’s interaction with Clarence Junior is the most complex of the film’s father–son relationships. Naming his eldest son after himself suggests a misguided desire to mould his offspring in his own image, though the younger sons escape this identical naming, suggesting a tendency rather than an unalterable disposition, important in a narrative which finds the patriarch’s attempts to control amusing, rather than threatening. Two related incidents involve letters addressed to his son, which the father opens as addressed to himself, one of them Mary’s love letter which he interprets as scandalously sent to him by an unknown woman. A suit handed down from father to son is central in three other incidents. In the first, the son tells his mother that the suit refused to let him kneel in church, forcing him into cloning his father’s antipathy to kneeling in prayer. In the others – the first reported, the second dramatised – the suit violently objects to a girl sitting on his knee (‘She was sitting on father’s trousers’), and then similarly disrupts his intimacy with Mary, making him shout: ‘Get off! Get off!’ Clearly, the son’s vexations with his father’s suit, particularly the trousers, are displacements of his chafing at paternal authority. The situation is resolved when Clarence Sr understands that his son needs a new suit in his new role, a perception of his sexual maturing that leads him – like Lew Stone in Love Laughs at Andy Hardy (Willis Goldbeck, 1946), and Lionel Barrymore and Walter Huston in Ah, Wilderness! and Summer Holiday – to initiate a father/son talk, which both his son

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and the audience expect to be about sex. (‘Clarence, there are things about women that I think you ought to know.’) Unlike Barrymore’s and Huston’s lectures, Powell’s homily on male/female difference is not characterised by paternal embarrassment, but entirely based on the antithesis male rationality versus female emotionality, a prejudicial version of Parsons’ division of nuclear family roles into ‘instrumental’ (male) and ‘expressive’ (female) – ‘We men have to run the world [...] A woman doesn’t think at all, she just gets stirred up. They try to get you stirred up too.’ At its end, when the bewildered son says, ‘but father, I thought you were going to tell me about women,’ his father replies, ‘Clarence, there are some things gentlemen just don’t discuss.’ Following his father’s instruction to be ‘firm’ with women, the boy orders Mary to write to him before he writes to her, only for her to refuse pointblank. Clarence Sr’s insistence on the absolute alterity of men and women is ironised in one direction by his own highly emotional – i.e., ‘feminine’ – outbursts (‘I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it!’; ‘What on earth is this world coming to?!’), and in the other by his constantly being outmanoeuvred by Vinnie. The incidents involving the father’s suit connect suggestively with the equally odd happening in which Clarence Jr and John apparently nearly kill their mother. Vinnie worries herself into near fatal decline over Clare’s unbaptised state, or perhaps even fakes her imminent death, fooling even the medics, in order to push Clarence to the font. The narrative refuses disambiguation, but the latter may persuade, given Vinnie’s expertise in getting her way and a conversation with Cora about reminding husbands that they love their wives. The young entrepreneurs Clarence Jr and John, noting that the patent medicine they are selling claims to cure ‘women’s complaints’, put some in her tea. Though a neighbour’s dog succumbs off-screen to the quack cure, it seems, if anything, to revive Vinnie, though their father upbraids them for nearly killing her. Younger children in the genre, less socialised than older siblings (e.g., Wesley in Moonlight Bay and Silvery Moon, and most famously Tootie in Meet me in St. Louis), sometimes commit acts interpretable as attacks on parents and family. Does Clarence Jr’s and John’s act release some unconscious impulse against the mother (did Clarence note his mother’s frigid warning smile at Mary?), or is it a screen for an attack on the father? Whatever half-surfaces here, though, is defused by the comedy, much as Clarence Senior’s more ‘psychopathological’ actions throughout are mitigated by the indulgent context and the stars’ genial performances.

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All these incidents are arranged around a curious central problematic: the revelation that Clarence Sr has never been baptised, leading to Vinnie’s strongly-resisted attempts to get him to the font (and to Heaven). Vinnie’s accomplice here is the unctuous Reverend Dr Lloyd (Edmund Gwenn), who sermonises to a congregation including the Days on the text ‘except a man be born again of water and the spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.’ The source narrative’s ‘he [Clarence Sr] permitted the existence of Christ, but disapproved of all his ideas,’13 is slightly toned down, as Clarence Sr makes declarations such as ‘if there’s one place the church should leave alone it’s a man’s soul.’ Clarence’s Episcopalianism is clearly a social convenience, and the comedy emerging from it is ambivalent (as he leaves for his enforced baptism he shouts ‘Hallelujah, Amen’, waving his hands in a parodic Negro revival meeting gesture). Were audiences expected to be both pleasurably complicit with and amusedly critical of his materialism, which is also used to expose Dr Lloyd’s commercialism in their altercation over the cost of the Days’ reserved pew? The difference between Clarence and Vinnie over his baptism, which, at least from his perspective, suggests that religion is for women and children (Harlan, the youngest, has a screaming fit when John tells him his father is going to hell), not rational men, is another instance of the ‘instrumental’ male/‘expressive’ female divide. It ends, here, in another victoryof-sorts for the female ‘expressive’, around which the film works so many of its effects, accepting the polarity as given, but at the same time amusing itself with its paradoxes, breakdowns, inconsistencies and fallibilities.

I Remember Mama While mild burlesquing of the paterfamilias’s authoritarian tendencies is frequent in the genre, overt subversion of the mother figure is all but unknown, channelled into melodrama and horror (except in Sirk’s satirically-inflected No Room for the Groom, with the comically monstrous, controlling Mrs Kingshead as malignly active as most are lovingly anodyne). However, certainly part of I Remember Mama’s context is the enduring storm created by Philip Wylie’s attack on ‘momism’ in Generation of Vipers (1942), with its extrapolation out of US army statistics of a generation of sons psychologically unfit for service, which he blamed on suffocating ‘hen-harpy’ mothers,

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‘mom, the brass-breasted Baal or mom the enfeebled martyr whose very urine, nevertheless, will etch glass’, giving rise to much worried debate on the mother/son dyad.14 I Remember Mama is a rarity; the only family comedy in which an intact, two-parent family is clearly headed by the woman, as distinct from the familiar pattern of the wife’s discreet subversion of the husband’s authority, of which Vinnie in Father is a paradigm. The versions of Little Women feature Marmee’s inspiring headship of her all-female family, but in the context of Mr March’s temporary Civil War absence (though in the 1933 and 1995 versions, Mr March, after his return, is significantly marginalised), while Belles on their Toes has Dr Lillian Gilbreth, the only one of the genre’s mothers to have a career, sole parent of her outlandish 12-child family, but only after the death of her husband, whose memory dominates the household. It would be going too far to see I Remember Mama as a conscious rejoinder to Wylie’s overwrought rhetoric and the arguments of followers like Dr Edward Strecker, author of Their Mother’s Sons (1946), although it takes extra significance from that context.15 For one thing, Marthe Hansen has three daughters and only one son, so that the mother’s relationship with male offspring (here only Nels) is secondary to that with her daughters (though her treatment of Nels is exemplary, the narrative’s first flashback showing her enabling him to continue school despite financial struggles). However, in a climate of obsession with the ‘pathology’ of the suffocating mother, the presentation of Marthe’s dominance as more a question of strength of temperament than disorder of marital relations – paralleling Margaret Mead’s meditations on sex and temperament in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) and Male and Female (1949)16 – is benign. Katrin remembers her dominating all the episodes she relates, with the exception of Onkel Chris’s (Oscar Homolka) interaction with the daughters and Mr Hyde’s (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) reading classics to the family, in the last of which, however, her positive attitude to the children learning from his performances is stressed. She presides over the family’s weekly audits; genteely blackmails aunts Jenny and Sigrid into not laughing at Aunt Trina’s marriage plans by threatening to disclose embarrassing marriage secrets; breaks hospital rules to keep her promise to visit her youngest child, Dagmar; presides over the ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’ of Dagmar’s cat, ‘Uncle Elizabeth’, the events around Katrin’s graduation, and the family’s visit to Onkel Chris’s deathbed. Even there, many of the scene’s meanings are

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relayed through Marthe as she insists on courtesy to Chris’s ‘housekeeper’ before she is revealed as his wife, joins him in a last drink, takes Kristina into the bedroom to say ‘Farvel’ so that she ‘can see death and not be afraid of it’, and invites Chris’s widow to stay in San Francisco – all instances of her far-from-conventionally-moralising empathy. Finally, less than highly-educated though she may be (referring enthusiastically to ‘Fenimore Kipling’), it is she who visits the celebrated popular author Florence Dana Moorhead and persuades the gourmet writer, in return for family meatball recipes, to read Katrin’s juvenile stories. Marthe’s activity is especially notable because of the genre’s wife–mothers’ tendency to be wholly subsumed, by the latter half of their role, to the point where perhaps a desire to escape contemporary domestic female problematics makes for typically anodyne though unceasingly pleasant portrayals, leading to a sense of mismatching with the more complex husband–fathers (both terms are Parsons’). It reminds one of the Lynds’ bleak comments on the distance between and misconceptions of each other of the sexes of in many Middletown marriages, with only fleeting moments of connection and empathy such as the Lynds were happy to find when they entered some homes.17

Figure 6-2 Mama

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Mama (Irene Dunne) oversees the family finances in I Remember

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With Marthe so central, the narrative carefully avoids suggesting a metaphorical castration of her husband, Lars, who in crucial episodes is absent at work or strike meetings. Though Katrin bypasses Marthe’s loyal ‘I want you should write about Papa’, placing him as secondary both for her and the audience (‘But above all, I remember Mama’), Philip Dorn’s good-humoured, pipe-smoking, imperturbable father has his own strengths, showing only admiration for his wife’s capabilities. Various foregroundings prevent him from being seen as a nullity, as he humorously mediates Dagmar’s insistence that her tomcat is female with the name ‘Uncle Elizabeth’, stage-manages Katrin’s rite-of-passage first coffee, unostentatiously aids Nels’s graduation to male pipe-smoking rituals, and spots the story about Florence Dana Moorhead in the newspaper. The comedy of the tomcat’s name echoes the Hansens’ marriage’s sex, gender and temperament adjustments, managed without the wife’s masculinisation or the husband’s effeminisation. Comparing the two films’ marriages, in Mama the classic nuclear family’s parental role division – a division necessitated, the functionalist sociologists agreed, by the impossibility of either taking on all roles18 – is gender-shifted untraumatically, while in Father, as in the genre’s other films, the divisions are accepted, but with more of a sense of exuberant, exaggerated roleplaying on both sides than is usual, and occasional subterranean hints of reversal. Unlike the majority of films with love plots featuring the families’ older children (e.g., Clarence Junior’s romance with Mary in Life with Father), I Remember Mama is exceptional in that none of the Hansen children have romantic relationships. Marthe is grateful to the impoverished ex-actor, Mr Hyde, for his evening readings, which have kept Nels from the dangers of mixing with delinquent boys (but apparently not girls), while Katrin’s preoccupations are with her writing, her graduation, and again – above all – her writing. While Marthe’s and Lars’s relationship is fond, there is only one marginally physical moment between them, occurring after she says that ‘it’s not good for her [Dagmar, who thinks that her mother brought Uncle Elizabeth back to life after his supposed death in the mercy killing with chloroform carried out off-screen by Marthe] to believe I can fix everything.’ Lars’s affecting reply is that ‘I know exactly how she feels.’ Here, they briefly touch hands before she turns away, in a shot from Katrin’s implied discreet, slightly obstructed, sightline. This absence of the erotic (except for Onkel Chris) places greater weight on the moral education of the children, much more overt in I

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Remember Mama than in other films, especially in the incidents around Katrin’s graduation present, involving both the elder daughters. By contrast, if the family in Life with Father is a factory producing human personalities, any explicit didactic element is marginalised, and with the boys inheriting the upper-middle-class world, and the immigrant family’s push to better themselves in Mama absent, the most important childhood lessons to be learned – with the older boys already little entrepreneurs and John experimenting with the electricity his father professes to dislike – could be said to reside in the cultivation and enjoyment of ‘personality’, as exhibited by their parents in their male and female roles. Oscar Homolka’s ‘Onkel Chris’, the ebullient, physically-imposing, unconventional ‘black Norwegian’ (i.e., black-haired among blonds) head of the extended family releases elements downplayed elsewhere – the broad comedy of his impatience, egotism, terrorising of the aunts except his favourite Marthe, and his scandalous drinking and sexual interests. In a narrative dominated by the good mother, he is a more boisterous, less reined-in version of masculinity than Lars, but is placed neither in direct opposition to him nor to Marthe, who is given special access to his deathbed (though certainly to Peter Thorkelson, Trina’s timid husband). A disruptive masculine force in a context of softened masculinity, Chris’s rough vitality is finally bent to the narrative’s heartfeltness when he reveals that Jenny Brown is his wife, and when, after his death, Marthe finds his notebook recording payments for operations for children crippled, like himself. Chris, without an equivalent in Life with Father, where the masculine–feminine interactions and conflicts are almost wholly expressed through the epiphenomena of gendered temperament rather than direct sexuality (though his masculine force goes beyond this), and anomalous and finally softened in I Remember Mama, reminds the viewer – like the more pathetic, down at heel Uncle Sid in Ah, Wilderness! – of what the genre circumscribes as well as celebrates.

Notes 1. Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (London: Constable, 1929), p. 110. 2. On Family Comedy and the Sirk films, see Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, ‘The Other Side of Midnight: Sirk’s Family Comedies’, Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 234–66.

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3. Talcott Parsons and Robert E. Bales et al., Family Socialization and Interaction Process (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), p.16. 4. Ibid., p. 18. 5. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, p. 8. 6. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 34. 7. Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 358; Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, eds Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 412. 8. Andrew Britton, ‘Meet me in St. Louis: Smith, or the Ambiguities’, The Australian Journal of Screen Theory, 3 (1977), pp. 7–25. 9. Margaret Mead, Male and Female (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 308. 10. Clarence Day, Life with Father; Life With Mother; God and My Father, collected in The Best of Clarence Day (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948); Kathryn Forbes, Mama’s Bank Account (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, Inc, 1943); Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, ‘Life with Father’ in Joseph Mersand, ed., Three Comedies of American Family Life (New York: Pocket Books, Simon and Schuster, 1977); John Van Druten, I Remember Mama: A Play (London and New York: Samuel French, 1945); Mama, CBS television series, 1949–57; Life with Father, CBS television series, 1953–55. 11. Parsons and Bales et al., Family Socialization and Interaction Process, pp. 104–5, 243. 12. Ibid., pp. 103–4. 13. Day, ‘God and My Father’ in The Best of Clarence Day, p. 36. 14. Philip Wylie, ‘Common Women’, Generation of Vipers (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1955 [1942]), pp. 184–96. 15. Edward Strecker, Their Mothers’ Sons: The Psychiatrist Examines an American Problem (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1946). 16. Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1935). 17. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, pp. 120, 130. 18. Parsons and Bales et al., Family Socialization and Interaction Process, pp. 150–51, 312–15, 387–88.

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7

The Railway Children and Other Stories: Lionel Jeffries and British Family Films in the 1970s Noel Brown

By any measure, Lionel Jeffries’s family films were produced at a decided low point in British cinema history. Against a backdrop of precipitous declines in movie attendances and widespread anxiety over ‘permissiveness’ in contemporary film – together signalling the demise of popular cinema as an inclusive mass medium – Jeffries emerged as one of the key figures in 1970s British child-orientated cinema. Described in his obituary as ‘a master of comic unease’, he was already a familiar face in front of the cameras for his archly intense performances in a variety of roles, notably as a plucky British officer in The Colditz Story (Guy Hamilton, 1955); as the strict authoritarian Lord Queensbury in The Trials of Oscar Wilde (Ken Hughes, 1960); and as the benevolently oddball Grandpa Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Ken Hughes, 1968).1 However, Jeffries may best be remembered as the writer-director of The Railway Children (1970), which has come to be regarded as the quintessential British family film. Jeffries went on to direct another four family movies: The Amazing Mr. Blunden (1972), Baxter! (1973), Wombling Free (1977) and The Water Babies (1978). None approached the critical and commercial success of The Railway Children. Jeffries’s directorial career was shaped by a cultural and industrial context in which family films were viewed both positively and negatively; as socially and culturally desirable, but simultaneously as outmoded and commercially dubious. He wrestled with familiar difficulties for British filmmakers, such as apathy among investors and distributors, lack of industrial infrastructure and competition from television. His films also reveal the problems in attempting to engage 120

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mixed audiences of children and adults in what we can now reflect on as a period of transition, where the cross-demographic ‘family audience’ was virtually obsolete, but before the emergence of the ‘kidult’ audience in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which dismissed such fare as insufferably juvenile.2 This chapter situates Jeffries’s films in their socio-cultural and cinematic contexts, and examines their relation to the broader decline of commercial children’s films in Western cinema during this period.

The Decline of British Cinema Attendances at British cinema had been falling since the 1950s. Roy Armes has observed that ‘the decline of cinema as a mass medium for the working class corresponds almost exactly to the rise of television’, and with the parallel emergence of the teenager as consumer, ‘the demand for the routine family picture became a thing of the past’.3 In the 1960s, the cracks in the British film industry were papered over by the international popularity of the James Bond, Beatles and Carry On film series; indigenous blockbusters such as Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) and Zulu (Cy Endfield, 1964); profitable exports from studios such as Rank, ABPC and Hammer; and the emergence of a critically-acclaimed ‘realist’ film cycle. By the 1970s, the downward spiral was cemented by various blows to the industry, including the financial difficulties of several studios, a shortfall in Hollywood investment, and, in 1971, the government’s withdrawal of financial support to the National Film Finance Corporation – established in 1948 to stimulate production of British features.4 In 1974, The Observer grimly noted that ‘for years, the film industry has been playing out a death scene besides which the most lachrymose Hollywood weepies would seem indecently cock-a-hoop.’5 The loss of the so-called ‘family audience’ to television imposed the need for cinema to cater to different markets. Many British producers, lacking Hollywood’s ability to make spectacular blockbusters, took advantage of censorship relaxations and produced explicitly adult- and youth-orientated films privileging ‘mature’ themes, replete with strong violence, sex and nudity. Big-budget family blockbusters such as Born Free (James Hill, 1966), Oliver! (Carol Reed, 1968) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang were no longer viable. Disney, which had filmed many of its live-action productions

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in Britain since 1950 as a means of circumventing trade restrictions, virtually discontinued the practice during the 1970s. The Children’s Film Foundation (CFF) – a government-backed organisation founded in 1951 which, by the end of the 1960s, had become Britain’s second most prolific producer of films – continued to supply children’s cinema clubs with shorts and feature films.6 However, cinema club attendances had fallen greatly from their peak in the 1940s/50s.7 With no British equivalent to Disney, most children’s films were made independently, often funded through private equity. Despite occasional successes – e.g., The Tales of Beatrix Potter (Reginald Mills, 1971), Bugsy Malone (Alan Parker, 1976), Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978) and Tarka the Otter (David Cobham, 1979) – most sank without trace.

Jeffries’s Railway Children Jeffries’s interest in wholesome family films was largely reflexive. He explained: I hate the seventies. I think that going to the moon was a bore. I prefer sailing to flying. I hate blue movies and violent stories and if you ask me what I have seen to make me that way I would say that I haven’t seen any. But I have heard about them and I don’t have to witness a murder to know that I don’t like murder.8 Jeffries was a staunch traditionalist. The son of two Salvation Army social workers, he took great pride that his grandfather, Charles H. Jeffries, was an important figure among General William Booth’s Salvationists.9 He converted to Catholicism in the early 1950s, and was later vice-president of the British Catholic Stage Guild.10 He expressed a hope that all religions should unite against ‘the evil of communism’.11 A private man, he is recalled by former child actors Jenny Agutter and Sally Thomsett as a benign, fatherly figure who rewarded successful takes with a half-crown piece.12 He was also, by his own admission, tempestuous, and at times almost evangelical. During the late 1960s, dismayed with the current trajectory of popular cinema and having long harboured ambitions to direct, Jeffries purchased the adaptation rights to E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children (1906). His friendship with producer-director Bryan Forbes was pivotal in getting the film into production and securing the

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director’s chair for himself. Forbes was a strong believer in family entertainment; he had earlier made the acclaimed, Hayley Millsstarred Whistle Down the Wind (1961), and would go on to direct, with rather less distinction, The Slipper and the Rose (1976) and International Velvet (1978). Moreover, when Jeffries approached him in 1969, Forbes had just been appointed production head at Associated British Picture Corporation, recently acquired by American media giant EMI. Armed with a large injection of capital, Forbes promptly announced a programme of family films, reiterating that ‘there is nothing wrong in wishing to reach the widest possible audience,’ and taking the opportunity to criticise the ‘pornography of violence’ overtaking movie screens.13 Although not all the films Forbes oversaw at Associated British were so overtly family-orientated, The Railway Children was the clearest – and ultimately the most profitable – manifestation of this production policy. Jeffries and Forbes worked hard in publicity materials to establish a dual identity for the film. Released in December 1970 for the Christmas family trade, with movie posters (ungrammatically) marketing it as ‘A Film for Adults to Take Their Children, too!’, it was positioned as a wholesome, nostalgic film for general audiences. But they also identified it as a palliative for a conservative majority dismayed by unprecedented levels of sex, violence, nudity, profanity and drug abuse in this new entertainment epoch. Jeffries explained: I found the climate of the E. Nesbit story just right for me, a way in which to start entertaining people and help, not destroy, our industry. There are hardly any films being made for children and for the middle-aged and older age groups.14 Forbes was even blunter in his assertion that ‘the British public is weary of the spate of violence and pornography on both the large and small screens [...] There is a crying need for films which all the family can go and see.’15 Expectations for the film were not especially high. Merete Bates in the Guardian predicted that ‘the public will go – but whether it’s what they really want is another question’.16 Co-star Sally Thomsett conceded that ‘we thought it was a little film for kids.’17 Although Jeffries maintained in interviews that his adaptation ‘kept to [Nesbit’s] story’, the film is replete with nostalgic inflections that subtly reinterpret it.18 Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the film’s opening scene, which utilises a subtle framing device similar to those employed in the Hollywood family comedies, Life with

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Father (Michael Curtiz, 1947) and On Moonlight Bay (Roy Del Ruth, 1951): a young, beautifully garmented woman – we later recognise her as a grown-up Bobbie (Jenny Agutter), whose voice-over narration relates the story – enters an Edwardian-style nursery and begins rolling a Victorian praxinoscope.19 The camera slowly zooms towards the lens, appearing to enter the mechanism, preparing us for the fact that, as in those earlier productions, we are journeying back to the early years of the twentieth century. Through Bobbie’s narration, we are introduced to her younger sister, Phyllis (Thomsett), brother, Peter (Gary Warren), and their doting parents, Mother (Dinah Sheridan) and Father (Iain Cuthbertson). The domestic harmony of their affluent life in London is disrupted when two men lead Father away from the house; we later learn that he was arrested and subsequently (falsely) imprisoned for selling state secrets. Now penurious, the family is forced into a simpler, pastoral life in Yorkshire. They forge a symbolic connection with the local railway station, whose steam trains they imagine ‘sending their love to Father’; and they befriend the station porter, Mr Perks (Bernard Cribbins) and an Old Gentleman (William Mervyn), to whom they wave as his train passes through the station every morning. The narrative is episodic, the children embarking on a series of minor adventures: they flag down a train after subsidence makes the track unsafe, bringing them commendations for public spirit; come to the assistance of a Russian dissident (Gordon Whiting) exiled from pre-Communist Russia; gather gifts from members of the local community to mark the birthday of Mr Perks; and rescue an injured boy, Jim (Christopher Witty), revealed to be the Grandson of the Old Gentleman, who aids the release of their father. Each episode flows more or less sequentially from the last, as if reconstructing the imperfect recollections of an adult looking back on childhood. The Railway Children’s attempt to represent the world through the eyes of children was exceptional, having previously largely been confined to CFF productions, second-feature films and adult allegories such as Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948) and A Kid for Two Farthings (1955). The child’s subjectivity is most effectively conveyed in two sequences. The first conveys the trauma of Father’s disappearance, which is framed by distantly observed, unfathomably half-heard conversations. The second is in the memorable and powerfully affecting closing scenes, where the emotional catharsis surrounding Father’s return (as he emerges on the station platform from a huge cloud of steam) is strengthened by the audience’s vicarious sharing

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of the moment with Bobbie. Accordingly, the internal subjectivity of the adults – notably the plight of Father, and Mother’s barelyglimpsed grief – are elided. The adult characters, alternately, are venerated figures of kindly authority (Mother and Father; the Old Gentleman), or comedy grotesques (the ghastly relative Aunt Emma; the Yorkshire cab driver, who irritates Mother by responding to every enquiry with a lugubrious ‘I dare say’). The exception is Perks, who, because of his vulnerabilities and unaffectedness, associated with his social class – to which both Nesbit and Jeffries were sincerely, if peremptorily, sensitive – is engaged with on equal terms. This is confirmed when the children surprise him with birthday gifts gathered from sympathetic members of the local community. Although Perks is initially angry at being a recipient of ‘charity’, the children talk him round, and he artlessly reciprocates their offer of lifelong friendship. The representation of the children is at the heart of the double (child/adult) address the film develops. Although the narrative heavily foregrounds the children and thus provides identification figures for child spectators, this remains, emphatically, an adult’s view of childhood. The Railway Children is ‘nostalgic’ and ‘charming’, in large part, because it resurrects lapsed but enduringly comforting visions of childhood perfection and social conviviality, made all the more appealing by the occasional hints of disquiet (in the untold but presumably horrendous ordeal Father undergoes; in the Russian dissident’s exile and separation from his family) which disavow fantasy and bespeak authenticity. Jeffries attempts to delineate an authentically naturalistic fictional space; in interview, he claimed to have eschewed ‘tricksy photography’, embracing ‘typical documentary techniques’ as if simply, and without mediation, representing the world as it really was.20 However, a contrary sentimentalism can be localised in the representation of the children, who are unfailingly sweet, gentle, generous, brave and honest. Even Peter’s covert stealing of coal for the fire is motivated by a desire to aid Mother’s recovery from illness, and he is instantly reproved by both sisters. Such idealised depictions of childhood virtue and innocence were normative in Victorian- and Edwardian-era children’s literature. Yet the presence of such affected images of ‘perfect’ childhood inevitably projects different meanings in the 1970s, and didactic elements implicit in Nesbit’s book are made explicit in performance. The cuteness of the children is mirrored, for instance, by the precision of their language and enunciation, which stand in contrast to the bluff colloquialisms of the locals, and the comparative unattractiveness

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Figure 7-1 The central family, happily reunited at the climax of The Railway Children

of the comically dishevelled cab driver and remarked-upon ugliness of Perks’s name. No matter how decent and upstanding its members, the Northerners suffer in comparison with the transcendent perfection of these children and their benignly patrician mother. These upper-class registers are subtly hierarchical – a fact already recognised by the CFF, which had largely abandoned ‘goody-goody’ child protagonists due to their unpopularity with children. From the mid-1960s, the CFF also ceased the practice of only casting young actors who had been to drama school (as had Agutter, Thomsett and Warren) and spoke with ‘Received Pronunciation’, which children apparently associated with adult authority.21 We should not ignore the film’s intrinsic virtues: Jeffries’s skilful adaptation of Nesbit’s source material; his simple and unfussy direction, so well attuned to the needs of the script and target audience; the fine period detail and beautiful locations; the understated yet memorable performances by the child and adult actors; and the almost tangible warmth and sincerity. These strengths were recognised by The Observer, which deemed it ‘a loving valentine to those good old Edwardian days’ which is ‘simple, sunny and sentimental in exactly the right “Meet me in St. Louis” way’; and by The Catholic Herald, which appreciated the ‘loving recreation of an age barely past when certainties were more secure, values and problems clearer, and

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neither children nor parents ashamed to love each other’.22 The latter review, however, hints at a more socially-determined set of appeals, recognising that, for all its purported innocence, The Railway Children is also a reaction against modern society; pre-eminently, the perceived breakdown of the family and culture of permissiveness. It positions itself as a bulwark against their further encroachment, soberly and responsibly (though not without good humour) promoting the values of family unity, social cohesion and friendship, tolerance and sincerity that Jeffries believed were under threat. It is as much a work of political activism as popular entertainment, even if its popularity in the intervening years risks ahistoricising its contextual meanings.

New (and Old) Directions: The Amazing Mr. Blunden and Baxter! Teddy Darvas, the Hungarian-born film editor who worked on Jeffries’s first three films, remembered him as ‘one of the great hopes of British film directors’.23 But Jeffries’s career was always limited by his contrarian insistence on confining himself to the milieu of family entertainment as much as by the wretched state of the industry. Several planned directorial projects came to nothing. Prior to the completion of The Railway Children, Jeffries announced plans to produce and star in a biopic about Salvation Army founder General Booth.24 Then, in 1972, a musical adaptation of Peter Pan, to feature songs by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, was announced but never begun.25 Instead, shortly after the completion of The Railway Children, Jeffries made Baxter!, a challenging, personal and more overtly mature film about the impact of divorce on the family. But producer Anglo-EMI, presumably doubting its commercial credentials, chose to sit on the film, and it did not see the light of day until 1973. Artistically, I believe, Jeffries never fully recovered; although he remained committed to the cause of children’s cinema, the drive, and to some degree the facility, dissipated. His remaining films were less personal, less nuanced in their modes of appeal, and more determined by the demands of producers-investors. The Amazing Mr. Blunden may be seen as a continuation of The Railway Children’s nostalgic stylings. A complex story in which two children from 1918, Lucy (Lynne Frederick) and Jamie (Garry Miller), are sent back in time by a benign ghost, Mr Blunden (Laurence Naismith), to help him rescue two children – heirs to a country estate,

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and ultimately revealed to be their ancestors – killed in a fire a hundred years previously, it is nonetheless lighter and more escapist than its predecessor. Jeffries, who co-produced, adapted his screenplay from Antonia Barber’s Carnegie Medal-nominated novel, The Ghosts (1969). Produced by Hemdale Films, a British-based independent company co-founded by actor David Hemmings, The Amazing Mr. Blunden is less episodic and disjointed than The Railway Children, but sacrifices the latter’s subtextual politicism and projections of naturalness and authenticity – and hence much of its adult appeal. Most of the comedy is derived from grotesquery, as in wicked housekeeper Mrs Wickens’s (Diana Dors) attempts to kill the children and get her hands on their inheritance by ordering their bedroom windows left open, hoping they will develop pneumonia. Whereas The Railway Children is clearly a family film – intended for adults and children – The Amazing Mr. Blunden is more readily identifiable as a children’s film, lacking the themes of romance and maturation, and universalistic affirmations of family, friendship and community, that underpin the earlier film’s enduring cross-demographic appeal. It was not as successful at the box office, and critical reception was less favourable. The Observer thought it ‘a trifle disappointing after “The Railway Children”’, but appreciated ‘that sense of enchanted stillness which is one of Lionel Jeffries’s greatest gifts as a director’.26 The Guardian found it ‘thinner’ than its predecessor, identifying it as belonging to the particular brand of ‘children’s fare designed rather carefully to appeal to the child in us all’, and observing that Jeffries’s ‘stock-in-trade is a particular kind of English period charm that persuades us that things are, after all, exactly as they used to be in spite of the cinema’s present penchant for sex and violence.’27 These responses hint at a less complicated, less differentiated mode of appeal. Whereas The Railway Children utilises a form of ‘double address’ which targets children and adults independently, The Amazing Mr. Blunden – as with many of Disney’s feature animations – relies for its adult appeal on its ability to regress to a symbolic state of childhood. The relative apoliticism of The Amazing Mr. Blunden could hardly present a greater contrast with the delayed Baxter! Centring on an adolescent boy, Roger Baxter (Scott Jacoby), who struggles to come to terms with the recent divorce of his parents, Baxter! is based on American artist and writer Kin Platt’s book, The Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear (1968) – more properly Young Adult than children’s fiction. It is Jeffries’s only film where he had no

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hand in the script (by acclaimed American writer Reginald Rose), and his only film not to receive a U rating from the British Board of Film Censors (its AA rating excluding under-14s). Baxter! is disorientatingly bleak and vaguely arty. Like Jeffries’s other films, it is shot largely from the child’s (in this case teenager’s) perspective. Formerly, Jeffries had employed this narrative mode to permit adult viewers to re-experience the unaffectedness of childhood. Here, it implicates them in the emotional damage inflicted on the child by adult self-preoccupation. Baxter’s psychological breakdown and eventual psychosis – unflinchingly depicted in the final third of the movie – is the culmination of a series of traumas. First, and probably central, is the divorce of his parents, which is also the root cause of his speech impediment (a periodic inability to pronounce Rs) and abiding fixation with death. This is compounded by his inability to engage with his classmates or teachers at school; his discovery that his mother (Lynn Carlin) has begun seeing other men; his father’s (Paul Maxwell) lack of interest; his (presumably) first kiss, with a neighbouring girl, Nemo (Sally Thomsett), who then reveals that she is moving abroad. The coup de grâce, after he seems to recover from an initial breakdown, is the sudden death of his sympathetic neighbour, Chris (Britt Ekland). The events are played out in a cold, anonymously alienating London, shot mainly in washed-out greys or in near darkness, lacking comfortingly recognisable landmarks – a fact that might as easily project a discomforting sense of null space as reflect its cosmopolitanism. The divorced parents are the villains of the piece. Both are entirely self-involved; in their first scene together, Baxter’s mother reproaches him for being such a nuisance, and his mostly-absent father displays no affinity with or interest in his son. The impact of their divorce is revealed in an early scene, where Baxter remarks to his mother: ‘You know, I’m sorry you and dad broke up [...] I mean, it was pretty neat to be the only kid in Beverly Hills whose mother and father that actually manufactured him lived in the same house’. A flashback shows a young Baxter, sobbing while overhearing a violent argument between his parents which touches on matters of money and sexual dissatisfaction. Ultimately, two kindly onlookers – the school speech therapist, Dr Clemm (Patricia Neal), and Chris’s French boyfriend (and Baxter’s namesake), Roger (Jean-Pierre Cassel) – make a breakthrough towards his possible recovery. Both are able and willing to engage with Baxter on his own level, with understanding and acceptance, sharing his self-deprecating sense of humour.

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Figure 7-2 The central child figure (Scott Jacoby) in a rare joyful moment with Roger (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and Chris (Britt Ekland) in Baxter!

Surely what interested Jeffries in this story is its discourse on the deleterious impact of divorce on the child. Jeffries emerges here as a reactionary force, but also a compassionate one, his aversion to promiscuity and divorce not merely reflecting an automatically doctrinaire conservatism, but bespeaking genuine concern for the emotional well-being of the next generation. Inevitably, Baxter! initially appears a marked departure from his established oeuvre, but although the success and idiosyncrasies of The Railway Children doubtless create expectations for a continuation of its modes of wholesome nostalgia, Baxter! indicates that Jeffries’s cinematic style was partially determined by his political agenda. He goes beyond the supposedly pseudo-documentary style of The Railway Children, employing a wider range of cinematic techniques. In addition to Baxter’s occasional voice-over narration, we are presented with flashbacks, subjective point-of-view shots incorporating zoom lenses and distorting filters which reflect his psychological regression, long shots and freeze frames, montage, and a much greater emphasis on lighting and texture, evident in the symbolically muted colour palette. Critical opinion was divided. The Monthly Film Bulletin flatteringly identified parallels with Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cent Coups (1959).28

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The Guardian noted the ‘attempt to reach an international market more thoroughly’ than his earlier films, but felt that while ‘Mr. Jeffries’s heart is undeniably in the right place [...] in this case his skill isn’t.’29 The Times deemed Jeffries’s ‘directorial style, combining a jolly literalness with a few modishly flashy touches’ to be ‘hopelessly unsuited’ to the material.30 Interestingly, in view of Baxter!’s consciously international feel and the broadness of its themes, it was better received by critics in the United States. The Saturday Review praised Jeffries’s ‘special touch with young actors, capitalising on their youthful appeal without sentimentalising them,’ and the fashionably left-leaning New York called it ‘a refreshing and rewarding film – made by those who care for those who still do.’31 Indeed, alongside The Railway Children, Baxter! is Jeffries’s most personal film, and reveals a director with greater range and imagination than might be imagined. However, it was an enormous flop, and marked the beginning of an extended fallow period in Jeffries’s career where he secured no further directorial projects.

Unfitting Epitaphs: Wombling Free and The Water Babies Jeffries made an inauspicious return to directing with Wombling Free, The Rank Organisation’s live-action adaptation of the popular BBC animated children’s series The Wombles (1973–75), which follows a group of intelligent mammalian creatures that live in a burrow under Wimbledon Common and spend their time collecting and recycling rubbish. Wombling Free might have appeared a safe investment, given the popularity of the books, TV series, novelty pop group, and associated merchandise, but was universally received with hostility. The storyline – mostly concerning a girl’s (Bonnie Langford) attempts to convince her sceptical father (David Tomlinson) of the Wombles’ existence – is dull and uninvolving. There is an overreliance on slapstick and tomfoolery, crudely-drawn and clichéd adult characters, lightweight song-and-dance sequences, and a far-too-blatant didacticism. In an early scene, the Wombles’ leader, Great Uncle Bulgaria (voiced by Jeffries himself), addresses the camera to complain about humans’ wastefulness and messiness. Pointing to a passing aeroplane, he laments that ‘it fills our ears with noise and our noses with a disgusting and dangerous smell!’ before remarking, portentously, ‘I sometimes think that if it wasn’t for us Wombles, they’d be over their ears in rubbish by now. In fact, they probably soon will be – and

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not just on Wimbledon common, but over the whole world!’ Such unsubtle preachiness indicates that Jeffries’s polemical agenda was best channelled through nostalgic evocations of the past. In his films set in the present day, his misgivings appear reactionary, and here his authorial voice is manifested all too clearly in numerous tirades against modern life. Jeffries’s final film, the animated/live-action hybrid The Water Babies, is his least personal. Produced by Peter Shaw and scripted by Michael Robson, its animated sections were made (without Jeffries’s involvement) by the Warsaw-based company Studio Miniatur Filmowych. Producer Shaw was the driving force behind the initiative; it was ‘the family film he had always wanted to make’.32 Shaw raised the necessary capital through private enterprise, hiring Jeffries on the basis of his experience with ‘children’s films’.33 Nevertheless, Jeffries was sufficiently enthusiastic to praise its ‘marvellous cast’ and ‘bloody good script’, emphasising that ‘I’m not in competition with sex and violence. I’m doing it despite them. I want to get people who are sick to death of the cinema’.34 The words seem to echo those used to promote The Railway Children, but with that film, Jeffries had selected a literary work that resonated on a deeply personal level, preserving its appeal but making it distinctively his own. Here, his dissatisfaction with modern life – perhaps his core motivator as a filmmaker – fails to reach the screen. Given his minimal involvement, though, it is small wonder that Jeffries’s command of the material appears precarious. The so-called ‘auteur theory’ has several inadequacies as a unified theory of popular cinema, especially when applied to child-orientated films. But here one is reminded of its alternately laudatory and witheringly dismissive opposition between the auteur, the ‘author’ whose vision the film articulates, and the metteur-en-scène, the blank functionary who merely assembles it. The distinction is historically dubious, but assumes a lineal progression in the auteur’s command of style and narrative. In Jeffries’s oeuvre, we are more apt to find regression, with the sensitivity, authenticity and universality of The Railway Children displaced by the uninspiring juvenilia of Wombling Free and The Water Babies. In his early movies, Jeffries seems to grasp, if only intuitively, the commercial necessity of addressing adult as well as child audiences. His final two productions almost actively preclude identification for anyone over the age of ten. This seems an extraordinary blunder (although the fault is only partly Jeffries’s) given that Kingsley’s novel is at least as much adult as children’s fiction. The

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film’s juvenilisation of the source material can be gauged by its sanitisation of various plot points. Kingsley’s Tom and his friend Ellie drown in the river, and must – unlike their screen counterparts – earn their return to human form. Grimes, portrayed here by James Mason as a comic grotesque, is a more complex character, eventually being given a chance of redemption following years of torment. And Kingsley’s coda, in which he forecasts Tom’s future as ‘a great man of science’, is similarly excised. In short, the ambiguities of the novel are effaced in favour of a highly conventional narrative where several old children’s film standbys – colourful animation, cheerful songs, and the fabled ‘happy ending’ – are dully invoked. Jeffries’s regression in many ways mirrors a parallel decline in British cinema, where a prevailing parochialism in production strategy (apparent in the ongoing mistrust of films with child appeal) exacerbated more practical impediments, such as funding shortfalls, theatre closures, and television’s displacement of cinema as the dominant entertainment medium – the latter cyclically inducing ever-increasing reliance on minority-appeal film forms.

Conclusion There are broader points to be made regarding the distinctions between children’s and family films, and how their respective statuses relate both to immediate commercial reception and long-term endurance. It is important, for several reasons, for family films to engage with adults as well as children. Parents/guardians are usually required to accompany young children to the cinema, so films must afford multiple levels of access. Less obvious is the role of adult opinion-makers in determining cultural receptiveness in the longer term. Wombling Free and The Water Babies have little to offer adult audiences and so, in current parlance, lack ‘repeatability’. By contrast, The Railway Children is multiply interpretable, and enduringly meaningful in its socio-cultural resonances, remaining as emphatic a cultural statement in the twenty-first century as it was in the latter half of the twentieth. It is a measure of its legitimacy that in 1999 the British Film Institute deemed it one of the top 100 British films of the century. But just as important in locating a text as ‘family film’ or ‘children’s film’ are non-textual discourses, including marketing and publicity materials, reviews (both contemporary and retrospective), merchandising, home video, and, revealingly, television scheduling.

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Unlike Jeffries’s later films,35 The Railway Children has been shown countless times on British television, often during symbolic periods of family unity, such as Easter and Christmas. Such (historically-bound) recapitulations and retellings underpin the ostensibly ‘timeless’ popularity of many celebrated family films. Presumably, The Railway Children’s appeal to children has not much changed in the years since release, its now-unfashionable air of antiquity notwithstanding. But to many older viewers it surely presents a double nostalgia, for their own lost days of innocence (as adults remembering their childhood, and their childhood experiences of the film) as well as to society’s. Jeffries had little interest in generic typographies. His motivation was a diffuse combination of social responsibility and self-gratification. He described his need to make The Railway Children as akin to ‘working [out] some form of psychosis’.36 Perhaps it is a dire reflection that an actor with no prior directorial experience could emerge as British children’s cinema’s most important figurehead, and indeed, the genre was in terminal decline. In 1982, the CFF was reconfigured as the Children’s Film and Television Foundation (CFTF), which subsequently brokered a deal with the BBC to produce a series of new films ‘tailored specifically for family television viewing’, but the government’s abolition of the Eady levy, through which it was funded, in 1985, made it redundant.37 In the 1990s and beyond, Hollywood investment and distribution deals have allowed the Harry Potter film franchise and British studio Aardman traction in the global market. But these are hardly children’s films, but rather family films made in Hollywood’s image, which simultaneously blur the distinctions between British and internationalised cultural tradition. After The Water Babies, Jeffries resumed his theatrical career and costarred in the ITV sitcom Tom, Dick and Harriet (1982–83), with guest roles in series such as Minder and Inspector Morse, and in the CFTF’s one significant post-Eady accomplishment, a made-for-television adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World (Gavin Millar, 1989). But he never again directed, a fact that Teddy Darvas attributes to his reputation for awkwardness.38 As Dennis Barker observes, ‘the fact that his directorial flair was so unused on TV, when many lesser talents were allowed to prosper, does not reflect at all well on the openness of that small world’.39 However, if Sight and Sound was correct in attributing Jeffries’s success to his ‘determination to get full value out of the material without dilution or sentimentality’, then the projections of authenticity and insistence on wholesomeness characteristic of his best work were incongruous in the post-1970s

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Hollywood milieu of escapism, fantasy, and progressive pushing the boundaries of acceptability.40 Perhaps this vaguely nostalgic line of argument ought to be resisted, as Jeffries’s films – as with children’s culture in its wider iterations – remain subject to much broader liberalising currents in Western society. Moreover, it risks a polarising historical hierarchy in which the past forever appears more moral, socially-aware, cohesive, convivial and intimate than the present. No doubt Jeffries himself would approve the comparison.

Notes 1. Dennis Barker, ‘Lionel Jeffries Obituary’, Guardian, 19 February 2010.

[accessed 17/5/2013]. 2. On the ‘kidult’ audience, see Noel Brown, The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2012), pp. 150–58, 197–204. 3. Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), pp. 239–40. 4. Peter Waymark, ‘Growing Pains’, The Times, 18 October 1972, p. 18. 5. Brian Bell, ‘Can the Film-Makers Carry On’, The Observer, 11 August 1974, p. 11. 6. Rowana Agajanian, ‘“Just for Kids?”: Saturday Morning Cinema and Britain’s Children’s Film Foundation in the 1960s’, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 18, no. 3 (1998), pp. 395–409. 7. Terry Staples, All Pals Together: The Story of Children’s Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 233. 8. Tom Hutchison, ‘Lionel Jeffries’, Guardian, 24 December 1970, p. 8. 9. ‘The Times Diary’, The Times, 29 April 1970, p. 12. 10. Ibid. 11. Hutchison, ‘Lionel Jeffries’. 12. ‘Steam Dreams’, Guardian, 21 March 1997, p. A10. 13. ‘Film Chief Attacks “Filth”’, The Times, 9 April 1969, p. 2; ‘Britain Steps Back into Cinema’s Big League’, Guardian, 13 August 1969, p. 5. 14. Hutchison, ‘Lionel Jeffries’. 15. Merete Bates, ‘Look, No Sex: Merete Bates on the Filming of “The Railway Children”’, Guardian, 4 June 1970, p. 10. 16. Ibid. 17. Anna Tims, ‘How We Made: The Railway Children’, Guardian, 6 May 2013. < http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/06/how-we-maderailway-children> [accessed 17/5/2013]. 18. Hutchison, ‘Lionel Jeffries’. 19. For a skilful reading of this scene, see Susan Smith, ‘Vocal Sincerity, Liminality and Bonding in The Railway Children (Jeffries, 1970)’, Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 3 (2007), pp. 198–213.

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20. Hutchison, ‘Lionel Jeffries’; Bates, ‘Look, No Sex’. 21. Staples, All Pals Together, p. 212. 22. John Russell Taylor, ‘An Edwardian Labour of Love’, The Times, 18 December 1970, p. 16; Tom Milne, ‘Truffaut’s Wolf Boy’, The Observer, 20 December 1970, p. 20; Freda Bruce Lockhart, ‘Happy – Playing By the Railway’, The Catholic Herald, 25 December 1970, p. 6. 23. Barbara Baker, ‘Teddy Darvas (Editor)’ in Let the Credits Roll: Interviews with Film Crew (Jefferson: McFarland, 2003), pp. 7–13. 24. ‘The Times Diary’. 25. ‘Peter Pan as a Film Musical’, The Times, 18 January 1972, p. 8. 26. Tom Milne, ‘Films – An Indian in the Rodeo Trap’, The Observer, 3 December 1972, p. 34. 27. Derek Malcolm, ‘The Great Schmaltz’, Guardian, 30 November 1972, p. 14. 28. Brenda Davies, ‘Baxter!’, Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1973, p. 48. 29. Derek Malcolm, ‘Winning Heat’, Guardian, 22 March 1973, p. 12. 30. Philip French, ‘The Solid Orange Pontiac’, The Times, 23 March 1973, p. 17. 31. Arthur Knight, ‘Three Swipes at the Establishment’, The Saturday Review, 24 February 1973, p. 72; Judith Crist, ‘More or Less Moral-Less’, New York, 12 March 1973, pp. 78–79. 32. Tim Radford, ‘Capitalist Tale with a Touch of Class’, Guardian, 1 November 1976, p. 8. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. The Amazing Mr. Blunden is a partial exception. 36. Hutchison, ‘Lionel Jeffries’. 37. Staples, All Pals Together, p. 240. 38. Baker, ‘Teddy Darvas (Editor)’. 39. Barker, ‘Lionel Jeffries Obituary’. 40. Brenda Davies, ‘The Amazing Mr. Blunden’, Sight and Sound, Winter 1972–73, p. 53.

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‘Luke, I Am Your Father’: Toys, Play Space and Detached Fathers in Post-1970s Hollywood Family Films Holly Blackford

Absent fathers, divorced fathers seeking legitimacy in their children’s lives, and men who need to develop into father figures without compromising their full identity undergird many post-1970s films: E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982), Big (Penny Marshall, 1988), Hook (Spielberg, 1991), Mrs. Doubtfire (Chris Columbus, 1993), The Santa Clause (John Pasquin, 1994), the Toy Story series (1995– ), Jingle All the Way (Brian Levant, 1996), The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997), Monsters, Inc. (Pete Docter, 2001) and Night at the Museum (Shawn Levy, 2006). Not only do these films feature various Neverland spaces in which fathers appear as ‘lost boys’ detached from domestic space, but also toys and play become a means through which fathers displaced as breadwinners and heads of households negotiate paternal roles and reclaim legitimacy. Toy theory provides a way to understand these films as setting forth a curious argument: although traditional men’s roles in the family and workplace have been challenged, fathers can reclaim a place in children’s lives as overgrown playmates or capitalist-infused toys. While Sarah Edge demonstrates that films of the late 1980s and 1990s react to feminism by creating nurturing fathers and restoring the father–son relationship,1 the films in this chapter construct a specifically playful base to fatherhood. Possibly reflecting a child’s-eye view of toys as playmate fathers, and likely responding to the market-share of divorced fathers, these films popularise fatherhood as a casual peer relationship rather than financial obligation or disciplinary force. An emblem of this shift occurs in Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), which mocks and diffuses its Star Wars precedent. Darth Vader’s famous assertion of paternity 137

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over Luke Skywalker recurs in Zorg’s declaration to the second Buzz, ‘Buzz, I am your father’. Instead of staging Oedipal conflict, the two play ball so Buzz can reconnect with his ‘dad’. Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. makes this transition its core theme – scary monsters become father figures and then transform into comedic peers. Pixar films and Disney’s The Santa Clause continue a long legacy of equating toys with love; for example, Disney’s Pinocchio (Norman Ferguson et al., 1940) veils the brutal poverty of Carlo Collodi’s novel when the successful craftsman Gepetto wishes his puppet were real. However, the relationship between detached fathers and toys transcends Disney; investigating the theme in non-Disney and adult-orientated films enables analysis of Disney’s ‘political unconscious’, defined by Fredric Jameson as imaginary solutions to cultural conflicts and tensions.2 For example, the detached father in the British comedy The Full Monty, who reconnects to his child through a playful enterprise associated with garden gnomes, echoes and exposes the shifting economic and social structures that inhibit men’s potential as fathers. The fathers in family films sound a similar alarm. Encompassing neither the daily requirements of childcare nor ongoing economic support, no longer disciplinary forces or Oedipal role models, fathers simply need to be fun. The role of toys in literature, film, and folklore enjoys a long history. Stories of inanimate objects brought to life gesture to classical myth in which statues, items of nature, or animals undergo anthropomorphic metamorphosis to reflect the needs of creators and negotiate shifting relationships. As Lois Kuznets argues, the relationship between toys and their human puppeteers parallels the relationship between humans and divine beings.3 Toy narratives explore developmental and existential concerns, embodying human anxiety about becoming ‘real’ or independent and symbolising children negotiating autonomy, social responsibility, and power, particularly in relation to ‘creators’ or parents. For example, Pinocchio features the quest of a puppet to become real, which in Collodi’s vision meant autonomy combined with moral and social responsibility. Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) uses Pinocchio to punctuate a cyborg child’s quest to become real,4 a tragic quest, since he is already more emotional and social than the humans who have rejected him. A.I. is hardly an isolated instance of Spielberg’s interest in the toy figure that is more human than flesh-and-blood humans. Spielberg’s innocent, foetus-resembling E.T. is more human than any adult humans in the film,5 who are associated with

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technology, just as the real child in A.I. is more mechanical physically and psychologically. Yet toys in today’s films represent more than child development. In one symbolic scene in E.T., the alien masquerades as a stuffed animal in Elliott’s (Henry Thomas) closet, tellingly situating E.T.’s relationship with Elliot in toy theory, an approach delineated by psychoanalytic theorists D. W. Winnicott and Melanie Klein, who postulated that toys and play provide a window into the unconscious.6 Winnicott defined toys as paradoxically ‘found’ and ‘made’ transitional objects occupying an intermediary zone between internal and external reality. To the child reaching for a ‘not-me’ object of external reality for the first time, having lost the omnipotence of infancy when things and mother magically surfaced as needed, the transitional object is ‘created’: The essential feature in the concept of transitional objects and phenomena [...] is the paradox, and the acceptance of the paradox: the [child] creates the object, but the object was there waiting to be created and become a cathected object [...] in the rules of the game we all know that we will never challenge the [child] to elicit an answer to the question: did you create that or did you find it?7 Transitional objects symbolise the mother, from whom separation is occurring, but more important than their symbolic status is their simultaneous signification of ‘me’ and ‘not me’, mother and notmother. Anyone familiar with E.T. can see that separation from the mother (Dee Wallace), who is oblivious to her children’s social and emotional lives, is overshadowed by the loss of the father, who has rendered the Oedipal triangle beyond repair. Elliott brings E.T. to life because he needs to. E.T. reconfigures toy theory to reflect a culture newly concerned with the phenomenon of single mothers and absent fathers. Not only is the father conspicuously absent in the home, symbolised by his empty shirt, but also the mother struggles; her children eat pizza and candy, and they are unsupervised and left with Sesame Street and access to beer, which the innocent E.T. drinks. E.T. is both an innocent child surrogate, registering the abandonment experienced by Elliott, and a father figure,8 teaching Elliott that one carries lost loved ones in the heart. ‘I’ll be right here’, he says, pointing to his heart and thereby helping Elliott resolve feelings about his lost father. Toys in post-1970s films have shifted to encompass lost, vulnerable parents; popular with all ages, E.T. situates the

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quest of the tabula rasa to negotiate anxiety about divorce culture, a recurrent concern of Spielberg’s.9 Fears of obsolescence, vulnerability, and abandonment mark many toy stories, but Spielberg’s later film, Hook, expressly advocates the role of transitional space in re-attaching distant fathers. Complicit with a new focus on fatherhood10 and adult-centric family films in the decade,11 Hook actively constructs Neverland as a transitional space for fathers. On the terrain of Neverland, the detached father Peter Banning (Robin Williams), who has forgotten his roots as Peter Pan, recaptures playful boyishness as paternal mode. Hook shadows subsequent films’ focus on the vexed displacement of fathers and the potential of transitional/play space to negotiate relationships to children. Various Neverland spaces in contemporary family films necessitate some recognition of ‘the Neverland’ in J. M. Barrie’s original vision. Like transitional space in Winnicott’s vision, ‘the Neverland’ is the child (not adult) mind, and this liminal zone between childhood and civilisation compensates for the detached, displaced, infantilised father in the Darling household. Barrie’s 1911 novel begins by assaulting and mocking Mr Darling. First, he only won Mrs Darling because he took a cab while other men walked, and he cannot obtain his wife’s ‘innermost box and the kiss’;12 second, he thinks in numbers and knows ‘about stocks and shares’, so he does ridiculous amounts of computations to see whether the children can be kept;13 third, Mr Darling ‘had a passion for being exactly like his neighbours’, so he insists on a nanny, but since they cannot afford one, they hire a dog, Nana, on whom he blames all problems;14 fourth, he tricks the children into taking medicine and instead of taking his, he hides it in Nana’s bowl, which is quite bad form; fifth, when his wife is grieving for her lost children, he boasts how his fame derives from his children’s abduction. Concerns with unfair fighting and bad form in Neverland are responses to the infantile, weak father presented in a way Edwardians would have understood as suffering from ‘overcivilisation’. Like the later Mr Banks in Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964), workplace conditions – stocks, shares, numbers, conformity – render manhood undesirable, explaining why Peter Pan rejects manhood and partnering with Wendy. Hook’s Peter Banning bears more kinship with Mr Darling than the capitalist pirate figure that the film’s grandmother Wendy names him. Neverland, where Peter Pan is named ‘The Great White Father’ for just playing great games, accords with contemporary films’ sense that for men, adulthood is the forced assumption of narrow economic roles.

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Tension between economic pressures and childhood dreams or talents finds expression in the divorced father of Mrs. Doubtfire; the father Daniel (Robin Williams), a struggling actor, fails in his marriage because his wild, chaotic play with the children perpetually irritates and causes extra work for his breadwinning wife, Miranda (Sally Field). However, Daniel can only understand this when crossdressed as Mrs Doubtfire, the role he assumes to answer his ex-wife’s ad for a housekeeper. The intimate relationship evolving between Mrs Doubtfire and Miranda can only occur when Daniel steps into the role of female caretaker to understand Miranda’s perspective. Tellingly, Daniel is a natural puppeteer, whose spontaneous, unselfconscious play with puppets at work earns him the attention of a producer, who is seeking a new entertainment for the child market. Daniel’s philosophy of aesthetic rather than didactic storytelling for children reflects the film’s view of a negotiated transitional space for father figures to address children through toys, play and peer support, rather than be swallowed by the nanny role of the drag character Mrs Doubtfire. Daniel grows in his understanding of women through assuming this role, but ultimately the assumed drag is only play – used in a new puppet show in which he is host and puppeteer, coaching children to cope with divorce through story and play – transitional space. A telling scene in which Daniel tries simultaneously to enjoy dinner with his family – as Mrs Doubtfire – and dinner with the producer, as himself, attempting to manage the huge production of role-switching, crystallises the conflict in the man who wishes success in both public and private spheres, as professional and parent. This role

Figure 8-1 Daniel (Robin Williams) spontaneously plays puppeteer and transforms the ‘dry’ dinosaur show, a symbol for reinvigorating ‘extinct’ traditional father roles

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conflict permeates the films under study. The father in Hook cannot excel at work and see all his sons’ baseball games; Calvin (Tim Allen) in The Santa Claus cannot compete with his ex-wife in homemaking, which is evident when he burns the Christmas turkey like other single fathers collected at Denny’s; Gaz (Robert Carlyle) in The Full Monty suffers economic displacement in a town where the women are employed and have displaced men (the women work, watch male strippers, urinate standing, etc.); and the professional scare monster of Monsters, Inc., James P. Sullivan (nicknamed Sulley, voiced by John Goodman), lives in a world that carefully divides the primarily male space of the company from children, into whose bedrooms men cross only at night. Not only does this strict division reflect work pressures on men, but also the fact that monsters are led to believe in the toxicity of children conveys the hostility of the public sphere to any mixing of private and public roles. Sulley’s increasing paternal attachment to a child threatens his career, reputation, and relationship with male colleagues. This hostility looms in both The Full Monty and Night at the Museum; fathers in both are threatened with loss of custody if they do not raise funds and/or gain steady employment, which both fathers see as a compromise of their dreams. Both seek, therefore, economically viable pathways that negotiate, as Winnicott theorises, between internal and external realities. Playful employment, like Daniel’s puppeteering in drag, serves as negotiation and compromise. One way that father-infused toys become valuable in these films is by reflecting capitalism, or what Karl Marx termed commodity fetish: our tendency to appreciate consumer goods apart from chains of production.15 Toys are big business and toy-related jobs therefore situate male development. In Big, for example, play and capitalism together negotiate masculine and even sexual development. Here, a child whose wish to be big is granted finds successful employment at a toy company; like Daniel’s, his expertise in play becomes a profitable option. This ideology of ‘playful capitalism’ is endemic to the Neverland mythology, which, like other British novels such as Treasure Island (1883), conjoins escape and empire-building as proper play for future citizens of England. Big is unique and confusing in its frank treatment of impossible child desires: what Jacqueline Rose calls (in reference to ) ‘the impossibility of children’s fiction’.16 Just as Elliott seems to possess in E.T. a visually phallic object, the child in Big wears the garb of his father, yet he both plays with an adult woman (jumping on a trampoline, etc.) and sleeps with her, after which – upon returning to a

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little boy – she drives him home. The myth of staying forever young yet enjoying sexual and economic success with a mother figure predominates. Later films shy away from the sexual nature of toy fantasy – the days of Weird Science (John Hughes, 1985), in which boys create a toy woman, are far behind. Yet the Oedipal narratives voiced by Christmas films The Santa Clause and Jingle All the Way satisfy a sexual as well as infantilising narrative. The fathers in both negotiate the demands of work and parenting through toys at Christmas, a strong symbol of capitalism. These films suggest that men can profit and play, stimulating the wonder of their children yet fulfilling economic functions. In The Santa Clause, the detached father becomes Santa and eventually – after myriad threats to access to his child – even satisfies his ex-wife’s innermost wish for a particular game, a satisfaction of both child and mother that is rendered innocent. In Jingle, the detached father who forgets to buy his child an action figure eventually – after numerous threats to losing his wife and family – becomes that action figure in a pageant, regaining his potency and legitimacy. More expressly sexual than The Santa Clause, Jingle suggests that a superhero toy-father ‘jingles’ his wife as well as impresses his child, who, through the father-astoy, claims his own potency. On the one hand, the situation of Christmas and gifts in these two films evokes the culture of divorce and fragility of marriage; noncustodial parents commonly place meaning on gifts and holidays as communications of ongoing love and support. On the other hand, as Sue Saltmarsh argues, Christmas stories throughout history mark shifting attitudes toward patriarchy, capitalism, commercialism, and imagination.17 The classic film Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947), like the later E.T., depicts the single mother as unhealthily unimaginative, refusing belief in Santa, in opposition to the male figure next door, who retains his sense of wonder and makes the mother seem perverse if not corrupting of childhood innocence.18 The opposition between mothers who do not believe in male dreams and men who not only believe in them but attain the respect of children for them circulates in The Santa Clause as well, not unlike in The Full Monty, which features the son’s increasing respect for his father’s strip show, in contrast to the child’s mother. Sons in The Santa Clause, The Full Monty and Night at the Museum take a leading role in their fathers’ economic enterprises. Mature children need only believe in fathers and manage their playscapes. These films make ‘hanging’ with imaginative fathers more appealing than living with unimaginative mothers, positing the centrality

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of toys and high interest activities in interactions with fathers, which replicates research suggesting that father participation with children tends to involve play and outings rather than routine care.19 Just as Jingle offers Christmas as one day of redemption for neglect, The Full Monty stresses the ‘one night’ of the strip act as redeeming a father even in the eyes of the community, who, amazingly enough, all attend the event even after condemning Gaz’s rehearsals. Throughout The Full Monty, the scheme of making money by stripping with an allmale peer group is associated with play, childhood fun and parenting. Although initially resistant to his father’s scheme and discontented with his father’s lack of homemaking skills – expressing dissatisfaction with eating Chinese food off a car engine and salvaging steel instead of doing ‘normal’ father–son activities – Nate (William Snape) comes to understand his father’s scheme as an expression of parental affection. In a moving scene mirroring Daniel’s assertion that he cannot live without his kids, Gaz expresses his love to Nate and explains he needs money to retain joint custody. However, the film also represents Gaz and his mates as ‘lad’ culture20 engaged in fantasy play. None of the men is exactly model material, and the film situates the rehearsals under their former foreman Gerald (Tom Wilkinson) as a parody of adult work roles. To distil the point, Gerald repeatedly calls them kids. A Peter Pan figure, Gaz and his overweight mate, Dave (Mark Addy), collect the downtrodden ‘lads’ of Sheffield in a green space beyond the town, where they eventually play football together and thereby become ‘lighter’ and more innocent. The child Nate participates in the strip scheme as DJ, dance critic, supporter, and financier. The film continually contrasts nakedness and suit-wearing, which stands for mundane adult jobs. For example, when the newlyemployed Gerald wears a suit and Gaz announces that tickets are already sold, Gaz says, ‘You’ve got the rest of your fuckin’ life to wear a suit’, and Dave says to Gaz, ‘Haven’t you grown out of all that, then?’ Multiple scenes in which the ‘lads’ play with Gerald’s gnomes demonstrate the subtext: by inviting Gerald to strip, they are saving him from an empty middle-class marriage based on traditional roles and dishonesty. Like Peter Pan, they look at Gerald’s middle-class life through windows; in one scene they play with Gerald’s gnomes outside a window, distracting Gerald from a job interview. The gnome that shatters symbolises the fragility of Gerald’s life, a shattering that recurs when Gerald’s wife discovers his unemployment and reveals she never liked the gnomes. In the context of Gerald and his home

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life, the gnomes are a symbol of idealised male labour buttressing the separate spheres of husband and wife, but by shattering and repairing the gnome, Gaz and Dave redefine cross-class male relationships, transforming the gnomes into items of active, disruptive play rather than decoration. With the reconstructed gnome they give Gerald a toy wheelbarrow: ‘its wheels turn and everything’. Gerald finds the wheelbarrow ‘marvellous, this’. The new gift is a new toy – a way for the gnome to move forward. Like Mrs. Doubtfire, The Full Monty gives men a unique opportunity to sympathise with women – the men increasingly face traditionally female concerns of exploitation, insecurities, and body issues – but just as the puppeteer seeks compromise, The Full Monty promotes the playful business of father–son entrepreneurship against the infringement of women and marriage. Although belonging to different genres, The Full Monty and Monsters, Inc. begin with similar scenes because they address the same problems in contemporary masculinity. Promotional advertisements – one for the town of Sheffield, and one for the company Monsters, Inc. – circulate the myth that men and the economy are healthy, wealthy and wise because industry and male identity go together. Like the embrace of steel in The Full Monty’s opening, signalling a vibrant past, the company Monsters, Inc. praises itself for powering the city by collecting fuel, harvested from children’s screams. Both films explore working-class male bonds and economic productivity as men’s primary value, which undergoes crisis when men become parents. Both focus on the development of play fathers as compensation for poor conditions of labour, limitations of public space and male identity, societal conditions hostile to fathers and children, and impossible efforts to negotiate parenting roles and allmale blue-collar work cultures. As startling as it is to compare the two films, comparison reveals that the paradigm of the fun father actively constructed in Pixar/Disney communicates the vulnerabilities and constrictions of fathers within a toy realm native to children’s culture and psychology. Monsters, Inc. features a man who is already a toy figure; though a professional scare monster, Sulley resembles a stuffed animal. He risks his work and buddy role when he grows attached to a child who has sneaked into the factory. The prohibition of children in the factory, policed by the Child Detection Agency, suggests the male condition. The two monsters, Sulley and Mike (Billy Crystal), a queer couple who occupy quasi-marital roles of masculine and feminine, come to crisis when they accidentally adopt the stowaway child and

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their relationship and aspirations have to alter. Mike’s pleas after Sulley is completely smitten suggest an abandoned partner: ‘what about us? [...] What about everything we ever worked for? [...] What about me? [...] don’t I matter?’ Tellingly, these pleas are voiced after exile, the punishment for childcare. Significantly, the workplace (the shut-down steel factory, the company) is the backdrop for a territorial struggle regarding fatherhood. Monsters, Inc. concerns the overwhelming shock of new fatherhood, which shifts all other priorities. At the beginning of the film, Sulley and his sidekick Mike care only for maintaining the top scare record, despite difficult times (today’s fearless kids). Sulley is conditioned to believe that nothing is more dangerous to the monster world than a child – that she (Boo) is the monster in the closet. The various doors used to gain access to children’s bedrooms provide a visual symbol of the closed threshold between work and family spheres, a division buttressed by the subordination of women at the company. Sulley’s initial, comic encounter with the child – she is holding on to his tail while he runs in fear – focuses on the chaotic mess of toys accompanying her, an attitude to early childhood and the chaos of play to which Pixar returns in Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010), with scenes of early childhood play as violent desacralisation of toys and proper order. In the masculine viewpoint of both stories, reproduction is terrifying and toxic. This cliché situates Sulley’s journey in learning to care for Boo, whom he names to the objection of Mike, in the crisis of new parenting. Sulley’s efforts to return or hide the child are continually thwarted, just as he fails to contain the child like an animal in their home, signalling new parenthood as a radical shift in power. The child is now in charge, demanding toys, bed, and Sulley’s company. Boo steals Mike’s teddy bear, the presence of which suggests that two men living together are not fully grown, and their appeasing her for crying is more for comfort than concern. The gradual acquiescence of Sulley to the child’s needs shows his seduction into a fathering role. While fear shifts to fascination the first night, and while a repetition of a trail of food from E.T. suggests childhood to be an alien invasion for single men, a pivotal change occurs the next day at work in the bathroom, when the child invites Sulley to play a sort of hide-and-seek game. The moment he plays with a gleeful child, his priorities shift. He begins to exaggerate being unable to find her; his ‘motherese’ manner of asking ‘where did she go? Did she disappear?’ shows accommodation to the developmental stage of

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the young child, the way in which adults adjust their discourse and manner in address to young children. After playing, protection of the child comes naturally. Their game also transforms doors into tools of collaborative play rather than separation. His initiation into parenthood is complete when he loses her and, in terror, screams at her ‘don’t you ever do that again, young lady!’ – a phrase parents and children will recognise as the terror of love. The film’s denouement – the realisation that children’s laughter generates more power than screams – is only an echo of the visual motif: Sulley’s physical appearance invites Boo’s play rather than fear. Visually, he is the only monster with normal facial features – other monsters have multiple eyes or tentacles or lizard appearances – and he is the only monster with fur, significant technologically as well as symbolically. Wanting to play and touch him in simulation of primate play, Boo is not afraid until he does a scare demonstration, which teaches him that scaring is wrong, and, in line with contemporary parenting practices, Sulley changes the scare floor to the laugh floor. With this comes a shift in the type of men valued; whereas the enormous, bear-like Sulley is the more valued employee at the beginning of the film and the more protective figure for Boo, the smaller, comedic one-eyed Mike, who makes Boo laugh, is more valued by the end. The triumph of the little guy’s playful, comic relationship with children mirrors the triumph of Gaz in The Full Monty, who simply lacks the body of the traditionally masculine figure. Mike pieces together Boo’s door, erasing the barrier between public and private. The public-private crossing device awarded to men in these films takes various forms; in The Full Monty it is the club itself, because earlier the child crosses the threshold into ‘women only’ space and the men cannot; in The Santa Clause, a snow globe allows communication between worlds; and in Mrs. Doubtfire, the television breaks the threshold when the father performs and breaks the fourth wall. Both Pixar and Disney films promote the economic viability of play along with the fantasy that men do not really have to grow up. Mike tells Boo, ‘it’s been fun. Go ahead – go, grow up’, when he sends her through her bedroom door, suggesting the monster world of the company as Neverland space and the girl’s bedroom as the ‘return’ to civilisation – like Wendy’s. The prejudice that men living without women and marriage are not really adult is an old one that still circulates in our homophobic culture.21 The idea of a buddy culture defining itself through fatherhood preoccupies the Toy Story series,

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where the toys stand for the absent father in the child Andy’s life. We are not told whether the father is deceased, but the mother’s description of Woody as ‘an old family toy’ hints that Andy’s special cowboy toy was perhaps once the father’s, which accords with Woody’s status as an earlier era toy in Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter, 1999). Throughout the series, Woody is adamant about ‘being there’ for Andy, even in Toy Story 3 when Andy is college-bound, and the other toys think they should leave before being consigned to the attic or ruthlessly discarded. The toys in Toy Story, as John Neal has articulated, enact Andy’s own fantasies of various stances of masculinity as he grows, in the absence of a father.22 Andy is most identified with Woody (Tom Hanks), a vulnerable and anxious toy who, in many scenes, loses limbs or pieces of himself (like his hat) and is far less conventionally masculine than the new space toy Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), who threatens to displace Woody as Andy develops, signifying the loss of androgynous youth as masculinity is acquired.23 At the end of Toy Story 3, Woody has to give up Andy entirely – E.T. and Elliott all over again. The developmental arc presented by and through toys bridges issues of parents and children in family films, making film itself the transitional space of fantasy theorised by Winnicott as objects relations – that which mediates between internal and external realities. Family films’ kinship with classic children’s literature in the prior century is not a surprise, because before the rise of mass media, stage creations like Peter Pan were family fare, designed to entertain all ages.24 A film like Disney’s Night at the Museum satisfies multiple levels of meaning by associating the development of a divorced father with historical toys that stand for different developmental stages of childhood as well as historical periods that defined masculinity in various ways. The main character, Larry Daley (Ben Stiller), lacks economic security, but, threatened with losing the esteem of his child, he gets a job as a security guard at the museum, the sort of job that The Full Monty equates with the narrowing of options upon adulthood – an unimaginative and lonely enterprise. However, not only does he immediately play with museum equipment while alone, but also the museum figures come to life at night and help him negotiate stages of fatherhood that he clearly did not perform with his actual child. With chaos unfolding in these figures, he needs to learn quickly how to manage. The museum monkey resembles the infant who needs diapers and baby keys; the two ‘sibling’ figures who continually fight (a toy Roman and cowboy) figure as

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children whom he must coach to share and cooperate; Atilla the Hun (Patrick Gallagher) resembles the angry adolescent whom he must council and psychoanalyse; the romantically shy, though physically brazen, Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams) represents the changes demanded from parents in the young adult years, when issues of romance and relationship become more complicated areas for counsel. Since most of these figures embody problematic models of masculinity as well – Teddy’s nonsensical lessons in manhood and greatness pepper the film – viewers of all ages can appreciate the irrelevance of such overwrought masculinity models in history to Larry’s actual efforts to parent the toys. His many mistakes make him want to quit, symbolising his fears that he and his son have given up on each other. The most intimidating figure in the museum is Sacagawea (Mizuo Peck), idealised as ‘the ultimate working mother’ because she led Lewis and Clark on their expedition with her baby on her back. The capabilities of mothers and their abilities to forge new relationships reflect Larry’s own anxieties about his son’s increasing respect for his mother’s new partner. The repeated shot of Sacagawea in the lead and the two men puzzling over a map mirror Larry’s anxieties about how he and his son may be unable to map a relationship given the competent mother; the conclusion that Larry can incorporate work and childcare through playing and organising the toys echoes numerous other films. Through play ‘at night’, he learns parenting skills, negotiating and organising rather than simply giving his

Figure 8-2 Night at the Museum’s Larry (Ben Stiller) expresses anxiety about paternal obsolescence through night play with a dinosaur-turned-pet

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‘children’ what they want. He also negotiates a different mode of masculinity than those represented by the toys, such as the cowboy and Roman, who claim they fight because they are men, or Roosevelt, who boasts about masculine greatness and fears speaking to a woman. Larry’s is a model of masculinity in which his son soon participates by helping him entertain and protect the toys; as in Toy Story 3, they all party together in the end, father and son restored as guardians of history and male legacies, made uniquely their own. Ultimately, Larry’s negotiated model for playful caretaking mirrors these films’ cultural functions; they entertain at night to construct playful myths where uncertainties and anxieties lie. Dave’s announcement of the strip act in The Full Monty is a meaningful description of how these films negotiate the vexed role of fathers in a post-feminist context: ‘we may not be young and we may not be pretty, we may not be right good, but we’re here, we’re live, and for one night only we’re going for the full monty.’ James Leggott argues that the overwhelming ‘narrative of infantalisation’ in The Full Monty is offset by Gaz’s mentor role toward the group.25 Gaz’s mentoring proves the pervasiveness of the tension in determining new images of fathers. In films we find a certain naked reflection of social roles that in are question, and toys indeed have become a cinematic window into the political unconscious.

Notes 1. Sarah Edge, ‘When Did You Last See Your Father? The Bad Mother and the Good Father in some Contemporary Hollywood Films’, Irish Journal of Feminist Studies 1, no. 2 (1996), pp. 76–77. 2. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). 3. Lois Kuznets, When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 4. Holly Blackford, ‘PC Pinocchios: Parents, Children, and the Metamorphosis Tradition in Science Fiction’ in Sharon R. Sherman and Mikel J. Koven, eds, Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture (Salt Lake: Utah State University Press, 2007), pp. 74–92. 5. Antony Magistrale, ‘Innocence Unrewarded: A Note on E.T. and the Myth of Adolescence’, Science Fiction Studies 2 (1984), p. 224. 6. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1982); Melanie Klein, ‘The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique: Its History and Significance’ in Juliet Mitchell, ed., The Selected Melanie Klein (New York: The Free Press, 1986), pp. 35–54.

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7. Ibid., p. 89. 8. Andrew Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), pp. 87–88. 9. See Gordon, Empire of Dreams, for a discussion of E.T. as an imaginary figure with contradictory meanings, including phallic body; Close Encounters, E.T. and Poltergeist as a suburban trilogy preoccupied with divorce; and the ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’ throughout Spielberg’s work. 10. Deborah Lupton and Lesley Barclay, Constructing Fatherhood: Discourses and Experiences (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 63–71; Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 29. 11. Noel Brown, ‘Hollywood, the Family Audience and the Family Film, 1930–2010’, PhD thesis completed at Newcastle University, June 2010, p. 226. 12. J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 5. 13. Ibid., p. 6. 14. Ibid., p. 7. 15. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1992). 16. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 17. Sue Saltmarsh, ‘Spirits, Miracles and Clauses: Economy, Patriarchy and Childhood in Popular Christmas Texts’, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 17, no. 1 (2007), pp. 5–18. 18. Ibid., p. 12–13. 19. Segal, Slow Motion, p. 35. 20. Estella Tincknell and Deborah Chambers, ‘Performing the Crisis: Fathering, Gender, and Representation in Two 1990s Films’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 29, no. 4 (2002), p. 148. 21. See, for example, this bias in Dan Kiley, The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up (New York: Avon Books, 1983). 22. John Neal, ‘We’re Andy’s Toys: Toy Story as Critique on Hegemonic Masculinity and the Gender Role Socialization of Children through Child’s Play’, paper presented at the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2011. 23. Ibid. 24. See Brown for a discussion of regressive address in family films and dual address in children’s literature, as well as a history of changes in the definition of family films. 25. James Leggott, ‘Like Father? Failing Parents and Angelic Children in Contemporary British Social Realist Cinema’ in Phil Powrie, Anne Davies, and Bruce Babington, eds, The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2004), p. 164.

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9

‘Films to Give Kids Courage!’: Children’s Films in the German Democratic Republic Benita Blessing

‘Who am I? Where do I belong?’ These are the sorts of questions that children’s and youth films help young people address, at least according to the former East German film director Helmut Dziuba.1 Dziuba’s statement, written in 2002 for the 25th anniversary of the International Children’s Film Festival in Berlin, captures the best intentions of filmmakers, and the hopes of most parents and educators about the benefits of children’s and youth films. Dziuba went on to insist that these films are not, and should not be, about box office numbers, but rather about giving young people’s lives meaning. Such optimistic statements do not accurately describe the entire world of children’s and youth films, and might come as a surprise when we consider this particular director’s background. Helmut Dziuba, after all, had worked for the state-run, socialist film production company DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft) in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany). Not all children’s and youth films in the GDR achieved the lofty goals he professed, although an impressive number did. DEFA children’s and youth films, a genre widely ‘held in particularly high esteem’ in even an international context,2 in fact polarise film studies scholars, compounded by the difficulty of defining ‘children’s films’, a category that emerged only slowly in the GDR and remained an object of debate throughout DEFA’s history.3 In some accounts, the GDR used films as vehicles for indoctrination,4 with children’s films at the forefront of the struggle between communism and capitalism.5 Elsewhere, DEFA’s children and youth films, especially the fairy-tale films, became an outstanding body of cinematic work that consistently 155

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‘reflected the spirit and ideals of humanism, democracy, and societal progress’, appealing to children and adults alike.6 DEFA children’s films direct our attention to the complex situation of filmmaking under GDR socialism, including the limits of regime authority.7 Children’s films, moreover, with their claim to bettering the world for young people, offer a particular kind of documentary about the GDR that requires scholars to interpret these stories within the contexts of Cold War politics and international cinema history.

DEFA and Children’s Films In contrast to many historians’ assumptions that official socialist expressions of art were subject to unrelenting censorship by a dictatorship, the DEFA studio enjoyed many periods of considerable autonomy and artistic ‘leeway’.8 That is not to say that DEFA filmmakers did not face various degrees and forms of censorship from the GDR’s official party, the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland, Socialist Unity Party), or even within the studio itself. The SED and the Ministry for Culture, often through its Film Office (the Hauptverwaltung Film), exercised primary control over filmmaking, from issues concerning a film’s ideological message, to cinematic style, to even whether a film was appropriate for children or adults.9 But decisions to make use of this power were confusing and capricious throughout DEFA’s history.10 At times, the SED seemed uninterested in the goings-on in DEFA’s feature film studios, located at Babelsberg, a few kilometres outside of Berlin. In other instances, the Party exerted a near absolute-authority over DEFA. The chilling Eleventh Plenum of 1965 exemplified this schizophrenic attitude towards films: accusing filmmakers of inappropriate criticism of the regime, the SED shocked DEFA by banning 11 films and warning the studio about its unacceptable bourgeois attitudes.11 In written and oral interviews, DEFA employees, whether directors, scriptwriters, actors, technicians, or costume designers, described the exhilaration of those times when any film seemed possible, just as they recounted the frustration and anger when the state, usually randomly, interfered in their professional lives.12 Children’s films escaped much, although certainly not all, of this formal and informal censorship.13 A number of filmmakers used this relative freedom to create films with subversive messages.14 Yet, more often, children’s filmmakers believed in the possibility of a socialism that could bring

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about a better society, even as they presented criticisms of their current system. As in many societies, children’s films in the GDR had a mixed audience of adults and young people. Given the inexpensive tickets – usually 1 East German Mark for adults and 25 Pfennige for children for domestic and other socialist productions15 – and the dearth of other recreational activities in a closed society, it is no wonder that the GDR has been described as a ‘film nation’: going to the movies was a national pastime.16 Statistics on the percentage of GDR citizens and children who watched DEFA films, specifically children’s films, are not entirely reliable, although a general picture can indirectly be drawn. An internal DEFA report from 1951 estimated that every GDR citizen went to more than ten films a year; in 1989, the last report by DEFA on audience data noted that cinemas and other venues, such as kindergartens, showed approximately 2,200 films daily to approximately 190,000 people, of which 70 per cent were children and adolescents.17 Not all of these films were DEFA productions; nonetheless, even a superficial reading of film magazines for fans such as Film und Fernsehen makes clear that DEFA productions were consistently well-attended, with screenings of productions for children and youth attracting young and old audiences alike. The founding of an official working group for children’s film did not occur until 1953, although films for and about children had been part of DEFA’s repertoire from its first production year in 1946.18 DEFA filmmakers and SED functionaries often argued about whether or not a film should carry the label ‘children’s film’. The Film Office, tasked with the decision of recommending a film for the appropriate age-group, sometimes changed its mind about the intended audience during the making of a film and even after distribution. Even the rating system was confusing, with the youngest rating starting with films for children six years and older, and subsequent ‘recommended’ ratings spaced with two-year intervals through the age of 18 (i.e., recommended for eight years and older, ten years and older, etc.) existing alongside official ratings.19 Nonetheless, using a definition of a children’s and youth film as one that was watched by young people or centred on their experiences,20 scholars of DEFA identify over 20 per cent of the more than 700 feature films produced between 1946 and the fall of socialism in 1989 as for or about children and young people.21 The diversity of topics is impressive, ranging from tales of Cold War espionage with young boys foiling the saboteurs (Alarm im Zirkus / Alarm at the Circus, Gerhard

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Klein, 1954), to princesses and their evil stepmothers (for instance, Schneewittchen / Snow White, Gottfried Kolditz, 1961), to young girls disappointed yet again by their deadbeat fathers (Das Herz des Piraten / The Heart of the Pirate, Jürgen Brauer, 1988). The diversity of DEFA children’s and youth films can nonetheless be divided into three general categories: historical films, fairy-tale films, and ‘everyday’ films.

Children’s Historical Films Dziuba’s 1969 film, Moor and the Ravens of London (Mohr und die Raben von London) exemplifies the importance and challenges posed to filmmakers commissioned to make historical feature films. These works used key aspects and characters of East Germany’s national foundation myths and overlaid them with fictional stories that demonstrated the development of socialism and its key tenets.22 The screenplay for Moor was based on a much-loved part of the sixthgrade reading curriculum in GDR schools, written in 1962 by the children’s book authors Vilmos and Ilse Korn, reflecting a common practice in DEFA of adapting popular literature for film.23 Moor, about Karl Marx during his years of exile in London, celebrated the communist hero’s 150th birthday – and was DEFA’s first feature film about him.24 Set in London in 1856, the film introduces us to a young Marx (Alfred Müller). His dark hair and ‘swarthy’ complexion – so different a picture to the older Marx, with his iconic, full white beard that would later grace communist banners and memorabilia – had earned him the nickname ‘Moor’ as a young man.25 Marx had always been uncomfortable with the moniker and its suggestion of a Jewish background; the film communicates a more general unease with the nickname when a young girl tells him that her name is Rebecca, but that they call her Becky. ‘Names can be tricky,’ he sighs; ‘they call me Moor.’ ‘Mr. Moor’ becomes a trusted ally of neighbourhood children employed in a spinning factory that violates numeroos child labour laws. The boys and girls work 12-, instead of eight-hour days; the supervisors force them into night shifts when production numbers are too low and whip them mercilessly; and the young workers often receive less pay than agreed. The turning point comes when one of the boys has his pay docked for allegedly stealing lace cloth, when in fact it had been the gang ‘The Ravens’ who had committed the crime. Moor learns the details of the case, and engages the ‘king’ of the gang in a conversation about class conflict and ethics, convincing

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Figure 9-1 ‘Moor’ (Alfred Müller) discussing the role of workers with neighbourhood children during a stroll through downtown London

the self-appointed Robin Hood characters to disband and, literally, go to work. When Moor enlists the city inspection agency to end the factory’s mistreatment of its young employees, it would seem that the story has a happy end. But Dziuba did not let capitalism off the hook so easily. The audience shares Moor’s amusement when factory manager Mr Cross (Hannjo Hasse) lectures him about the economy – a topic, complains Mr Cross, on which Moor should educate himself. Even for the uninitiated, the depictions of Moor hard at work writing about and discussing the failures of capitalism make Mr Cross and the factory’s abusive supervisors-cum-henchmen appear arrogant. The film rivals Marx’s actual writings for a sober explanation of the evolving theories behind communism. Even Moor’s lectures about education, that young people must be able to read to grow into responsible adults, does not fall into an empty warning about juvenile delinquency. All children have the right to attend school, implies the film; that is, to learn about their society and how best to structure it. The film received positive reviews from audiences. Critics agreed that Dzuiba had succeeded in his pedagogical objectives without turning Marx into a one-sided fanatic.26 Despite the bleak and desperate living conditions of some of the characters, the film resists becoming a depressing lesson about nineteenth-century capitalism. Absent are facile slogans about communism. Moor relies on the presumption of good triumphing over evil, stopping short of pedantic lectures on the historical inevitability of the collapse of capitalism. Dziuba himself,

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after all, believed in socialism as an ongoing societal project that aimed for the creation of a better world; at the same time, he argued that only a truly open assessment of socialist society that did not shy away from criticism would make this vision possible.27 Nonetheless, SED officials found Dziuba’s ‘Moor’ an insult to Marx and all he stood for.28 The very scenes that humanised Marx – his avuncular talks with troubled young people, or images of a local boy showing him how best to peel onions – kept the movie out of the Moscow Film Festival. In the eyes of SED officials, Dziuba had turned Marx into a lamentable figure, who showed no signs of becoming one of socialism’s most celebrated heroes. Much in keeping with its inconsistent ability to recognise an obvious triumph of socialism over capitalism on the Big Screen, the SED declared that showing the film in Moscow would alienate Soviet audiences.29 Other films made that year point to the political line that officials readily accepted. They also point to the arbitrary decisions made by party officials, particularly in the presence of discrepancies between official interpretations of films and even loyal socialist film critics’ assessments. Konrad Petzold’s Weiße Wölfe (White Wolves, 1969), part of the emerging genre of DEFA’s ‘Indian Films’, portrayed nineteenth-century triumphs of Native Americans in the United States over the white military, an ideal vehicle for creating a fantasy-history for socialist messages that could be practiced beyond the cinema: Children playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’ no longer wanted to play the bad guy role of cowboy.30 The children’s film Der Weihnachtsmann heißt Willi (Santa Claus’s Name is Willi, Ingrid Reshke, 1969) depicts a society in which adults who try to swindle children can be rehabilitated when confronted with children’s innocence and wonder. More problematic had been the fairy-tale film Wie heiratet man einen König (How to Marry a King, Rainer Simon, 1969), which SED functionaries believed would confuse and bore children with its love story full of eroticism.31 Although Simon’s film packed cinemas, silencing its critics, the message remained: directors had no right either to complicate fairy tales with love stories or, as in Dziuba’s case with Moor, play around with larger-than-life socialist heroes. Despite his first political setback with Moor, Dziuba became one of the GDR’s most important directors and went on to produce a number of award-winning children’s and young people’s films. These works included his 1982 critically-acclaimed story about an orphan girl, Sabine Kleist, 7 Jahre (Sabine Kleist, 7 Years Old ) and his so-called ‘proletarian trilogy’ historical films – Rotschlipse (Red Ties, 1978); Als

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Unku Edes Freundin war (When Unku was Ede’s Friend, 1981); and Jan auf der Zille (Jan on the Barge, 1986). Clearly, although the SED had mistrusted Dziuba’s treatment of Karl Marx in Moor, it did not see a reason to take drastic action to rein him in. This attitude exemplifies the uneven judgements and punishments meted out by the SED and the Film Office. Many of their decisions ended DEFA employees’ careers, but Dziuba was not alone in receiving a second chance to direct other films, even ones that did not celebrate the realities of life under socialism.

Traditional Fairy-Tale Films Fairy-tale productions earned DEFA a reputation for excellent children’s films, even if many filmmakers did not conceive them solely for a young audience.32 These movies offered audiences in the GDR and beyond impressive adaptations of traditional fairy tales, from storyline to special effects and technical prowess. Filmed with live actors and familiar storylines, these movies came to occupy a place in DEFA’s regular productions for children watching them for the first time, and adults who returned to revisit the tales of their youth. DEFA fairy-tale films also offered a clear filmic and aesthetic alternative to the animated Disney fairy versions, contributing to the GDR’s development of its own national film culture. The earliest fairy-tale films impressed audiences with their special effects.33 Paul Verhoeven’s 1950 Das kalte Herz (The Cold Heart),34 based on the nineteenth-century German tale by Wilhelm Hauff, and constituting DEFA’s first colour film, boasted gorgeous, magical landscapes peopled by lifelike giants and dwarves.35 Three years later, oblivious to the Soviet tanks outside the film studio brought in to violently repress the 17 June 1953 Worker’s Revolt, Wolfgang Staudte directed another Hauff story, Die Geschichte vom kleinen Muck (The Story of Little Mook).36 In this popular story, the orphaned hunchback Mook finds magical slippers with which he can run at breakneck speeds across the desert in search of happiness, a cinematic trick that took filmgoers’ breath away. DEFA fairy-tale films slowly took on a different look. Although special effects continued to appear in fairy-tale films throughout DEFA’s history, an identifiable aesthetic had been established by the early 1960s, with movies such as Schneewittchen (Snow White). In these films, characters moved within simple, pared-down settings,

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reminiscent of the theatre world in which many fairy-tale filmmakers also worked. This media convergence of theatre and film created productions that focused on the actors and the story. The talking mirror in Snow White showed off only a few blinking lights while it judged the stepmother’s beauty, allowing the stepmother’s dialogue with the mirror to define her growing fear and hatred of her stepdaughter. Later fairy-tale films, which turned to more lavish sets and were often shot on location in romantic forests, such as Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot (Snow White and Rose Red, Siegfried Hartmann, 1979), retained the look and feel of a stage play, with near-static camera shots and acting reminiscent of classical theatre training. This theatrical aesthetic in fairy-tale films did not always guarantee success. Some of the same filmmakers who made children’s films that won numerous international awards also produced disappointing movies. Sometimes, these less-impressive films failed to turn a fairy-tale story into an interesting film, or else contained technical mistakes, or suffered from a poor selection of actors. And, although scholars of the GDR have pointed to fairy-tale films as a vehicle for political subversion, not all DEFA tales of good versus evil portrayed clear outcomes.37 One such example comes from DEFA’s prolific children’s film director Walter Beck. His 1971 film Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty) has all the hallmarks of a bad film: a forced, yet incomplete, storyline; flat characters; sloppy camerawork; absurd costumes; and an ending that does not come quickly enough to release filmgoers from the cinema. Because DEFA fairy-tale films had such a strong cinematic reputation, Sleeping Beauty is important to contextualise the entirety of this genre. Moreover, Walter Beck occupies a special place in the world of DEFA directors, with his numerous awards for outstanding children’s films and his contributions to the genre – he made more fairy-tale films than any other DEFA director, and published widely on the subject.38 While all prolific filmmakers are bound to have at least a few less-than-brilliant works, Beck’s Sleeping Beauty is breathtaking in its problems. It performed well at the box office, typical of DEFA fairy-tale films, but received sharp criticism for its pedantic approach to depicting socialist values. In Beck’s retelling, the 13th fairy, uninvited to the celebration of the birth of the princess, is responsible for hard work (Fleiß). She crashes the party and curses Sleeping Beauty, foretelling that a prick from a spinning wheel will kill the princess. As in traditional versions of the tale, the King bans spinning wheels from his kingdom, hoping to spare his

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daughter. Unlike other tales, Beck shows the King living a life of luxury, portraying him and his entourage as oblivious to the workers of the kingdom, who, without their means of production, fall into poverty and misery. Beck overdraws this contrast. The hungry workers who shuffle past the overweight King and the feast at his banquet table look comical instead of pitiable. When Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger, only the court falls asleep. The rest of the kingdom continues to toil and suffer for a hundred years, so that it is not at all evident that the disappearance of an elite class – even for an entire century – could bring about a government in which workers rule. The film’s other attempts to connect the tale to socialist lessons are equally problematic. When the Prince slashes his way through to rescue Sleeping Beauty, the 13th fairy arrives at the castle. She removes the crown from the King and then turns to the Prince to quiz him about how he will run his kingdom. She informs him that he has passed her test about the perils of laziness. The King realises his own leadership mistakes, and declares forevermore to rule with ‘hard work’. The fairy of hard work, not evil after all, returns his crown, and warns the rulers never to overlook the importance of work again. This change to the story confuses the intended moral. There had never been any doubt that the kingdom’s workers had wanted to work. In the hundred years of royal slumber, the subjects’ plight had not improved. Only the royal family’s recognition that their laziness had brought about pain to the kingdom effected improvements to the average person’s life. Had the film been more coherent, we might read a biting criticism of an ‘enlightened’ government, or even an appeal to the masses to take matters into their own hands. Such messages of subversion do not hold up in this meandering film. Sleeping Beauty may have discouraged the most dedicated, hard-working young antifascists from believing in any values of socialism. Critics of the film complained about the film’s many failures. For example, the attempt to give the kingdom’s residents pale complexions after a hundred years without sunshine only turned their faces blue.39 Others either complained that the film adaptation was so unrealistic as to overrun the fairy-tale quality of the story, or damned it with faint praise, conceding that the film at least showed the ‘true quality of our ORWO-Colour-Materials’.40 They went on to observe that Sleeping Beauty and her Prince did not personify royalty, since the actress came across as silly instead of regal; nor did her short dress and his almost modern-looking breeches make a bridge to the twentieth century.41 They just looked out of place. Despite these criticisms

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of style and message, the Film Office evaluated the film positively for its effective moral and political lessons.42 It is difficult to imagine that significant criticism of Sleeping Beauty was unimportant to the SED, and yet Beck received no reprimands for making a film that from contemporary accounts failed cinematographically and ideologically. Here, at least, the regime abandoned its dedication to children’s and young people’s socialist education through film in another demonstration of its inconsistent attitude towards, or perhaps inability to regulate, what came out of Babelsberg studios.

Everyday Films The film Hasenherz (literally ‘rabbit heart’, The Coward ), directed by Gunter Friedrich in 1987, is a roman-à-clef, embedding the DEFA fairy-tale film tradition in a story about the everyday problems faced by young people. The Coward won numerous national and international awards, including UNICEF’s children’s film prize. The use of the fairy-tale motif points to Friedrich’s earlier work as an actor in some of Beck’s fairy-tale films, while positioning the film within DEFA’s children’s films of the 1980s that no longer turned to artifice as a means of understanding the world. From the multi-layered plot to the meticulous set design, The Coward exemplifies DEFA’s children’s films’ ability to address young people’s issues beyond the Iron Curtain, including late twentieth-century societal expectations of gender roles. The film begins with a DEFA director who comes to a school to find a boy to play the prince in a fairy-tale film. This scene makes the film exciting and believable: who would not want to be discovered as a movie star so easily? In the GDR, the story carried even more credibility; many directors used Laiendarsteller – untrained actors – and the connection between schools and children’s filmmakers was a close one.43 The director in the film picks the 13-year-old Janni (Bettina Hohensee) for the role of the prince who is to slay a dragon. The class bursts into laughter and jeering: Janni, despite the short hair and chequered flannel shirt, is actually Jeanette, a young girl, devastated at this gender confusion. Janni runs home, where she lives with her mother and grandmother, crying that she will not be part of the film. The absence of a father does not seem to be a problem for the family. When the film director comes to the house that evening to ask Janni to reconsider, he talks to her as a filmmaker who wants to make an outstanding fairy-tale film, and not as a

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paternal figure. Janni’s mother and grandmother are impressed by the director, but they do not treat him as a hero. When the two women convince Janni to take the part, they do so out of a conviction that Janni might benefit from the challenge of being part of the film. Young people’s own feelings about gender roles figure heavily in to the storyline. In the GDR of the late 1980s, girls might decide to wear tomboyish clothes, but they would be punished for acting – literally, in The Coward – like boys. Janni finds a solution to this dilemma by allowing her classmates to believe that she plays the role of the princess. She pictures herself in this role, too, sneaking into the costume room to dress as a princess. When the director sees her in a brocade gown and a wig of flowing locks, he chastises her for not playing her correct role. Janni’s distress at her ambiguous gender status drives the film’s narrative. She is scared of countless things and situations, demonstrated early in the film within the film when she runs from the large barking dogs that, in the fairy-tale movie, the prince must get past to take on the dragon. Janni leaves the set and cowers behind the adults. The director apologises to her, apparently for trying to keep her from acting like a girl, even though his ultimate objective for her is to act like a boy. She fails time and again at rehearsals when trying to ride a horse into the dragon’s lair to slay it, since she fears heights and swords. To complete the case of mistaken gender, she finds a new best friend off-set, Sabine (Charlotte Bastian), who believes Janni to be

Figure 9-2 Janni (Bettina Hohensee) learning her lines as the ‘Prince’ for the film within the film in The Coward

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a boy and falls in love with him, or rather her. Janni, however, is in love with Sabine’s brother, Sebastian (Clemens Ziesenitz), who also believes her to be a boy. Janni does not correct the siblings’ misperception, since it allows her to brag to Sabine about her/his princely deeds in the movie, while the two of them watch Sebastian and his friends play soccer. In the end, predictably, Janni becomes so self-confident that she invites her classmates to the premiere. They celebrate her talent in her role as a valiant prince and accept her as a peer. She then confesses her gender identity to Sabine, who refuses to forgive her for the lie. Janni does not seem upset by this ‘break-up’. She lets her hair grow longer, and in the final scene rides up to Sebastian’s sports field on a white steed, borrowed from the film set. Decked out in a lacy pink dress, Janni waves to Sebastian, who realises her feminine charms and runs to her, not upset that she had tricked him into believing she had been Sabine’s boyfriend. Janni, now Jeanette, and Sebastian ride off together in the sunset, albeit with Janni holding the reigns. The Coward is another illustration of the never-ending DEFA and SED arguments about whether a film was for children or adults. Some critics believed that The Coward, with its realistic depiction of Janni’s world and personal growth, would not make sense to children, would bore adolescents, and that parents were more likely to enjoy the story than their children.44 Other critics praised the film for its intriguing storyline, pleasing set design, and the actors’ abilities. The fact that the film is, in many ways, about DEFA also received positive mention, even though the director of the fairy-tale film and his team do not always make the right decisions, sometimes treating actors like Janni unfairly and without consideration of the consequences – a self-criticism that could be read as a metaphor for critique of the GDR.45 Neues Deutschland enjoyed the film and its message that children can learn from one another.46 This interpretation of the film as a Bildungsroman, designed to support young people in their path to adulthood, dominated commentary about it. Adults may be in the film, but the film is on the side of the children. This point of view stands in contrast to Beck’s Sleeping Beauty, where adults control children’s fates, and even to Moor, where adults are the ultimate authority figures who must keep young people safe. Critics and audiences ignored the moral that a true Happy End comes only for girls who choose the path of the Princess – granted, one less helpless than princesses before her – providing insight into the

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history of idealised and actual gender roles behind the Wall. By the 1980s, single mothers did not apologise for the absence of a father, and adults trusted girls to take on roles in film and in life that transcended traditional feminine qualities – but only temporarily. Janni receives the opportunity of a lifetime by acting as a boy, but at the acceptable expense of losing her best friend in a complicated, gender-confused break-up. Everything in the film pushes Janni on a journey that ends with her growth into a young woman – not into a young person. Similarly, her stand-in prince, Sebastian, falls in love with the ‘real’ girl, and not one with short hair and flannel shirts. A girl could play at being a boy, but only in a fairy-tale fantasy. And here is where Friedrich succeeds in making a documentary of an era of the kind that make DEFA children’s films such an important part of Cold War culture.

DEFA Children’s Films: Between Inspiration and Confusion What do we take from these films? To return to my introduction, Dziuba’s claim that children’s and youth films served to inspire young people was, in many cases, right. His statement can be extended to include young people’s own agency in choosing their paths, and not always along a vague notion of socialist ideology. But not all DEFA films were pedagogically or even cinematically sound, and the SED’s assessments of DEFA’s productions for children and young people were often at odds with audience and film critics’ reception. When a film such as Moor and the Ravens of London succeeds in communicating its intended message to an audience who is ready to receive it, but the state mistrusts its citizens’ ability to judge the film, then DEFA cannot be understood as a puppet of the SED. When a film such as Sleeping Beauty fails its viewers, young or old, but the state allows and even encourages the director to continue with his or her vision of what children and young people should be watching, then the state is either not always paying attention, or simply does not care as much about young people as it claims. When a film like The Coward provides girls with the courage they need to become women, without critically asking if the film’s conception of womanhood is the best future for them, then the film and the state’s assessment of it both reflect and reify the era’s gender ideals and norms. Or, put another way: film-makers in the GDR had the freedom, at times, to

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make the kinds of films that got them in trouble with the state. And filmmakers had so much freedom, or else an absence of administrative scrutiny, that they were permitted to produce even bad films. Finally, by the late 1980s, at a time when unrest throughout the Soviet bloc stretched SED functionaries’ attention, some directors, like Friedrich, had the freedom to produce films that held potentially anti-regime messages that would-be censors did not notice, or simply ignored. In all of these cases, though, DEFA directors of children’s films clearly respected their young audiences and cared about their futures, holding fast to the belief that their films would help children along the way, giving them courage, regardless of box office numbers and political winds.

Notes 1. Barbara Felsmann, Blicke, Begegnungen, Berührungen: 25 Jahre Kinderfilmfest (Berlin: Jovis, 2002), pp. 8–9. 2. Seán Allan and John Stanford, eds, DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946–1992 (New York: Berghahn, 1996), p. ix. 3. Marc Silbermann, ‘The First DEFA Fairy Tales’ in John Davidson and Sabine Hake, eds, Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2008), pp. 109–10; Helmut Dziuba, ‘Sabine Kleist, 7 Jahre – ein Film für Kinder oder für Erwachsene?’ in Ingelore König, Dieter Wiedemann and Lothar Wolf, eds, Zwischen Marx und Muck: DEFA-Filme für Kinder (Berlin: Henschel, 1996), p. 34. 4. Sylvia Delti, ‘Vorwärts und nicht vergessen...: Zur Propaganda in DEFAFilmen’ in Raimund Fritz, ed., Der Geteilte Himmel: Höhepunkte des DEFAKinos 1946–1992, vol 2; Essays zur Geschichte der DEFA und Filmografien von 61 DEFA-Regisseurinnen (Viennna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2001), pp. 133–48; Marc Silbermann, German Cinema: Texts in Context (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), pp. 145–46. 5. Heinz Kersten, ‘Junge Pioniere, Tagträumer und Indianer: Die Kinderund Jugendfilme der DEFA’ in Raimund Fritz, ed., Der Geteilte Himmel, pp. 119–32. 6. Klaus Richter-de Vroe, ‘Zwischen Wirklichkeit und Ideal’ in Eberhard Berger und Joachim Giera, eds, 77 Märchenfilme: Ein Filmführer für Jung und Alt (Berlin: Henschel), p. 20. 7. See Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Massenmedien im Kalten Krieg: Akteure, Bilder, Resonanzen (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006); Dieter Wiedemann: ‘Der DEFA-Kinderfilm: Zwischen Resteverwertung und Politikdiskursen – Überlegungen zum Umgang mit einem Kulturerbe’ in Horst Schäfter and Claudia Wegener, eds, Kindheit und Film: Geschichte, Themen und Perspektiven des Kinderfilms in Deutschland (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2009), p. 117.

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8. Evelyn Preuss, ‘The Bakhtinian Headstands of East German Cinema’ in Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, eds, Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), p. 108. 9. Allan and Sandford, DEFA: East German Cinema, pp. 9–10. 10. Klaus Wischnewski, ‘Träumer und Gewöhnliche Leute: 1966 bis 1979’ in Ralf Schenk, ed., Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg: DEFA Spielfilme 1945–92 (Berlin: Henschel, 1994), p. 213. 11. Stephen Brockmann, A Critical History of East German Film (Rochester, New York: Camden House), pp. 227–28. 12. Oral History Interviews during the years 2007–2013 in the possession of the author. 13. Stefan Röske, Der jugendliche Blick: Helmut Dziubas Spielfilme im letzten Jahrzehnt der DEFA (Berlin: DEFA-Stiftung, 2006), pp. 49–50. 14. Interview with former DEFA director Jörg Foth, November 2010. 15. All film prices and even accompanying film programmes were inexpensive throughout the GDR; some regions, moreover, offered reduced or free tickets to children during summer vacation. Imports, especially from the West, often cost twice the normal price. Interview with former DEFA screenwriter Renate Epperlein, July 2007. 16. Harry Blunk and Dirk Jungnickel, eds, Filmland DDR: Ein Reader zu Geschichte, Funktion und Wirklung der DEFA (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1990). 17. Ralf Schenk, ‘Kino in der DDR: Eine kurze Geschichte des ostdeutschen Lichtspielwesens, 1946–1990’, at filmportal.de [accessed 8/9/2013]. 18. Dieter Wiedemann, ‘Der DEFA-Kinderfilm: Zwischen Resteverwertung und Politikdiskursen’ in Horst Schäfter and Claudia Wegener, eds, Kindheit und Film, p. 117. 19. Matthias Struch, ‘Auf dem Weg zur sozialistischen Persönlichkeiten: Kinder-und Jugendmedienschutz in der DDR’, Teil II, tv-diskurs 48:3 (2009), p. 76. 20. Tobias Kurwinkel and Philipp Schmerheim, Kinder- und Jugendfilmanalyse (Constance: UVK, 2013), pp. 15–25. 21. Helmut Morsbach, ‘Vorwort’ in Klaus-Dieter Felsmann and Bernd Sahling, eds, Deutsche Kinderfilme aus Babelsberg: WerkstattgesprächeRezeptionsräume (Berlin: DEFA-Stiftung, 2010), p. 7. 22. Stefan Röske, Der jugendliche Blick, pp. 130–31. 23. Hans-Dieter Tok, ‘Ausflug in die Vergangenheit – Historischer DEFAKinderfilme’ in Ingelore König, Dieter Wiedemann and Lothar Wolf, eds, Vergangene Zeiten: Arbeiten mit DEFA-Kinderfilmen (Munich: KoPäd, 1998), p. 13. 24. Ingelore König et al., Zwischen Marx und Muck, p. 170. 25. Pierre Birnbaum, Geography of Hope: Exile, The Enlightenment, Dissimilation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 77–79. 26. Elvira Mollenschott, ‘Erster Marx-Film der DDR’, Neues Deutschland , 31 March 1969; Friedrich Salow, ‘Faßbares Marxbild’, Filmspiegel 9 (1969), p. 8; H. U., ‘Ein lebensvolles Porträt’, Neue Zeit, 30 March 1969.

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27. Stefan Röske, Der jugendliche Blick, p. 9. 28. Hans-Dieter Tok, ‘Ausflug in die Vergangenheit – Historischer DEFAKinderfilme’ in Vergangene Zeiten: Arbeiten mit DEFA-Kinderfilmen, p. 11. 29. Ibid. 30. Norbert Wehrstedt, ‘Indianerwestern made in GDR’ in Ingelore König et al., Zwischen Marx und Muck, pp. 61–64. 31. Stellungnahme des VEB DEFA Außenhandel zu dem Film ‘Wie heiratet man einen König?’, 19 November 1968, Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Fiche 178. 32. Qinna Shen, ‘Barometers of GDR Cultural Politics: Contextualizing the DEFA Grimm Adaptations’, Marvels & Tales, 25:1 (2011). 33. Silberman, ‘The First DEFA Fairy Tales’, pp. 106–19. 34. Paul Verhoeven continued to make films in the Federal Republic of Germany until his death in 1975 and should not be confused with the Hollywood filmmaker of the same name. 35. Ingelore König et al., Zwischen Marx und Muck, p. 78. 36. Ralf Schenk, ‘Mitten im Kalten Krieg: 1950–1960’ in Schenk, ed., Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg, p. 81. 37. Gert Reifarth, Die Macht der Märchen: Zur Darstellung von Repression und Unterwerfung in der DDR in märchenhafter Prosa,1976–1985 (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen and Neumann, 2003). 38. Donald Haase, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales (Greenwood Press: Westport, CT, 2008), p. 260; Eberhard Berger und Joachim Giera, eds, 77 Märchenfilme, p. 372. 39. Ehrentraud Novotny, Filmspiegel, Berlin 9 (1971); Renate HollandMoritz, ‘Dornröschen’, Eulenspiegel, 1 May 1971. 40. H. P., Brandenburgische Neueste Nachrichten, 14 April 1971. 41. Ehrentraud Novotny, Filmspiegel. 42. ‘Einschätzung zum Film Dornröschen’, VEB DEFA-Studio für Spielfilme, 27 November 1970. 43. Dagmar Schittly, Zwischen Regie und Regime: Die Filmpolitik der SED im Spiegel der DEFA Produktionen (Berlin: Links, 2002), pp. 95, 163. 44. Hans-Dieter Tok, ‘Hauptdarsteller Mauerblümchen’, Wochenpost Berlin, 31 January 1987. 45. A. M., ‘Hasenherz. Ein Gegenwartsfilm für Kinder’, Kino für Kinder, December 1987. 46. Birgit Galle, ‘Wie ein Hasenherz zum mutigen Mädchen wurde’, Neues Deutschland, 21 December 1987.

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10

Post-Soviet Parody: Can Family Films about Russian Heroes be Funny? Natalie Kononenko

When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, the nation states that emerged from it needed to create new identities. In its efforts to free itself from the Soviet past, Russia, the country that had dominated the USSR, had to assert its Russianness; it could not simply adopt the ways of the West, the cultural sphere that the Soviet Union had so vigorously opposed. The search for genuinely Russian expression is occurring at all levels, including animated film, where the struggle to get ‘beyond Disney’ – while still maintaining technical excellence, public appeal, and commercial success – is particularly acute. Russia and the Soviet Union have a long history of animated film, and a long-standing relationship with Disney. The first efforts at animation were made before the Soviet Socialist Revolution. In Soviet times, Lenin did much to advance filmmaking with his oft-quoted statement that ‘of all the arts, for us cinema is the most important’.1 Stalin’s consolidations of the film industry helped by concentrating talent. Under Stalin, Soiuzdetfilm (Soviet Children’s Film) became Soiuzmultfilm (Soviet Animated Film), the studio that produced the award-winning animations for which the Soviet Union is known. In 1934, Walt Disney Studios showed several Mickey Mouse shorts at the Moscow Film Festival, creating a tremendous impact on Soviet animation. Stalin became a Disney fan; he liked the aesthetics of Disney, with its rounded, more realistic presentation of human and animal actors. He also liked the prudishness and sentimentality of Disney plots.2 The heyday of Soiuzmultfilm came in the 1970s and 1980s, when directors such as Norshtein and Nazarov won international prizes for their work, and when children watched cartoons such as Nu pogodi (1969–86), Kak kazaki (1967–87),3 171

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and adaptations of literary classics, such as the Musicians of Bremen (1973), and Winnie the Pooh (1969; 1971; 1972). Soiuzmultfilm, as powerful as it was, did not survive the break-up of the Soviet Union and the studio split, with one branch retaining the distribution rights to the old films,4 and the other continuing to make cartoons,5 though hardly successfully. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of Soiuzmultfilm, many questioned whether animation had a future in Russia. Could Russian cartoonists adjust to a market economy? Under Soviet rule, all a filmmaker had to do was please the censor; the audience had no choice but to watch what was offered. Now studios had to compete with each other and with the Western products that were flooding the market. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987–96) were on TV. Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991), Aladdin (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1992), The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994), Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), and Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton, 2003) were playing in theatres. Did animation produced in Russia, especially with its lesser financial resources, have a chance?6 The breakthrough came in 2004, when studio Melnitsa released Alesha Popovich i Tugarin Zmei (Alesha Popovich and Tugarin the Dragon, Konstatin Bronzit), a feature film based on a Russian heroic epic (bylina). This film was followed by Dobrynia Nikitych i Zmei Gorynych (Dobrynia Nikitych and Gorynych the Dragon, Ilia Maksimov, 2006), Ilia Muromets i Solovei Razboinik (Ilia Muromets and the Nightingale Robber, Vladimir Toropchin, 2007) and Tri Bogatyria i Shamakhanskaia Tsaritsa (Three Knights and the Queen of Shamakhan, Sergei Glezin, 2010). All of these films have been commercially successful, the last of them grossing more than US$19 million in Russia alone. The films in this series have come to be known as the ‘Three Knights’ movies, and spin-offs from this series include a website7 and figurines available inside Kinder Surprise candies produced by Ferrero, an Italian company. What accounts for the success of the ‘Three Knights’, and what do Russian audiences want from their movies? Strong opinions about the film industry can be found on fan websites and film discussion sites such as Afisha and Kinopoisk.8 Here, films intended for family viewing, such as the ‘Three Knights’, are frequent topics of discussion. Comments are posted by adult contributors who report their own reactions and those of their children, and describe what they would like to see in entertainment aimed at young audiences. What commentators consistently call for is

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animation that is Russian; that is distinct from films produced in the West. For contributors to these sites, Russianness is manifested in the subject matter of the film and also in the positive presentation of Russian characters. Aesthetics are less important, and commentators seem oblivious to the fact that Melnitsa uses Disney-like rounded and realistic figures taken, however, not directly from Disney, but from Soiuzmultfilm fairy-tale cartoons. The ‘Three Knights’ films are Russian on many levels. They are based on Russian folklore; they deal with contemporary Russian issues; and they present traditional Russian beliefs. However, they do borrow from the West. Some borrowings are overt, like Ilia Muromets’s ‘I’ll be back’ line, taken from the Terminator (1984–2009) series. Some are reputed to be coincidental, like the resemblance between the horse Iulii and the Donkey voiced by Eddie Murphy in Shrek (Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, 2001).9 The patriarchal attitude toward women, and the presentation of minorities as dark and with limited language skills, recall Disney films,10 but also fit Russian stereotypes. All in all, whatever may be borrowed from the West has been fused with local material into a distinctly Russian blend perceived by audiences as genuinely Russian. The problems the films face is a tension between valorising things Russian and being humorous. To be appealing, cartoons need to be funny. But if cartoons present heroic Russian figures, can these figures be amusing? Can a hero who is supposed to be a great warrior be made fun

Figure 10-1 The three heroes – Dobrynia Nikitych, Ilia Muromets and Alesha Popovych – from the film Tri Bogatyria i Samakhanskaia Tsaritsa

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of – or does the playful treatment of a heroic figure come across as anti-Russian? The quest to develop truly Russian animation in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union started with attempts to learn from the West. Konstantin Bronzit, who studied with Soviet director and animator Fedor Khitriuk, went to France where he produced animated shorts which won international prizes. Melnitsa, where Bronzit eventually took a job, released the feature-length Karlik nos (Little Long Nose, Maksimov, 2003), a film based on a German fairy tale. In all of these, the emphasis was on technical excellence, not Russian subject matter. These early efforts met with limited success in Russia itself. The breakthrough came when Bronzit joined Melnitsa, and accepted a script from the then only 19-year-old Maksim Sveshnikov,11 who proposed a film about the epic hero, Alesha Popovich. Epic poetry, with its traditional heroes, turned out to be the subject matter that everyone was looking for and, once Alesha Popovich came out, Melnitsa stuck with the epic hero theme, producing the subsequent Knights films listed above. Epics are peculiar subject matter for family entertainment. The attraction of the epic is that it deals with heroism, and there is little doubt that Russia needed to feel that it had had a heroic past and the promise of a heroic future. But there are many problems with epic poetry, Russian epics included. The epic is a folk genre that is performed for adults and deals with adult subject matter. Usually sung by the losing side in a conflict, the epic asserts moral superiority in the face of great military losses. Epics are songs about heroes battling impossible odds. They fight courageously – and often die. In the epic songs known in the West, the Greeks are victorious at Troy, but the great heroes Achilles and Hector lose their lives in the conflict. Roland is heroic and insists on not calling for reinforcements, but he is killed along with his men. Many Russian epic heroes discover their mortality through hubris akin to Roland’s. Dunai kills his wife when she outdoes him in an archery contest and discovers that, in the process, he has also killed the magical child that she carries. The great hero Sviatogor sees a coffin in the mountains, decides to test it for size, and becomes trapped. Before he dies, he passes some of his strength to Ilia Muromets, but death is still his fate. The folk originals of the epics that were used by Melnitsa are no less tragic. Alesha does indeed defeat Tugarin, but his victory reveals that Apraksiia, the wife of Tsar Vladimir, was Tugarin’s mistress, something her husband condoned to maintain peace. Dobrynia does defeat Gorynych

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the Dragon, and he does free Zabava, but he is betrayed both by Gorynych, with whom he had a pact of brotherhood, and by Tsar Vladimir. Furthermore, his strength is nothing compared to that of a huge polianitsa, a female warrior named Nastasia Mikulichna, whom he meets in the steppe. Nastasia falls in love with Dobrynia and becomes his faithful wife, but the marriage is almost ruined by Alesha Popovich, who should be Dobrynia’s companion-in-arms, not his rival. As for Ilia, he has many tragic adventures after his encounter with Sviatogor. He defeats Solovei, the Nightingale Robber, but Vladimir’s foolishness in asking Solovei to display his whistling abilities kills many men. More tragically, Ilia does not recognise his own son, engages him in combat, and ends up killing him.12 The plots of the Melnitsa films bear little resemblance to the Russian oral epics on which ostensibly they are based. They are all simple quest stories, with no tragic elements. Alesha Popovich begins by showing the protagonist as a child who fails to realise his own strength, causing destruction as a result. As Alesha reaches adulthood, his city, Rostov, is threatened by the fearsome, Asiatic-looking Tugarin. Alesha devises a plan: he will collect all of the city’s gold, use it to lure Tugarin and his men into a cave, and then trap them using a rock. The plan fails; the rock bounces down the hill, destroying Rostov, and Tugarin escapes with the treasure. Alesha then sets out to recover the gold. He is joined by Tikhon, his mentor; Liubava, the girl who loves him; Babulia, her granny, and two animal companions: Liubava’s donkey Moisei, and the talking horse Iulii, unintentionally acquired by Tikhon from a band of gypsies. Most of the film shows the adventures of the group as they meet the ancient hero Sviatogor, travel through the countryside, and eventually return to Rostov. In the end, Tugarin is overcome and the gold returned to the people, who, along with Alesha and Liubava, can live happily ever after. While the plot is minimal, the charm of the film lies in its gags,13 its music, and a series of catchphrases, namely Iulii’s ‘don’t make my horseshoes laugh’ (‘ne smeshite moi podkovy’) and Alesha’s ‘feel the might of a knight’ (‘ispytaite silu bogatyrskuiu’). Dobrynia Nikitych has an even simpler plot. The young courtier, Elisei, is in love with the tsar’s niece Zabava, but she is carried off by Gorynych the Dragon. Elisei turns to Dobrynia for help and, when Elisei manages to rouse him from his heroic sleep, Dobrynia springs into action and rescues Zabava. It turns out that Dobrynia and Gorynych are friends, having sealed a pact of brotherhood long ago. The real evil-doer, we learn, is Kolyvan, a usurer who wanted to marry

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Zabava. Kolyvan took advantage of the fact that everyone, the tsar included, owes him money. It was the tsar, it turns out, who arranged to have Gorynych abduct the girl to pay off his gambling debt. In the end, Kolyvan is punished, and Elisei can marry his beloved. The story of Ilia has a double quest: the hero must recover his beloved horse, the source of his prowess in battle, and he must defeat the Nightingale Robber, an evil Turkic lord with a deadly whistle. Again, the tsar has a gambling problem and is complicit in the loss of Ilia’s horse, along with the nation’s treasure. And again, the quest is a success, especially with the help of an old lady with a cane, who knocks out Nightingale’s front tooth and deprives him of his whistling ability. Ilia gets his horse back and marries the fair chronicler Alenushka, who both helps him in his quest and records it. The story of the three heroes and the Shamakhan queen is different from its predecessors. While the heroes come from epic, the queen of Shamakhan is a figure taken from a Pushkin fairy tale in verse called the ‘The Golden Cockerel’.14 The film begins with a queen, who initially seems to be gorgeous. She is, however, covered by a Muslim-style headdress and veil. These conceal the fact that the queen is old, ugly and bald. She talks to her pet raven about restoring her youth and learns that she needs to water a magic tree with the tears of one thousand beautiful women. Where better to find beautiful women than in Russia? To gain access to the women, the queen uses her magical gaze to seduce the tsar.15 Our three heroes try to protect the tsar, but he journeys to Shamakhan and signs over half of his kingdom to the mysterious queen. The queen arrives in Russia, has the maidens of the realm summoned to the palace, and makes them gaze into a magic mirror which reveals the future: their appearance in old age. This vision of ugliness-to-come brings the young women to tears. The queen collects the tears, heads home, and waters the magic tree, which sprouts leaves and fruit. The queen eats the fruit and regains her youth. But then she becomes greedy and eats too much and, in the final scene, we see the queen’s pet raven deposit a parcel on the windowsill of the tsar of Russia. The bundle contains the Queen of Shamakhan, now an infant. This is not the happilyever-after ending of the other knights movies. Russia may be rid of the adult queen, but her infant self is placed in the very heart of the country, leaving the threat of future havoc hanging over the nation. Turning epic poems into family entertainment is quite a feat. Sveshnikov and Bronzit are not solely responsible for this accomplishment, because they did not work directly from folklore. In

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1963, the Leningrad State Publishing House of Children’s Literature produced a retelling of Russian epic poems by I. V. Karnaukhova.16 This book was extremely popular, and Sveshnikov names it as one of his childhood favourites.17 In the book, bogatyri are pictured as defenders of the Russian motherland. The heroes are powerful, ever vigilant, and self-sacrificing, forsaking family to serve country. In addition to valorising the bogatyri and removing any epic hubris, the book makes a number of other changes. Oral epics are racy. Apraksiia’s sexual relations with Tugarin are but one of the extramarital couplings that appear in the texts. In the originals there are many betrayals, the most blatant being Sviatogor’s wife having sex with Ilia while her husband sleeps. Such amorous contacts are not present in the book for children, and even Alesha’s attempt to marry Dobrynia’s wife is blamed on the tsar. Heroes in the book support each other; they act in unison, and conflicts are quickly resolved. Camaraderie and mutual support are good lessons for children and they were important Soviet themes, because having all of the diverse peoples of the Soviet Union work together and support the state was crucial to the survival of the union.18 The one moment of tension between heroes in the Karnaukhova book stems from class conflict – another important Soviet issue. At the end of the story about Ilia Muromets and the Nightingale Robber, the other knights honour the hero and name him their leader. Alesha protests, because Ilia is of peasant birth. He is chided and told that noble deeds, not noble lineage, determine the worth of man. This is consistent with Soviet ideology, which holds a classless society as its ideal. The Karnaukhova book, like many products of the Soviet era, presented good role models, but did so in a humourless way. Working from this book, the scriptwriters and directors at Melnitsa needed to come up with stories that were humorous and entertaining and still presented Russian culture in a positive light. In Alesha Popovich, this is done by making the hero somewhat inept, though unquestionably good-hearted and well-intentioned. Alesha may not be good at reading, and he may not know his own strength, but there is not a mean bone in his body. He is never afraid, and heads out to recover the gold of Rostov without hesitation. When he and his companions come across a signpost which offers three choices – a road to marriage, one to wealth, and one to death – he chooses the road to death, because that is what heroes do. The most notable questioning of Russia’s heroic past in this film comes in the presentation of Sviatogor. Alesha and his companions look for this ancient hero to tell them where to

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find Tugarin. When they first see him, he appears as he is depicted in the Karnaukhova book and in oral epic: he is enormous, far larger than a normal human. But appearances turn out to be deceiving, and we soon discover that Sviatogor is senile and small. He is an old man who easily dozes off and is put to bed by Alesha, where Liubava’s granny gently places a blanket over him. The great heroes of the past are not so great, the film seems to say, but a regular guy like Alesha can be a hero if he is pure of heart. It is only in the last of the Knights movies that Alesha’s lack of guile is cast into doubt, when we see that his words exceed his deeds. Otherwise, he is of noble character. Dobrynia is unambiguously heroic – and not very amusing. He has no moments of bumbling awkwardness like Alesha. He shirks neither heroic deeds nor domestic responsibilities. In fact, he is a one-dimensional figure, who has been criticised for his ‘soullessness’.19 Dobrynia is a man of few words. His catchphrases are: ‘I work alone’ and ‘do I make myself clear?’, a phrase that indicates that the conversation is over. His distinguishing feature is his heroic sleep, a slumber so deep that nothing, and certainly not the courtier Elisei, can wake him until he is ready to arise. Dobrynia is married to Nastasia. We learn nothing of the courtship between the two, but this Nastasia is not the polianitsa (female warrior) of oral epics. She is large and combative, but her extra size is limited to girth, and her fighting spirit is manifested only in her beating her husband with pots and pans; she is hardly a woman warrior. Dobrynia takes the beatings without flinching. His stoicism is meant to be humorous, but it is unlike the stoicism of characters like Shrek, resembling more the unfunny impassivity of Vin Diesel and Chuck Norris. Western viewers, this author among them, find Dobrynia flat, and this film the least successful of the Knights movies.20 Not so the Russian audience. On Kinopoisk, Dobrynia Nikitych appears as the second highest-rated of the Knights films, behind only Alesha Popovich and ahead of both Ilia Muromets and the Queen of Shamakhan, both of which, to Western eyes, have more interesting plots.21 A humourless strongman seems to be what Russians want. Another source of the appeal of this film may be its similarity to a cartoon produced by Soiuzmultfilm in 1978. Russians long for the creations of Soiuzmultfilm. Bloggers discussing children’s entertainment lament the fact that Soviet cartoons are no longer shown on television. They criticise broadcasters for buying cheap Western products to fill their airtime instead of using good Soviet fare. For those who miss Soviet cartoons, Dobrynia Nikitych may well be the

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answer. There are extensive similarities between the new film and a Soviet cartoon called the Last Bride of Gorynych the Dragon (1978). In both, the tsar’s niece is in love with a young courtier. In both, she is abducted by Gorynych. In both, a strong and silent hero with blond hair, broad shoulders, and a tiny waist comes to the rescue. During his rescue mission, the hero is accompanied by the courtier. And in both, the young couple weds in the end, while the heroic rescuer asks for no reward. There are even visual similarities, such as the initial garden scene showing idyllic young lovers, and the scene where the hero is pictured as a peasant, sowing grain. To my knowledge, Maksimov, the director of Dobrynia Nikitych, has not commented on this connection, making it impossible to claim intentional borrowing. Still, the similarities are there and, whether or not the Melnitsa film was based on the Soiuzmultfilm product, it is similar enough to evoke feelings of nostalgia and please those viewers who are longing for the cartoons of old. Ilia Muromets follows the pattern established by Dobrynia Nikitych, with a twist. The hero is stoic, and even more clearly linked to the action heroes of American film by his ‘I’ll be back’ line, yet he is a more complex and interesting character. Ilia is not an emotionless mass of muscle. He is dedicated to his horse in a touching way. When the foolish tsar loses the state’s monies and Ilia’s horse to the Nightingale Robber in a calculated speculation, Ilia is heartbroken. He promises the horse that he will get him back and, when this happens, there is a tender reunion. Ilia’s sensitivity is also conveyed through his superstition. He believes in the power of his horse’s mane and, when this is shorn, he fears the horse has lost his power. Ilia carries a pouch of Russian soil as a talisman. When he sets off for Constantinople, he discovers that his pouch is missing and is devastated. The chronicler who will become his wife wins Ilia’s heart by fetching the pouch from his mother and delivering it to him. Other superstitious beliefs play a role in the film, and the old woman who knocks out the Nightingale Robber’s tooth does so because she believes that whistling brings bad luck. Folk belief had a tremendous resurgence in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Magical beliefs did not die out during the Soviet period, but practices such as visiting folk healers for egg ceremonies were done surreptitiously. When the Soviet Union collapsed, magic became public. Healers opened clinics,22 bus drivers filled their vehicles with talismans, and scholarly works explored beliefs in symbiants and other magical phenomena.23 Were the film makers at Melnitsa trying to capitalise on this resurgence of folk

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belief? If so, they were unsuccessful. Westerners, both this author and KinoKultura reviewers, find Ilia’s vulnerability appealing.24 Not so Russians commenting on the film; they consider Ilia’s faith in talismans a sign of weakness inappropriate for a hero.25 While the three knights have slightly different personality traits, their enemies are all the same: they are Turkic, malicious, and devious. Turkic ethnicity is unmistakable: Tugarin is a contraction of Tugar Khan; Solovei has the patronymic Rakhmanovich. Visually, both in the Karnaukhova book and in the Melnitsa films, the enemies of Russian heroes are Asiatic in face and dress, with narrow eyes and scant facial hair. As in Disney movies, they are darker than the positive characters, and they speak Russian with an accent. The most negative portrayal is of Tugarin. He is dark, fat and gap-toothed. When he is defeated, he is treated like an animal, and our heroes ride back home atop him while the donkey Moisei leads him by a rein through his nose. The negative portrayal of Turkic peoples in Melnitsa films reflects Russian fear of the many foreigners moving into Russian cities, taking over jobs and apartments, and changing the Russian landscape. When I attended the meeting of the Association for the Study of Nationalities held in Moscow in 2011, demographic shifts

Figure 10-2

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The evil enemy Tugarin Zmei (Tugarin the Dragon)

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were one of the major points of discussion, and the subject matter of an entire plenary session. As if to confirm the reality of Russian fears, near my hotel I met an Azeri kiosk owner who had moved to Moscow after the break-up of the USSR. The Turkic ‘invasion’ is most forcefully presented in the Queen of Shamakhan. This film is not based on epic and is not a heroic narrative. Alesha, Dobrynia, and Ilia are not victorious. Instead, the Queen seduces Tsar Vladimir and ends up in Russia as an infant, ready to grow up and cause more damage. This last scene can be viewed as a device, an open-ended conclusion which prepares the viewer for more sequels. It is, however, also an accurate presentation of the perceived Turkic threat in the midst of Russia. In fact, it may be too accurate a depiction, and one which eliminates any possibility of light-hearted humour. Indeed, in spite of the reappearance of the talking horse Iulii, this is the lowest fan-rated film of the series. Audiences seem to want escapism and reassurance from their cinematic fare, something this film does not provide. The film has other disquieting elements. The tsar is childlike in both appearance and behaviour and packs his teddy bear for his trip to Shamakhan. As Lora Mjolsness has noted in her review for KinoKultura,26 he is reminiscent of the childish tsars portrayed in Soviet animation, most notably in Ivanov-Vano’s Humpbacked Horse (1947/1975). Perhaps the most unacceptable feature, from the Russian audience’s point of view, is the depiction of our three heroes as lessthan-heroic. In an opening scene that is meant to be funny, we see Dobrynia, Ilia, and Alesha in a pose that intentionally resembles Vasnetsov’s famous painting of Russian heroes. But then, as the camera pans away, we see that menacing clouds behind them are a backdrop. The three men wear armour from the waist up only; below the waist they are in their underwear. And their horses are not real: they are fake horse’s heads on sticks, like children’s toys. The men are indeed posing for a picture identical to Vasnetsov’s, but it is being painted by their wives for a contest. Mjolsness states that this scene prepares the viewer for the theme of the film: appearances can be deceiving. But important to the plot or not, this revelation of the underwear-clad underbelly of the heroic is not acceptable to Russian viewers. Alesha and Tugarin the Dragon satirised the bogatyri of old by depicting Sviatogor as frail and senile and by portraying its hero as a dumb ox. This was gentle humour that audiences enjoyed. The Queen of Shamakhan, it seems, reveals too much.

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Many successful Western animated comedic series, whether anachronistic (The Flinstones, 1960–66) or dealing with contemporary situations (The Simpsons, 1989– ), focus on family life. Perhaps in emulation of this, the Queen of Shamakhan also shows bogatyri family life and, as in the Western cartoons, women are shown as the real power in the household. We learn that Dobrynia is not the only one with a forceful wife. Liubava is the source of strength in her family; it is she who does all the work, while Alesha does all the talking. Alenushka, Ilia’s chronicler wife, has him typing obediently as she dictates.27 Russian viewers object to having women dominate their heroes and this, like the underwear scene, is one of the criticisms levelled at the Queen of Shamakhan. Perhaps aware of Russian attitudes toward women, Melnitsa tries to have it both ways. All of the heroes’ wives are pictured as the supporters and admirers of their men. Liubava follows Alesha because she loves him. Her goal is marriage, and when the group of travellers comes upon the signpost which points to three roads, she wants the one that leads to matrimony. Alesha chooses a different road, angering Liubava. She forgives him, of course, and in the fourth film, she is his loyal spouse. Because the main love relationship in Dobrynia Nikitych is between Elisei and Zabava, the hero’s courtship of Nastasia does not appear. Zabava, of course, loves Elisei truly and is willing to marry him regardless of social status. Ilia’s Alenushka is a woman with a profession. Nonetheless, her mission is to serve Ilia, for she not only fetches him his soil, but chronicles his life and not her own. This is a housewife-in-the-making presentation of women similar to that which Henry Giroux has found and criticised in Disney,28 but it is probably not a Disney borrowing. Women who want nothing more than to serve their husbands may be intended as humorous, but this presentation is too close to actual Russian belief to be funny. A peculiar news piece appeared on Russian television and was quickly removed – only to circulate online. In this piece, a commentator discusses the American cartoons shown on Russian television, and cautions parents against letting their children watch them, because they may ruin future relations with the opposite sex. According to this documentary, watching Western films will make Russian girls uninterested in marriage so that they will grow up to shirk their responsibility to become wives and mothers. At the same time, the beauty of Disney princesses will put unattainable ideals before children, causing boys to search for the impossible, and keeping them from marriage as well.29 This video may have been

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shown and removed precisely to draw attention to it, and thus increase viewership. Whether or not this is the case, its message does fit the government campaign to get Russians to reproduce.30 And Melnitsa seems to have responded to this message. In the Knights films, all good women become wives. At least one of the women, Dobrynia’s wife, is not super-slim, and offers a respite from an unattainable ideal of beauty. In most cases, however, the pressure to be beautiful is as great in Russian animation as in any Disney film. As the folklorist Adoneva has pointed out, what the knights films in general – and the last film in particular – tell us is that Russia’s treasure is its beautiful women. Women will go to any length to be beautiful, and even the natural process of ageing is seen as the onset of ugliness.31 Female vanity knows no bounds and, in a Melnitsa film that is not part of the Knights series, a witch is seduced by flattery and bribed into giving the heroes what they want in exchange for cosmetics.32 The only women who are admired even when they are not gorgeous are old women like Babulia, Liubava’s granny. But they win this esteem at enormous cost. Babulia is literally doubled over with osteoporosis, yet when the group has to cross a ravine by walking over a log, she picks up both Liubava and the donkey and carries them to the other side. She gets the approval of Iulii the Horse, who declares, ‘Now, that is a woman!’ But when Alesha lifts Liubava off her granny’s back on the other side of the ravine, it is Alesha whom the girl thanks, much to Babulia’s consternation. Babulia even pulls out her own gold-capped tooth when the people of Rostov are asked to contribute gold for the trap to capture Tugarin. Her tooth is returned in the end, but her physical endurance is tremendous (if not heroic), her stoicism exceeding Dobrynia’s. Is Babulia funny? She has been cited as one of the successful characters in Alesha Popovich. Yet she is not to be laughed at; rather, she is an ideal mother figure, a completely selfless woman who will endure anything for others. Furthermore, powerful old women can be threatening if they are not on your side. The mysterious little old lady who knocks out Nightingale Robber’s tooth seems to be Turkic. She helps the hero, but her character remains undeveloped, because having a Babulia on the side of the enemy would be frightening indeed. While the women in its animated films may look like Disney princesses, and the male heroes may resemble Vin Diesel and Chuck Norris, Melnitsa has achieved a uniquely Russian product. Working from folklore which depicts the ancient and heroic Russian past, and using the adaptability of folklore, contemporary filmmakers have

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found a formula with an appeal that transcends imported Hollywoodmade animations and satisfies the Russian viewer. One of the problems that Melnitsa has encountered is trying to be Russian and funny at the same time. The choice of heroic epic solved the problem of presenting Russian culture in a positive light, but the heroic is hard to satirise without undercutting the best traits of a nation and its culture.33 Melnitsa may have solved that problem as well. The studio’s latest offering draws on folklore, but uses folktale rather than epic. The film Ivan Tsarevich i Servyi Volk (Prince Ivan and the Grey Wolf, Vladimir Toropchin, 2011) is a reworking of a folktale which satirises the Soviet past. Folktale subject matter may well be the solution to producing films that are Russian and funny, and go beyond Disney at the same time.

Notes 1. Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 2nd edition (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 1998), p. 28. 2. David MacFayden, Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges: Russian Animated Film Since World War Two (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005), p. 32; Laura Pontieri, Soviet Animation and the Thaw of the 1960s: Not Only for Children (New Barnet: John Libby Publishing), 2012, p. 76. 3. Additional episodes of both series were created after the fall of the USSR. 4. [accessed 13/10/2012]. 5. [accessed 20/10/2012]. 6. The budget for the first two Russian films was approximately US $1.5 million each. The budget for the roughly-contemporaneous Cars (Pixar/ Disney) was $140 million (KinoKultura, 4 October 2006). [accessed 13/10/2012]. 7. [accessed 20/10/2012]. 8. ; [accessed 21/10/ 2012]. 9. Bronzit, the director of Alesha, has denied any such influence. Interview by Mikhail Sudakov. [accessed 6/10/2012]. 10. Henry Giroux, Breaking into the Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics (Malden, Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 116–20. 11. Ironically, the man who discovered Russian subject matter was not a Russian, but a Ukrainian. 12. The action in Russian epic takes place on the territory of what is now Ukraine. But the songs were recorded in the Russian north and Russians

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13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

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see them as part of Russian history. Ukrainians object to seeing Kyivan Rus/Kievan Russia as part of the Russian past; Russians do not. The word ‘geg’, from the English ‘gag’, has recently entered Russian vocabulary. Pushkin based his poem on Washington Irving’s ‘Queen of Alhambra’, but this Western connection is lost on Russian viewers and probably also on Melnitsa’s staff. Pushkin is considered the father of Russian letters; the Russianness of this topic is not questioned. The magic gaze may be based on the Cat in Shrek 2, voiced by Antonio Banderas. Karnaukhova, I. V., Russkie bogatyri: Byliny v pereskaze dlia detei I. V. Karnaukhovoi (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo detskoi literatury ministerstva prosveshcheniia RSFSR, 1963). Sveshnikov’s answers to questions posted on [accessed 17/9/2012]. Natalie Kononenko, ‘The Politics of Innocence: Soviet and Post-Soviet Animation on Folklore Topics’, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 124, no. 494 (Fall 2011), pp. 271–94. Ulrike Hartmann, KinoKultura, 4 October 2006. Ibid. The ratings are: Alesha 7.79, Dobrynia 7.68, Ilia 7.5 and Queen of Shamakhan 7.12 out of 10. Galina Lindquist, Conjuring Hope: Magic and Healing in Contemporary Russia (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2006). For example, Olga Khristoforova, ‘Spirit Possession in a PresentDay Russian Village’, Folklorica, vol. XV (2010), pp. 27–64; Iulia Krasheninnikova, ‘Charms and Incantational Magic of the Northern Russians’, Folklorica, vol. XIV (2009), pp. 27–56. Vlad Stukov, 15 October 2008. [accessed 14/10/2012]. [accessed 27/10/2012]. The typing anachronism is typical of the many time juxtapositions are used for comic effect. Giroux, Breaking into the Movies, p. 116. . The documentary was also placed on religious sites. ; and [accessed 29/9/2012]. Cash awards to women who gave birth to more than one child were announced in 2006. [accessed 17/9/2012]. ‘Ivan Tsarevich i Seryi Volk’ (‘Ivan Tsarevich and the Grey Wolf’), KinoKultura, 6 July 2012. In the West, there are no humorous films based on epics. Folklorebased satire, such the Shrek series, works with folktale.

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11

A Brief History of Indian Children’s Cinema Noel Brown

In spite of fervent political support for the format, traditionally the production of children’s films in India has been loose, uncoordinated and occasional. For much of their history, they have been regarded by critics and audiences as little more than curios, and have had to contend with various obstacles, including the diffuse nature of power, production and distribution among the Indian film industries, language barriers, intractable suspicion on the parts of financiers, and a deep cultural resistance to juvenility, which has begun to loosen only recently. All of the major Indian cinemas (i.e., Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi and Malayalam) have experimented with the genre. Inevitably, though, the majority of children’s films have been made in Mumbai (Bombay), the country’s largest and most profitable centre of production (known as ‘Bollywood’). Barely more than a handful of indigenous children’s films have attained iconic status: Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (Satyajit Ray, 1969), Haathi Mere Saathi (M. A. Thirumugham, 1971), Rani Aur Lalpari (Ravikant Nagaich, 1975), Safed Haathi (Tapan Sinha, 1977), Masoom (Shekhar Kapur, 1983), Mr. India (Shekhar Kapur, 1987), Halo (Santosh Sivan, 1996), Makdee (Vishal Bhardwaj, 2002), Hanuman (V. G. Samant and Milind Ukey, 2005) and Taare Zameen Par (Aamir Khan, 2007). Only one of them – the Bengali-language Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne – was not made in Hindi, and several were not even designed as children’s movies, attaining this status retrospectively. Many adhere to the world-famous masala (i.e., a rich combination of spices) style, characterised by song-and-dance, romance, and strong ‘emotional’ emphases, underpinning their commercial intent in a sector dominated – by force of numbers – by the 186

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non-commercial, state-funded body, the Children’s Film Society, India (CFSI). The perpetual debate in India is whether ‘children’s films’ should be essentially didactic, serving morally and psychologically to prepare ‘the child’ for the demands of adulthood, or purely escapist, and made only for profit. The Children’s Film Society is the vanguard of the first position, and from its inception in the mid-1950s until the 1970s was unrivalled in the children’s film arena. Although many films still evidence a valorisation of traditional, patriarchal conceptions of family and social unity, since the turn of the century a contrary tendency towards an identifiably Western-influenced, ‘family’ entertainment aesthetic, founded on spectacle and overtly aimed at youth audiences, has emerged. This chapter presents a broad overview of Indian children’s cinema, exploring the creative tensions wrought by the confluence of political pressures for wholesome films which uphold and reflect the richness of Indian cinema and society, and commercial pressures to reach the broadest, crossdemographic audience base.

Indian Cinema as ‘Family’ Entertainment It is necessary to draw firm lines of distinction between ‘children’s films’ and ‘family films’. Cinema is, and has been since colonial times, widely regarded as one of India’s primary ‘family’ entertainments. As Margaret Khalakdina observed, ‘most films are for adult audiences, but they are so heavily censored that the babe in arms can view it with little fear of distortion to his personality’.1 In the United States, the distinction between ‘family’ and ‘children’s films’ became progressively weaker after the 1950s; but in India, cultural barriers between childhood and adulthood – strongly supported by religious scripture and mythology – have been more enduring. Nandita Das, then chairperson of the Children’s Film Society, recently insisted on the need for continued distinction between entertainment for children and adults, remarking: ‘how can the same story and sensibility be for a sixyear-old and a 60-year-old? I do think there is a need to make films [e]specially for children, to cater to their needs and aspirations.’2 Indian cinema’s status as ‘family’ entertainment was crystallised in the years after independence. During the colonial era, film-going had been viewed with suspicion by the religious orthodoxy. Mahatma Gandhi was famously antipathetic towards the medium, describing it

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as a ‘sinful technology’ and contending that ‘the evil it has done and is doing is patent’.3 In 1939, future Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of his dissatisfaction at the moral standard of popular Indian cinema, and of the need for ‘high class films which have educational and social values’.4 Such films, he ventured (anticipating the interventionist mentality of his own post-independence government) ought to ‘receive the help and cooperation of not only the public, but the state’.5 Similar sentiments continue to be espoused by leading politicians. In March 2012, Chief Minister Kiran Kumar Reddy advised the industry: ‘Be very careful about the films you make, as they influence the society. Make films that promote family values.’6 The dominance of the ‘family entertainment’ paradigm partially reflects a pseudoimperial attitude on the parts of successive governments that Indians must be protected from themselves. In 1984, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, recently retired chairman of the government-appointed film censorship board, argued that ‘[Indian] audiences are still very immature. So we have to take into consideration their receptivity.’7 As Manjunath Pendakur has observed, these attitudes – indicative of the ‘imperial influence on elite minds’ – construe Indian audiences, symbolically, as children requiring guidance and protection.8 Films in India can be exhibited only after certification from a government-appointed review body. The Central Board of Film Censors (CBFC) was formed in 1952, in accordance with the recommendations of the Cinematograph Act of the same year. Initially, there were only two ratings: U (unrestricted exhibition) and A (restricted to adults). In a 1983 shake-up (when it was diplomatically renamed The Central Board of Film Certification), two additional categories were added: UA (unrestricted public exhibition – with a caution that parental discretion is required for children below the age of 12) and S (restricted to any special class of person). There is also the option not to grant a certificate at all. In recent years, the status of Indian cinema as an arbiter of all-age ‘family’ entertainment has been subject to debate. In 2011, veteran actor Dharmendra insisted that: In our time, we used to make a conscious effort to see that a film doesn’t have any obscene content because we used to make clean films for everyone. A film used to mean a family outing. We always tried to bring the whole family together, so that all could enjoy – from kids to the old […] But now things have changed. At times, it becomes difficult to sit with your mother and sister and watch the same content.9

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, studio executives disagree. UTV Motion Pictures executive Gaurav Verma recently asserted that ‘Hindi films have universal appeal and they are barely targeted towards a specific segment of audience. So it is a myth that films for children are not being made in India’.10 Such observations should, of course, be viewed with scepticism. An examination of CBFC ratings between 2009 and 2011 indicates that U-rated films still constitute approximately half of all domestic releases, UA films roughly one-third, and the remainder A. However, U-rated films have declined year-on-year, from 49.61 per cent in 2009 to 46.77 per cent in 2011, with ‘adult’ films now forming approximately 20 per cent of productions. Foreign films (constituting between 15 and 20 per cent of films showing in Indian theatres) are more likely to be adult-orientated, with 35–50 per cent falling into the A rating, 30–45 per cent UA, and 15–20 per cent U. What these figures indicate is that i) Indian cinema is no longer, generically, a ‘family entertainment’; ii) films unsuitable for children are still in the minority, but their proportion is increasing; and iii) imported films – the majority of which are North American in origin – are far less liable to be ‘family-friendly’ than indigenous productions.11 The initial push for a children’s film movement in India came shortly after independence. In 1951, the government-appointed Film Enquiry Committee recommended state sponsorship of children’s films, reflecting the perceived importance not only of entertaining, but of educating, the nation’s children. Nehru was a firm supporter: There is one thing, I feel, India has been lacking in, and that is children’s films. Films which are really children’s films are of high importance. There is a tendency in our books written for children for the author to consider himself [sic] wise and give lectures to children on how they should behave and what virtues they should develop. My own reaction as a child to such lectures, as far as I can remember, was to hit the person lecturing. That is not the way to approach children. By lecturing, you inevitably drive children to evil ways. Don’t sermonise too much. There are subtler ways of pointing a moral or drawing a lesson. Good children’s films can be a very powerful instrument in developing the child, and I hope that the Indian film industry will think of this.12 Through Nehru’s intervention, in 1955 the Children’s Film Society was formed as a state-funded but artistically-autonomous body charged

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with producing, exhibiting and distributing films for children. As of late-2013, the Society has produced in excess of 250 feature films, shorts and documentaries in multiple languages. The Children’s Film Society struck gold immediately when its production Jaldeep (Kedar Sharma, 1956) was awarded the Best Children’s Film prize at the 1957 Venice International Film Festival. However, during the 1960s and 1970s the Society found itself under near-constant assault for the perceived inadequacy of its films and its ineffective distribution network. Moreover, there were damning accusations of inefficiency, fraud and corruption, culminating in the disastrous Estimates Committee report of 1973–74, which made public several Public Accounts Committee Reports pertaining to the Society dating from the mid-to-late 1960s. In its 42nd report, covering 1965–66, the Accounts Committee lamented that: Even though the Children’s Film Society has been in existence for over a decade and that the Government has spent approximately Rs. 65 lakhs on this Society during the above period, the results achieved are far from satisfactory. The whole project of the Society appears, to the Committee, to be badly planned and inefficiently executed.13 Furthermore, an enquiry appointed to investigate financial irregularities in its accounts found strong evidence of ‘large-scale attempt[s] to defraud the Society’.14 In its 62nd report, covering 1966–67, the Accounts Committee questioned why no action had been taken by the ministry over its allegations of financial malpractice, and why a publicly-funded body appeared to be beyond government control. And in its 78th report, covering the 1968–69 period, the Committee regretfully noted that civil proceedings could not be initiated to recover Rs. 92,744 missing through ‘irregular excess expenditure, shortages [and] outstanding dues’ because too much time had elapsed since the alleged malpractice. It concluded: ‘The Committee deplore that the society, which was set up with the objective of production of films for children who are the future hope of the country, was allowed to fall into the hands of such unscrupulous people.’15 Matters did not improve. The 1979 report by the Working Group on National Film Policy recommended that the Children’s Film Society be dissolved, and its responsibilities transferred to a prospective central organisation primed with ‘promoting the

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production, distribution and exhibition of children’s films’, while simultaneously undertaking research into the requirements of films for Indian children and help[ing] to expand the scope of this genre. It should import films for children, export and exchange children’s films with other countries, and undertake sub-titling of children’s film in regional languages including foreign films in Indian languages.16 Again, these recommendations were not carried out. The Society came under further fire in 1981 from educationalist Vijaya Mulay, who alleged that a mere 0.6 per cent of the country’s 246 million children and adolescents could be reached by its present distribution strategies – and even this circulation was largely confined to the urban centres.17 She also refuted claims by the Society that lack of funds was a major inhibiting factor, contending that almost onethird of its government-awarded grant in 1978–79 remained unused. But Mulay reserved her strongest criticism for the quality of its films, which she described as ‘overtly message-oriented, preachy, and directed towards the middle class audience’.18 A difficulty which still exists to this day is the absence of consensus on what a ‘children’s film’ is, or should be. Kamini Kaushal, an actress and former chairperson of the Children’s Film Society, asserted that: A good children’s film should have an easy narrative style, a fair proportion of close-ups, a somewhat slow pace, preferably no flashbacks, an element of anticipation, abundant action and excitement, few dialogues, a good deal of humour and straightforward and bright photography, preferably in colour [...] A good film maker should bring himself to the child’s level and probe into his private world. The film-maker will then be able to channelise [sic] the child’s thinking in a manner that will arouse his curiosity and consequently inspire him to educate himself further. He will offer the child what he wants and not what the film-maker thinks he should be given.19 As Mulay wryly notes, such expectations ‘call for the prowess of a Superman, who will not only be a good director knowing his film medium well, but [also] be a trained psychological sociologist and competent educationist, all rolled into one.’20 Questioning Kaushal’s understanding of child developmental psychology, she insisted that

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‘One could have dismissed such ill-informed opinions, had not the persons quoted been holding key positions in the only organisation in the country today which makes films for children’.21 Despite these valid criticisms, however, most of the Society’s films are wellintentioned, and some of its more recent productions are excellent. Moreover, armed with a barrage of righteous rhetoric, it has proven successful in mobilising support. Government backing – though still relatively meagre – has increased in recent years, with a substantial raise in overall funding in 2011 from Rs. 40 to Rs. 70 million (US $1.25 million), and a doubling in the amount of ‘qualitative’ children’s films receiving a Rs. 25 lakh (US $45,000) subsidy (from two to four) coming into operation in early 2012.22 Something approaching a commercial children’s film movement in Hindi cinema finally emerged in the 1970s. Whereas Children’s Film Society releases are typically shorter than the average ‘Bollywood’ movie, and mostly lack songs, the likes of Haathi Mere Saathi, Rani Aur Lalpari and Safed Haathi – although they were not quite ‘masala’ films – were clearly intended for mass audiences and were highly popular. In their extended length, privileging of diegetic song-and-dance numbers, and strong ‘emotional’ overtones (notably frequent oscillations between sentiment, comedy and tragedy), these films abided by the formal conventions of Bollywood cinema. They also benefited from stronger distribution than their Children’s Film Society counterparts, but, most importantly, their emphasis is on evoking pleasure, rather than instilling moral fibre. However, the same inhibiting factors remained: diffuse and decentralised production systems, intransigent suspicion from producers and financiers, and a pervasive socio-cultural aversion to juvenility. To this day, Satyajit Ray’s wonderfully inventive Goopy and Bagha trilogy (1969–90) is barely known outside of Bengal. Perhaps it is a greater surprise that children’s films were made in 1970s and 1980s India at all, dependent as they were on free-thinking, audacious investors, and politicallymotivated directors. With the post-liberalisation easing of trade restrictions in the early 1990s and greater proliferation of Hollywood ‘family’ films, this has changed, somewhat. In 2008, filmmaker (and former head of the CFSI) Sai Paranjpye observed that ‘[children’s] films are [now] not being made for altruistic reasons. It’s all for personal benefit.’23 But despite a greater plurality in output, with marginally increased production of films in Telugu and Marathi, as well as Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada, the majority of Indian children’s films continue to originate within Bollywood.

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Dominant Genres Although it is hardly practicable to talk about Western conceptions of ‘genre’ in relation to Indian cinema – with most films transcending such specifications in their diverse formal influences – children’s films commonly fall into one of several structuring master-genres: i) the child film; ii) the family drama; iii) the sports film; iv) the animated feature; v) the fantasy; and vi) the blockbuster. The most effective means of examining both the specificities of these films, and developments in Indian children’s cinema as a whole, is by dealing with them in such terms. i) The Child Film. Perhaps the most prominent genre in Indian children’s cinema since the 1950s is what I will call the ‘child film’. Typically, child films are small-scale productions centring on young (pre-adolescent) children and their interactions with the adult world. Most lack big stars, and are made with limited budgets and resources. Many are funded through the CFSI, and as such, are built around a core, didactic theme, designed to stimulate the ethical awareness of their avowedly juvenile (and occasionally adult) audiences. There is usually a point of narrative reversal, in which the child protagonist undergoes a moral or spiritual epiphany through which they renounce their selfish and amoral juvenile identity, and thus symbolically communicate their readiness to enter the adult world (e.g., Parichay, Gulzar, 1972; Halo). A common theme is that of disconnection between childhood and adulthood. The child is seen struggling to come to terms with uncomprehending, distant or seemingly callous adult authority figures; sometimes parents or other family members (e.g., Kitaab, Gulzar, 1977; Taare Zameen Par; Malli, Santosh Sivan, 1998; Keshu, Sivan, 2009). There is a general feeling in India that a film about children axiomatically is a children’s film. However, as we suggested in the Introduction, many child films are made largely for adults. In the Hindi production Taare Zameen Par and the Malayalam production Keshu – two recent, award-winning child films – the central child figure is disabled in some way (in the former, he is dyslexic; in the latter, he is profoundly deaf and mute) and are misunderstood by their families, who view them as lazy and unintelligent. In both productions, it is incumbent upon enlightened outsiders to expose these misconceptions and imbue the child with sufficient confidence to allow their talents to shine through – both prove to be naturally superb artists. In the process, their families successfully overcome

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their prejudices, and the value of the children – intrinsically and to the community – is reaffirmed. Although widely received as children’s films (Keshu was funded and distributed by the Children’s Film Society), both productions clearly criticise the ignorance of adults (who may, as spectators, recognise such prejudices within themselves). Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan – who produced, directed and starred in Taare Zameen Par – openly stated that the film was intended for parents, not children.24 ii) The Family Drama. Alongside the child film, the damily drama – at its height in the 1970s and 1980s – has been a staple since the early days of the Children’s Film Society. Productions such as Parichay and Masoom are ideologically as well as narratively predicated on the reaffirmation, or reinvigoration, of the family as an institutional system. This is hardly surprising, given that ‘family’ in Hindu culture has traditionally constituted not merely a socialising apparatus but a system of kinship, duty and filial obligation among an extended network; the so-called ‘joint’ family. In Parichay, what is at stake is not just the harmonious day-to-day running of the central family, but its long-term survival. The film opens with a hapless private tutor being driven from the house of Rai Saheb (Pran) by the endlessly disruptive, mischievous antics of his five tutees, Rai Saheb’s grandchildren, still emotionally devastated by the death of their

Figure 11-1 The modern, urban Indian nuclear-style family unit in Masoom

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father. With the children unable to connect with their grandfather, and mistreated by their tyrannical aunt (Veena), the family’s survival rests on the intervention of a sympathetic tutor, Ravi (Jeetendra). Not only does Ravi succeed in reforming the children’s behaviour, and reignite Rai Saheb’s long-repressed sense of emotional responsibility towards his surrogate children, but his romance with, and eventual engagement to, the eldest child, Rama (Jaya Bhaduri), restores the family to its dual role as support system and provider of children. In Gulzar’s later film, Kitaab, although the focus is more on a central child figure, again family problems resonate throughout the narrative, driving young Babla (Master Raju) to run away from home. Sent by his doting mother (Dina Pathak) to live in the city, Babla finds himself neglected by his narcissistic, possibly philandering sister (Vidya Sinha), and spends much of his time playing truant. Ultimately, Babla secretly embarks on a long, perilous journey to his mother’s village. The basic plot, and its grittiness, is reminiscent of Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cent Coups (1959). Yet whilst that film ends on a note of unsettling ambiguity, with the child protagonist still estranged from his family, in Kitaab a terrified, penitent Babla is forced to reconcile with his family and apologise for his errant behaviour. Gulzar also contributed the screenplay to one of the most highly-regarded Indian family-orientated films, Masoom. In many ways, Masoom is a meditation on adaptations to ‘traditional’ Indian social structures and values; the central family unit is structurally ‘nuclear’, rather than ‘joint’. Furthermore, the film deals with the familial affects of such profane issues as marital infidelity. It begins with the revelation that patriarch DK (Naseeruddin Shah) – the head of a happy, affluent family in New Delhi – has an illegitimate son from a brief extra-marital affair conducted several years earlier. The mother of the child – Rahul (Jugal Hansraj) – has died and, in spite of its devastating impact on his wife, Indu (Shabana Azmi), DK is forced to bring Rahul into the family home. Although Rahul builds a strong relationship with his half-sisters and, progressively, with DK, Indu’s revulsion to Rahul (and what he represents) leads DK to determine to send the boy to a boarding school, in order to keep the family together. The film ends on a harmonious, triumphant note, as Indu’s guilt at transferring her resentment towards DK on to the child moves her to welcome Rahul into the household. The wife and mother’s decision to forgive her husband’s adultery, and accept his illegitimate son,

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reflects the enduring power of social conventions in Hindu culture positioning the matriarch both as subservient to her husband and as the compassionately resolute force which holds the family together. Conversely, DK’s white-collar identity and the family’s clearly affluent status in modern, urban Delhi bespeak the power and rapidity of social change. Although the Family Drama has remained a staple of non-Hindi cinema, in Bollywood it mutated into the slicker, less realistic but enormously-popular ‘family entertainer’ during the mid 1990s. While director Kapur has insisted that he did not make Masoom for children, young star Hansraj believes that it ‘reflected a child’s emotions’ in a way that most ‘family entertainers’ – such as Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995) and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... (Karan Joshar, 2001) – do not.25 iii) The Sports Film. The sports film is rather less complicated in its modes of audience address, reflecting as it does the real-life associations of mainstream sport – especially cricket – as recreational pursuits in which ‘the whole family’ can participate. The sports film has been almost exclusively a province of Hindi-language cinema, with the glossy, broad-appeal aspects of Bollywood film mirroring the similarly universalistic aspects of team sports. The genre was kickstarted by the colossal global success of Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001), where an extended cricket match (authentically performed by the cast) operates metaphorically for the social and cultural tensions between the opposing sides, one comprising British army colonials, the other a diverse collection of impoverished, but ultimately triumphant, Indian villagers. Gowariker, its director, insists that Lagaan is a children’s movie, arguing that any film that has received a ‘U’ certificate and can be ‘understood and enjoyed by kids’ should be regarded as such.26 Several other family-orientated sports films have followed, including Iqbal (Nagesh Kukooner, 2006), Say Salaam India (Subhash Kapoor, 2007), Chain Kulii Ki Main Kulii (Kittu Saluja, 2007), and the smash hit Chak De! India (Shimit Amin, 2007). iv) The Animated Feature. The first major Indian animated feature did not emerge until 2005, with the release of Hanuman (V. G. Samant and Milind Ukey). A mythological narrative – Hanuman is one of the Hindu gods from the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana – it articulated a newly-universalistic, expansionist ethos in Indian ‘family’orientated filmmaking. Producer Atul Rao suggested that: Hanuman is the original superman. He is different from heroes like Spiderman, Batman and Superman of the West. Hanuman

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has many virtues which would make him a role model [...] We should present Hanuman in a way that he is accepted by the rest of the world. In the US, Superman is god. Hanuman surely should have a much wider appeal.27 Although the standard of animation was a notch below that of mainstream Hollywood, Hanuman was one of India’s biggest childorientated hits for many years, grossing in excess of Rs. 30 million. Predictably, a cycle of Hindi-language mythologically-themed animations followed, including Krishna (Aman Khan, 2006), My Friend Ganesha (Rajiv S. Rula, 2007), Bal Ganesh (Pankaj Sharma, 2007), Hanuman Returns (Arurag Kashyap, 2007), Dashavatar (Bhavik Thakore, 2008), Ghatothkach (Singeetam Srinivasa Rao, 2009), Roadside Romeo (Jugal Hansraj, 2008), Ramayana: The Epic (Chetan Desai, 2010) and Arjun: The Warrior Prince (Arnab Chaudhuri, 2012). Such mythological films endorse Hindu religious tradition, but there are clear parallels with Hollywood. Navin Shah, chief executive of the Percept Picture Company, admitted: ‘We never took Hanuman as a mythological character; for us he was the original superhero, so it was more of a superhero film’.28 Hanuman’s box office success was ultimately misleading. In 2009, with substantial losses on Hanuman Returns, Krishna, Roadside Romeo, Dashavatar, Ghatotkach and My Friend Ganesha, The Times of India estimated that the Indian animation industry stood to lose in the region of Rs. 70 crore (c. US $130 million).29 Because of the scale of these collective losses, many films hastily assembled in the post-Hanuman production frenzy were unable to find distributors. Shailendra Singh, Percept’s joint managing director, observed that: ‘The average Indian audience hasn’t completely warmed up to animation. A lot of people probably still believe animation is for children.’30 Nevertheless, Disney has moved purposely into the Indian market in recent years. Its co-production with UTV, Arjun: The Warrior Prince, is the country’s costliest animated feature to date, combining the mythological focus of earlier films with greater emphasis on sensorial appeal. Its star, actor Jaaved Jafferi, insisted that: ‘This mentality that Indians have that animated films are only for kids is very wrong. Animated films are high-grossing films at the box-office.’31 Actress Mandira Bedi affirmed: ‘I am happy a film has been made on such a big superhero. Today, our kids are growing up on Western concepts and Western culture. But here an animated film has been made which will promote Indian culture.’32 However, it, too, bombed.

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v) Fantasy. Until recently, fantasy occupied a marginal position in Bollywood. Partly, this reflects budgetary considerations: fantasy worlds tend to be expensive to realise. But it also underpins India’s traditional emphasis on family and kinship, and concomitant rejection of puerility, in opposition to more properly ‘adult’ values associated with maturation. Yet the attraction of fantasy as a narrative framework and a vehicle for spectacle remains apparent. Often, the result has been a compromise; a sub-genre comprising ‘mock’, or ambiguous, fantasies. For example, in Makdee, what appears throughout to be a supernatural narrative – a reclusive witch transforms a young girl’s sister into a chicken, forcing her servitude until the ‘curse’ is lifted – is ultimately explained rationally (the ‘witch’ is merely a petty criminal who is keeping the sister hostage). In the superhero movie Mr. India, the protagonist inherits his powers of invisibility via a light-refractive suit invented by his father. And even the climax to Rani Aur Lalpari, in which a young girl ventures into heaven to convince the Lord of Death to restore her dying mother, refuses disambiguation as to whether the child was simply dreaming. In recent years, however, the market for fantasy films has opened up considerably. The trend can be traced back to the mid-1990s, when Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) broke box office records for a foreign film, grossing over Rs. 50 million. As Pendakur observes, ‘In the liberalising Indian economy of the 1990s, Hollywood film distributors [...] discovered a huge pent up demand for movies with glitzy special effects’.33 Since the millennium, there has been a perceptible shift in emphasis in Indian fantasies, where fantastic elements have no longer been presented ambiguously or apologetically.

Figure 11-2 Jadu, the benign, very Hollywood-esque Extra-Terrestrial of Koi...Mil Gaya

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vi) The Blockbuster. In the big-budget smash hit Koi...Mil Gaya (Rakesh Roshan, 2003), we see the fullest appropriation of Western fantasy tropes. The film centres on dim-witted young Rohit (Hrithik Roshan), who incurred brain damage when his discredited scientist father – ridiculed when he presented evidence of UFOs to his colleagues – lost control of his car, killing him and injuring his pregnant wife. Rohit, who is bullied by his much-younger schoolmates because of his disability, discovers an alien – which he names Jadu – in his back yard and keeps its existence hidden. Jadu is rescued at the film’s close by his returning mother-ship, but not before he imbues Rohit with super-human intelligence. With a storyline that borrows explicitly from the Spielberg films Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. (1982) – while retaining central Bollywood characteristics of melodrama, song-and-dance and strongly emotive content – Roshan created a new type of fantasy film, a hybrid of Hollywood-style visual appeal and ‘Indian’ narrative/thematic structure. A similar hybridisation can be seen in subsequent blockbuster fantasy films, including Krrish (Rakesh Roshan, 2006), the vastly-successful sequel to Koi...Mil Gaya; the box office flop Aladin (Sujoy Ghosh, 2009); and the Disney-distributed films Anaganaga O Dheerudu (Prakash Kovelamudi, 2011), Zokkoman (Satyajit Bhatkal, 2011) and Arjun: The Warrior Prince.

Current Trends As in North America during the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of the teenager as a dominant socio-economic entity in India has paved the way for dramatic stylistic and commercial changes in the ‘children’s film’. As Elizabeth Williams Ørberg has observed, many recent Bollywood films – traditionally a vanguard for social conservatism, despite their glamour – have ‘begun to address new lifestyles and family mores such as premarital sex, unwed motherhood, alternative sexualities, live-in relationships, bachelorhood, “singledom”, infidelity and divorce.’34 Furthermore, urban middleclass youth (known as ‘post-liberators’) are forced to grapple with conflicting attitudes to such concerns as social, civic and familial duty, courtship, marriage (arranged or otherwise, and the tradition of endogamy) and national honour, all of which relate directly or indirectly to themes explored, affirmed or subverted by ‘family’ and children’s films.

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Among younger urban children, too, entertainment preferences and patterns have been affected by shifting socio-cultural values and greater consumer choice. As Shakuntala Banaji argues, ‘the media environment surrounding children in a metropolis like Bombay [Mumbai], India has altered almost unrecognisably in the last two decades.’35 A study of the entertainment habits of children aged 9–12 in Mumbai found that: All the children [...] talked knowledgeably about aspects of older teenage culture (both Western and Indian) and spoke in a sophisticated manner about issues as diverse as relationships, sex (which caused some shyness and much hilarity), potential careers, bullying, advertising, fashion, national identity, managing money and adolescent crushes.36 Derek Bose suggests that ‘with changing times, the maturity of children has changed’, with children now ‘preferring to watch either Hollywood action films or even Bollywood films’ in preference to so-called ‘children’s films’.37 Although the term ‘child’ is still widely and misleadingly applied to anyone under the age of 13, a recognisable ‘tween’ urban sub-culture has emerged around such franchises as Transformers and Hannah Montana. The ‘tween’ phenomenon, surely, is socio-cultural acknowledgement that the once-immutable boundaries between ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ are weakening – even as such ‘crossover’ entertainment franchises as Harry Potter succeed in appealing to multiple demographic sections. Bose advises that instead of ‘kids’ movies’, the industry focus its attentions on ‘films that appeal to people of all age groups’.38 In rural areas – particularly among poorer communities – screen entertainment is scarcer, although Hollywood programming remains far more accessible than the latest Children’s Film Society release. As director Vishal Bhardwaj observes, ‘if we watch television, we find so many kids’ channels’, but they ‘are not made in India’, and instead are ‘dubbed in local languages. We don’t have anything to offer to our children in India’.39 Arguably, Indian cinema is still failing to provide children with their own entertainment spaces. Although several recent Indian child films, such as Chillar Party (Nitesh Tiwari and Vikas Bahl, 2011) and Stanley Ka Dabba (Amole Gupta, 2011), have attempted specifically to entertain children, increasing demographic segmentation – differentiating toddlers, ‘tweens’ and everything in the middle – has made the production of movies for ‘children’, as

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a homogenous entity, increasingly anachronistic, not to say uncommercial. It is unsurprising, then, that ‘family’ entertainment in the Hollywood (i.e., ‘youth’-orientated) style continues to grow in momentum. Young people’s changing attitudes to screen entertainment – or, perhaps, their increasing ability to articulate their desires – is threatening to displace the paternalistic ethos that has governed Indian cinema since its inception. The country’s enormous social, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural plurality, and the enduring strength of its core values, make it impossible to predict how far ‘youth culture’ will ultimately extend. But the transformation of Indian children’s entertainment is a demonstrable reality. If the Children’s Film Society’s continued existence bespeaks the immense rhetorical attraction of peculiarly ‘Indian’ family entertainment which – in its small-scale, local, culturally-specific inflection – positions itself in opposition to a perceptually invasive and mass-market Western entertainment model, the increasing popularity of Hollywoodflavoured blockbusters like Krrish underpins a contrary tendency towards cultural aspecificity. Disney’s recent distribution deal with UTV Motion Pictures suggests that it perceives an untapped local market in such all-age entertainment. Mahesh Samat, managing director of The Walt Disney Company, India, explained that: ‘Together with UTV, our goal is to produce films that have a direct connection with the dynamic and expanding India audience and that embody Disney brand values – optimistic, fun, meaningful and emotional entertainment for the entire family.’40 Several of the most successful recent Bollywood ‘family’ films have approximated the kineticism, narrative transparency and aesthetic appeal of mainstream Hollywood without sacrificing their cultural uniqueness (melodrama, romance, song-and-dance, etc.). However, such films are still liable to be perceived as symptomatic of the infiltration of foreign values into the local cultural sphere. As a result, children’s films and ‘family’ entertainment – so often the battleground of ideologues on all parts of the political spectrum – are likely to be sites of considerable debate in the years to come.

Notes 1. Margaret Khalakdina, Early Child Care in India, eds Halbert B. Robinson and Nancy M. Robinson (London and New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979), p. 159.

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2. Radhika Bhirani, ‘New Children’s Films Are Fun for Adults as Well’, Bollywood.com, 25 July 2011. [accessed 5/6/2012]. 3. Tejaswini Ganti, Bollywood: a Guide to Popular Hindi Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 45–46. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. ‘Clean Films Necessary to Promote Family Values: CM’, The Times of India, 24 March 2012. [accessed 7/5/2012]. 7. Manjunath Pendakur, ‘India’s National Film Policy: Shifting Currents in the 1990s’ in Albert Moran, ed., Film Policy: International, National and Regional Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 145–68. 8. Ibid., pp. 151–52. 9. Manpreet Kaur, ‘A Film is No More a Family Outing: Dharmendra’, Bollywood.com, 13 July 2011. [accessed 7/5/2012]. 10. ‘Comedy, Drama, Action’, The Express Tribune, 30 April 2012. [accessed 7/5/ 2012.] 11. These statistics are taken from: ‘Annual Report: 2010’ of the Central Board of Film Classification, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, pp. 18–19; ‘Annual Report: 2011’ of the Central Board of Film Classification, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, pp. 19–20. 12. Nehru on Social Issues, eds S. P. Agrawal and J. C. Aggarwal (New Delhi: Askok Kumar Mittal, 1989), p. 188. 13. Cited in Vinayak Purohit, Arts of Transitional India: Twentieth Century, Vol. 2 (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1988), pp. 1138–40. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. ‘Working Group on National Film Policy, 1979 – Report’, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1980, pp. 325–26. 17. Vijaya Mulay, ‘Where are the Children’s Films?’, Vidura, 8 December 1981. [accessed 15/6/2012]. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Rebecca Hawkes, ‘Call for More Children’s Films on Indian State TV’, Rapidtvnews.com, 21 July 2011. [accessed 5/6/2012]; Muralidhara Khajane, ‘A Children’s Film for

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23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

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Adults Too’, The Hindu, 3 April 2012. [accessed 7/5/2012]. Radhika Bhirani, ‘Children’s Films a Genre Neglected, Directionless’, The Hindustan Times, 6 August 2008. [accessed 7/5/2012]. ‘Aamir Goes Gaga Over His “Taare Zameen Par”’, Bollywood.com, 13 December 2007. [accessed 7/5/2012]. Bharati Dubey, ‘Tiny Twinkle in Tinseltown’, The Times of India, 6 January 2012. [accessed 7/5/2012]. ‘Ashutosh Thinks Lagaan as “Children’s Movie”’, The Hindustan Times, 4 August 2008. [accessed 7/5/2012]. Ch Sushil Rao, ‘Roll Over Superman, Hanuman’s Here’, The Times of India, 22 June 2003. [accessed 18/6/2012]. Jyothi Prabhakar and Vishwas Gautam, ‘Children’s Films, a Myth?’ The Times of India, 14 November 2008. [accessed 21/6/2012]. Meena Iyer, ‘Animation Films Fail to Rock the Box Office’, The Times of India, 1 January 2009. [accessed 18/6/2012]. Ibid. ‘Animated Films not Just for Kids: Jaaved Jaffiri’, The Times of India, 26 May 2012. [accessed 7/5/2012]. Ibid. Pendakur, ‘India’s National Film Policy’, p. 151. Elizabeth Williams Ørberg, The ‘Paradox’ of Being Young in New Delhi: Urban Middle Class Youth Negotiations with Popular Indian Film (Sweden: Lund University, 2008), pp. 5–6. Shakuntala Banaji, ‘ “Adverts Make Me Want to Break the Television”: Indian Children and Their Audiovisual Media Environment in Three Contrasting Locations’ in Shakuntala Banaji, ed., South Asian Media Cultures: Audiences, Representations, Contexts (London: Anthem Press, 2010), pp. 51–72. Ibid., p. 56. Prithwish Ganguly, ‘Children’s Films Spell Poor Success in Bollywood’, The Hindustan Times, 30 June 2007. [accessed 7/5/2012].

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38. Ibid. 39. Prithwish Ganguly, ‘Bollywood Doesn’t Make Good Children’s Films’, The Hindustan Times, 10 August 2007. [accessed 7/5/2012]. 40. ‘Walt Disney, UTV to Co-Produce Family Films, The Economic Times, 19 May 2011. [accessed 5/6/2012].

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Brazilian Children’s Cinema in the 1990s: Tensions Between the National-Popular and the International-Popular Mirian Ou and Alessandro Constantino Gamo

‘A very Brazilian Macaulay Culkin’. This is how a lead from a review described the main character of Nutty Boy (Menino Maluquinho – O Filme, Helvécio Ratton, 1995), played by Samuel Costa, just before its theatrical release, comparing him to the young star of Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990). The sequel, Nutty Boy 2 – The Adventure (Menino Maluquinho 2 – A Aventura, Fernando Meirelles and Fabrizia Alves Pinto, 1999), has prompted similarly allusive responses. One reviewer observed that Nutty Boy 2 presents a ‘country bumpkin E.T. chopping tobacco’,1 referencing both Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Almeida Júnior’s painting, Life in the Countryside: Chopping Tobacco (1893), an icon of rural culture from the south-east of Brazil. Produced by the Brazilian production company Grupo Novo de Cinema e TV, both films were the third most watched Brazilian films in their years of release, and received strong critical notices. The extent to which such reviews underscore the films’ hybridisation of Brazilian and Hollywood elements is striking. For academics, the artistic classes and other specialised discourses (such as the popular press), these two spheres traditionally represent opposite poles. This essay will first explore how this dichotomy between the local and the global operates in Brazilian cinema. To shed light on these questions, we will briefly expound upon concepts developed by the sociologist Renato Ortiz2 about the national-popular and the international-popular. We will then analyse how this dichotomy is present in the Brazilian production of child- and family-orientated films in the late-1980s and 1990s and, finally, how the Nutty Boy films 207

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deal with the pressures and tensions of this context. While these films try to construct and reinforce Brazilian national identity, they still aspire towards mass-market popularity by adopting certain narrative, aesthetic and commercial strategies more associated with non-Brazilian – and particularly Hollywood – cinema.

Beat Them or Join Them? As is the case in many countries, Hollywood movies dominate the Brazilian film market – including children’s cinema. Foreign products are usually treated, in commercial terms, as threats to be challenged, or even overcome. In the case of Nutty Boy, for instance, press articles celebrated the ‘technical tie’ (approximately the same number of viewers per copy of the film) between Nutty Boy and Disney’s Pocahontas (Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, 1995). Although such figures are only proportional, achieving similar results to imported blockbusters is widely regarded as an impressive accomplishment. Successive governments have supported the movie industry, while attempting to maintain the difficult balance between film production as a commercially-viable national industry, and film production as an important part of Brazilian people’s cultural upbringing. This has generated countless discussions regarding the kind of movies that should be supported. In the 1970s, when the governmentbacked enterprise Embrafilme vigorously promoted a truly ‘national’ cinema, a wide debate ensued. Randal Johnson suggested that this was a case of ‘commerce versus culture’: The vast presence of foreign movies – mainly North American ones – in the Brazilian market has reinforced the audience’s bias in its favour. This creates, for the Brazilian cineaste, the dilemma of whether to imitate foreign films, or whether try to create new modes of filmic discourse based on that which he or she perceives as ‘national’ values. The culture/commerce dichotomy is an expression of this complex, and perhaps unsolvable, dilemma.3 Johnson summarised the challenges faced by Brazilian filmmakers, who must appeal to an audience accustomed to foreign films. Although cultural and commercial aspects are not mutually exclusive, this dichotomy remains strongly apparent in cinematic discourses in Brazil. The adoption of classically Hollywood narrative and stylistic

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elements tends to be associated with films motivated primarily by economics. The development of new aesthetic styles, or an appeal to characteristics that are considered national, on the other hand, is associated with films which purport to be culturally significant, despite often-meagre financial returns. To the first category can be added films carrying a strong influence from television, a very popular media in Brazil, but frequently discredited by the Brazilian intelligentsia. Embrafilme was extinguished in 1990. An economic recession aggravated the situation and resulted in the effective dismantling of the film industry and the stultification of feature film production – a fact which explains the shortfall in children’s movies in 1992 and 1993. Two Federal laws (Rouanet, 1991, and Audiovisual, 1993) were important in the resumption of film production, offering mechanisms for tax incentives to individuals and enterprises investing in national films. These initiatives were the catalyst for what has become known as the retomada, or renaissance, of Brazilian cinema. Even during this period, when Brazilian cinema enjoyed a commercial renaissance,4 many films still attempted to pursue artistic recognition and to uphold Brazilian national identity. One of the results of government subsidies for Brazilian films in the early days of retomada was a tendency among Brazilian filmmakers to emphasise, with a degree of exaltation, the culture or history of the country.5 These nationalistic ideologies are strengthened in child-orientated works, due to their pedagogical imperative. Given that national identity is a socioideological construction determined by socio-cultural and historical conditions, it is important to ascertain which kinds of structures Brazilian children’s films attempt to promote.

The National-Popular and the International-Popular The central dichotomy between cultural and commercial cinema is related to tensions rooted in the recent, fast-paced and far-reaching modernisation of the country. Renato Ortiz argues that the advent of an urban and industrialised society in Brazil posed the question of dependency on foreign models against the maintenance of what were then considered traditional national values.6 Ortiz underlines the consolidation of a national mass cultural industry, pointing to a ‘progressive autonomisation of the Brazilian cultural sphere’ paralleling the country’s processes of modernisation.7 This growing industry

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faced the problem of producing cultural industry goods beyond the mere reproduction of foreign dominant models, while still relying on them, both commercially and aesthetically. Ortiz has identified in this process a recurring counter-position critical to modernity in discourses both from artistic and intellectual classes; an opposition between popular culture and mass culture. The first would be related to a rich spiritual past and to Brazilian national identity, while the second, to quantity and technique that would detract from these values. According to Ortiz: Criticism of modernity is made […] in the name of a humanism that privileges the dimension of quality to the detriment of quantity. The tension point between these two terms can be apprehended when one considers, for example, the relation between popular culture and mass culture. Popular is considered as beauté du mort, it is reified [...] as national memory. The popular culture must be preserved because it is essentially tradition and identity. The means of mass communication belong to the territory of quantity, they massify and uniformalise the diversity of the Brazilian ideal […] ‘Popular’ is culture, ‘mass’ is technique.8 Ortiz has coined the expression ‘national-popular’, which expresses a tendency to emphasise supposed Brazilian traits in films, books and other media. Such a tradition forges a national identity based on what is popular, i.e., that which comes from ‘the people’ in a folkloric sense, or that which portrays popular, subaltern classes and their cultural and social movements. The latter concept is uncommon in Brazilian children’s movies, where representations of the national are usually attached to pre-industrial and more traditional spheres. From this perspective, therefore, television and Hollywood films both contribute to cultural massification. It is precisely in mass media sectors such as television, especially with soap-opera production, that an inversion occurs in the influence process. This autonomisation process evolves and supplies not only the internal market, but also part of the international market. Products from the Brazilian cultural industry begin to transcend national borders and boundaries. This change to an ‘internationalpopular’ position is due to an adaptation of local forms of production to international practises. It is necessary, therefore, to establish a dialogue with elements regulated by the perceived requirements of international audiences. Ortiz argues that globalisation has created

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an international-popular memory, which is a global cultural imaginary composed mainly of what is transmitted collectively by television, cinema, comics and the mass media as a whole – characters, images, situations, songs, etc. With this expression, Ortiz paraphrases himself, and the term ‘popular’ assumes a third meaning: that of a widely consumed and known product. International-popular culture also produces global ‘non-spaces’; places that do not present regional singularities. According to Ortiz, one example of a non-space is airports. International-popular culture seeks an asepsis that would potentialise identification, so that people all around the world can feel comfortable in such environments; beyond that, it creates world references through which people may navigate. This international-popular memory becomes a reference for cultural projects that aspire to the international market. To Ortiz, the fact that national cultural production has overcome the condition of mere copies of models allows us to ‘present ourselves as holders of another kind of identity, which actually is not that different from the one of our competitors, since they are interchangeable.’9 This phenomenon led, on the one hand, to a comprehension of cultural alterities, but on the other hand, resulted in decreasing diversity among the products. To Ortiz, this was a definite sign of the rooting of modernisation and advanced capitalism in the country. Returning specifically to Brazilian children’s films, we come to the question of which strategies can be adopted by local producers to position their films in a globalised market while maintaining a local appeal.

Children’s Films Made in Brazil: Influences Even though child-orientated productions constitute only approximately 2 per cent of all Brazilian feature films,10 several of them figure prominently in a list of domestic films believed to have been watched by more than 1 million spectators from 1970 to 2009.11 Children’s and/or family films in this list are mainly vehicles for popular television personalities, such as Xuxa (a singer and presenter) and the Trapalhões (a slapstick comedy quartet), and constitute national blockbusters. The Trapalhões (and their leader’s, Renato Aragão’s, solo movies) are instances of characters successfully migrating from television to family-orientated cinema. All of their films are comedies, but usually mix elements from other genres, such as adventure or musical. They present a very physical, sometimes naïve, humour,

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but also include many attractions for adult audiences, like malicious jokes and guest appearances from television personalities or musical celebrities. Reflecting the influence of international literature and films, their movies are highly referential, usually resorting to parody. Such titles as Robin Hood’s Mystery (O Mistério de Robin Hood, J. B. Tanko, 1974) and The Trapalhões and the Wizard of Oroz [sic] (Os Trapalhões e o Mágico de Oroz, Victor Lustosa and Dedé Santana, 1984)12 are examples of the trend. Historically, such films have been heavily reliant (for finance and revenues) on product placement, the intrusiveness of which has often aroused the indignation of critics. During the 1980s, a search for thematic and technical sophistication may be perceived. Films with a national thematic, such as The Trampish Cangaceiro (O Cangaceiro Trapalhão, Daniel Filho, 1983), located in the poor north-eastern region, ‘intend to go beyond the “alienated” entertainment’13 in an attempt to broaden the audience. The film tells the story of the goatherd Severino (Renato Aragão), who integrates a band of cangaceiros (bandits) with some friends who have escaped from prison. Comic scenes, fantastic elements and a love story are tailored to make the film suitable for a family audience: we follow clumsy missions, an encounter with a fairy-witch, the relationship between Severino and the mayor’s niece and, finally, the discovery of the chicken that lays golden eggs, which makes them rich. Aragão states: ‘Previously, I got inspiration from foreign stories – Ali Baba, Robin Hood, etc. Suddenly, that started to bother me. I thought I had the duty to use my popularity for children’s benefit, addressing national subjects, even with a sociological punch.’14 This response explicitly endorses the notion that the national-popular benefits children’s upbringing. In an attempt to achieve the same success as the Trapalhões, other 1990s TV personalities moved into children’s cinema: Fofão and Sérgio Mallandro, then hosts of children’s television programmes; the stars from Super Colosso (Luiz Ferré, 1995), which was a programme starring puppets on the Rede Globo channel; and Castle Ra-Tim-Bum (Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum, O Filme, Cao Hamburger, 1999). Castle was a different initiative in that it grew out of an award-winning, statebroadcasted television programme with an educational stamp, and generated greater box office returns and positive critical reception. While the movie took advantage of the TV programme’s reputation, it also presented a good, original fantasy script, high technical standards and ambitious settings and costumes. The protagonist of the movie is Nino, a 300-year-old boy who lives in a castle in São

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Paulo with his aunt and uncle, powerful mages. Alongside his newly made friends, Nino tries to prevent the demolition of the castle and helps his aunt and uncle to fight Losangela, an evil witch who has stolen their book of spells. Cassiopéia (Clóvis Vieira, 1996) – one of the first movies in the world to be animated completely with computer graphics – also warrants brief consideration. Made under a tight budget, it is a science fiction film set in space, and its main characters are robots piloting a spaceship – elements appropriated from the international-popular memory. Unfortunately, the budget did not permit a wide release, and consequently it was a box office failure. Seeking to counter what he called ‘showcase films’ packed with promotions of brands and personalities, Helvecio Ratton directed The Puppets Dance (A Dança dos Bonecos) in 1984. The story is about an ambulant artist who steals little Rita’s magic dolls, made by her grandfather, and sells them to the toy industry. As the director states, it is an avowedly ‘anti-consumption [film], which presents the basic argument that fantasy cannot be reproduced or industrialised. Hence, a handmade toy has magic that mass-produced ones will never attain.’15 According to Ratton, the film’s great villain is a conglomerate, a corporation which, in an endless search for the most fascinating and most sellable toy, kills fantasy when it tells us how we should play with their products, as if we were merely reproducing a mechanical dance.16 Ratton’s statement is typical of mass cultural critique, stressing the inhibiting effects of mechanisation upon consumers’ imaginations, and advanced capitalism’s supposedly unscrupulous pursuit of profit. A project of a similar nature is Eduardo Escorel’s filmic adaptation of Maria Clara Machado’s theatrical production Little Blue Horse (Cavalinho Azul, 1984). Vicente, the protagonist, is a young boy who loves his horse (for the boy, a beautiful and blue horse; for his parents, an ordinary brown nag). After his father sells the animal to buy food, Vicente leaves his house to look for it. On the way, he meets two men who own a circus. When they find out about the existence of such a rare animal, they follow Vicente in order to capture his horse and transform it in the circus’s main attraction and profit source. In this film, we can also find criticism of commercial exploitation of entertainment that opportunistically takes over the child’s imaginary. In The Puppets Dance and Little Blue Horse, we may identify children’s

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cinema projects which resist promoting commercial brands and television aesthetics. This emphasis is later developed in Nutty Boy.

Nutty Boy: The Film In 1995, the most successful Brazilian children’s novel – Nutty Boy (Menino Maluquinho) by the cartoonist Ziraldo, who is also the creator of the comics The Pererê Gang (Turma do Pererê, 1960–64) and one of the creators of the Pasquim, an important Brazilian periodical that resisted military dictatorship – became a movie. The book is about a mischievous boy, and successfully combines simple but attractive and surprising drawings with short phrases that build a charismatic portrait of the protagonist. When the film was released, the book had already sold more than 2 million copies in Brazil, been translated into English, Spanish, Catalan, Esperanto, Korean and Japanese, and received an important Children’s Literature award, the Jabuti, which attached additional prestige to the movie. Since the book concentrates more on drawing a portrait of a character than a storyline, the screenplay had to create settings and many additional scenes. The film is set in the state of Minas Gerais, in the south-east of Brazil. Nutty Boy is a middle-class boy living in Belo Horizonte, the state capital. The film deviates from classical narrative conventions in that the main character does not have discernible motivations, and there are no clear antagonists. Instead, great emphasis is placed on scenes from everyday life, such as children’s games, resulting in contemplative and lyrical moments mirroring similar passages in the book. At the mid-point in the film, the boy’s grandfather takes him and his friends to his farm in the countryside. The main dramatic facts the character has to come to terms with and overcome are his parents’ divorce and, towards the end of the film, his grandfather’s death. Although the idea of this cinematic adaptation began with the producer, Tarcisio Vidigal, director Ratton has admitted that he attempted to create a work in which his own authorial voice could be expressed. Continuing the line of criticism against consumer society and industrialised toys from The Puppets Dance, Nutty Boy is free from product placement, and presents only one scene in which the protagonist buys something: a Pererê comic book. This way, the film comically, if sincerely, promotes the figure of the author – Ziraldo. In order to display a different childhood from the one known by child viewers, a childhood in which mass-market cultural products

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Nutty Boy (Samuel Costa) engaged in outdoor play

are comparatively rare; the film is set in the 1960s, when television ownership was not yet widespread in Brazil. Nutty Boy does not have a television set at home – he reads, instead. One revealing scene – in that it demonstrates the filmmakers’ perception of the child audience’s lack of knowledge about their own country – is where Nutty Boy and his friends, Bocão (João Romeu Filho) and Nina (Fernanda Guimarães), meet boys from the provinces for the first time. The clash between outsiders and local children is accompanied by music which consciously parodies classical Hollywood westerns, with photography in shades of ochre and a mise-en-scène reminiscent of a western duel. The local boys are lined up, sullen and distant from the visitors. The visitors take the initiative and try to establish contact as if their interlocutors were Indians: ‘We come in peace!’ Their behaviour is a laughing-stock among the ‘natives’: ‘Come on, do you think we look like Indians?’, they reply, and burst out laughing. Western movies are used by urban characters to hide their spare knowledge of the Brazilian countryside. The scene alludes to one of the most celebrated film genres, plays comically with the repertoire of the international-popular imaginary and presents children who are more familiar with international-popular references than with their own country. Nevertheless, internationalpopular references appear more as punctuating quotations, rather than dominating the film as a whole. Facing this fierce foreign competition, Ratton elected to make a virtue of the natural resources at his disposal: ‘Since we do not have

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the financial and technological resources Americans do, we must invest in our Brazilian landscapes and actors.’17 Natural elements of the earth and the people are an advantage of an altogether different kind. Both in the city and in the countryside, the film offers visions of a less industrialised past, which provides tangible and intangible benefits that were normative in the 1960s but disappearing by the 1990s. Playing activities such as bente-altas18 and soapbox-cart races are invocations of an endangered child culture. The rural space represented by the grandfather’s farm is a repository of even older articles and toys, of contact with nature, with regional food and home-crafted artefacts imbued with a certain magic. Thus, the film establishes a dialogue with some national-popular elements related to tradition and to folklore, extolling, somewhat romantically, a national identity grounded in the past. The film also alludes to symbols and historical facts related to Minas Gerais in a celebratory and civic tone; for example, in the school’s theatre, where kids stage the story of Tiradentes, a martyr in the fight for Brazilian independence from Portugal. In the contemporary film market, though, nationalism alone is not enough to attract mass audiences. Brazilian filmmakers have continued to aspire to the technical standards of major Hollywood productions. Much of Nutty Boy’s post-production work, notably the final sound mixing in Dolby Stereo and the optical transcription, were carried out in New York – a fact widely commented on in the Brazilian media. A great effort was also made to execute scenes with high visual appeal, such as hot air balloon and plane flights. This technical quality was considered essential to sell the film internationally. Its first public exhibition took place at the Berlin Festival’s market. Afterwards, Vidigal secured a distribution deal with companies from at least five countries: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Ireland and Korea.19 Nutty Boy began its career in fine style. The film received a popular reception from Brazilian critics and filmgoers alike and has won several national and international awards, such as Best Film at the Cairo International Film Festival for Children (1996). Flush from his success with Nutty Boy, Vidigal soon began work on a sequel.

Nutty Boy 2: The Adventure In an interview in 1998, before the release of Nutty Boy 2, Vidigal stated that there was an opportunity for a Brazilian character to

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compete against foreign ones: ‘I think that the entertainment consumer market needs a Brazilian character. We have a market dominated by foreign products, mostly American […] But I believe that there is space for another kind of character, and Nutty Boy could be this character in the years to come.’20 The production of a sequel – a rare event in Brazilian cinema – indicates not only the influence of international practices, but the desire to occupy a position similar to global blockbusters. From Vidigal’s comments on the matter, we may perceive that he harboured two lofty ambitions with the new movie. First, he had hopes of developing a cinematographic franchise (‘make the third [Nutty Boy] […] and release a new Nutty Boy every year, always during summer holidays’);21 and second, he wanted his films to cross over to the international marketplace, especially the United States, where the first film had made little impact. It is no coincidence, therefore, that in Nutty Boy 2 Vidigal crafts a more classical adventure narrative – a genre predominant in Hollywood family films. Perceiving that child audiences crave for more action, the producer also tried to make Nutty Boy 2 an international-popular film by incorporating elements of the international-popular memory. The opening credits, for instance, allude to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Leo the Lion emblem: an animated figure of Nutty Boy appears inside a round frame and snarls. In an interview presenting the sequel’s new characteristics, Ziraldo, who wrote the script, reveals: It is indeed a family film [...] The spirit of the first film remains: there is the beloved grandfather, the fireworks man, Mr. Mayor, the countryside village, a childhood without computers, but suddenly the boys become Rambo. The film gets a little imprecise. Loads of things happen, children will go crazy.22 Suggestively, Ziraldo uses the expression family film, in English. Although the Rambo films cannot be easily associated with family entertainment, this is clearly a celebratory reference to Hollywood’s influence. Accordingly, Nutty Boy 2’s script is much more classical: there are goals to be achieved and, to accomplish them, the protagonists must overcome obstacles and antagonists. The sequel is set in the 1960s in the state of Minas Gerais, and tells the story of Nutty Boy and his friends at the farm of his other grandfather, Tonico (Stênio Garcia). Tonico wants to organise a party to celebrate the town’s centennial, but Mayor Costa (Nelson

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Dantas) tries to sabotage it. The children help Tonico to assemble a circus and to create performances, in which they are going to be the lead artists. Near the end of the film, Mayor Costa tries to confiscate all the fireworks at the party, but he accidentally starts a fire that soon leads to an explosion. It is Tonico who saves Costa and takes him out of the barn. After that, Costa gives his support so that the party can happen. In the meantime, a parallel plot is developed: Nutty Boy meets a mysterious creature, Tata Mirim, who is made of fire. The boy follows the creature and disappears into a cave, leading to a long sequence in which Tonico and Nutty Boy’s friends organise a rescue expedition. The other kids meet Tata Mirim there, and they become friends. While the children and Tata Mirim make popcorn and have other little adventures, the adults can see signs that something strange is going on, with thriving sunflowers in the winter and large quantities of popcorn on the street. The mysterious being and the children suffer the antipathy of religious women and other townspeople, who suspect some sort of demonic force. They persecute the children in order to expurgate the evil. Tata Miguel, Tata Mirim’s friend and protector, saves the children by flying them to another spot, and explains to the children that Mirim must go home, as he is becoming weaker. They say farewell, but Tata Mirim comes back to give the town’s celebration a grand finale: he replaces the fireworks that were lost in the explosion and gives them a firework show. The cave in which the children get lost (and where Tata Mirim lives) is the cinematic non-place of the film par excellence. Diegetically, it is a Brazilian space. However, it does not present any particular national characteristic. Built in a big studio, it does not diverge much from the caves presented in Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981) or The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985). The producers invested a lot of time and money to ensure that the film’s technical qualities were convincing. The special effects sequences utilise an unprecedented degree of technical sophistication for Brazilian cinema, presenting for the first time an image resolution of 3K. Furthermore, Vidigal hired two foreign technicians. Fernando Meirelles, one of the movie’s directors, suggested Tony Mitchell – who had worked on Highlander (Russell Mulcahy, 1986) – for the film’s cinematography. Thus, the film was boosted by the expertise of an international cinematographer with experience in Anglo-American action films. The technical crew also included a Mexican creator of special effects, Federico Farfan, to assist in the explosion scenes.

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Figure 12-2 Nutty Boy and his friends playing in the cave, Nutty Boy 2’s cinematic non-space

The film still displays national-popular tendencies, but some features become stylised. The characterisation of the people of Minas Gerais, for instance, is more farcical, with their accents bordering on caricature. Transforming such regional traces into comical caricatures facilitates the acceptance by those who are unused to them (inside or outside Brazil), since the fable tone softens an awkwardness that would be felt more sharply in a more realistic narrative framework. The movie also transforms Brazilian traditional folklore. Diegetically, Tata Mirim is a creature invented by Nutty Boy. It is a possible reference to Boitatá, a Brazilian folkloric figure that lives in the forests and similarly is made of fire. This new ‘folklore’ somehow loses its roots, and the creature acquires such indeterminate shape and content that even the Brazilian press could not correctly classify it: some called it a folkloric creature, others a mythological one and even a being from pre-history. Tata Mirim’s loose form and content (he does not speak) facilitates his assimilation by audiences from other cultures. When Nutty Boy says farewell to Tata Mirim, the mise-en-scène clearly quotes Spielberg’s E.T.; but rather than being an extra-terrestrial, Tata Mirim is referred to as an intra-terrestrial. Moreover, the character of Tonico, Nutty’s grandfather, is a microcosm of the film as a whole, comprising both local and global

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cultural references. Tonico is a wacky inventor with an Einstein-like shock of hair; this is a recurring archetype in children’s and familyorientated products, as witness Disney’s Gyro Gearloose, and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) from Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985). Tonico invents unconventional machines such as an automatic system that serves coffee or tea to visitors. Technology and technicality are thus highlighted. Tonico also acts as a cultural producer who tirelessly organises a festival to celebrate the centennial of the town. Hence, Tonico embodies both categories identified by Ortiz: culture (associated with humanity and quality) and technicality (associated with modernity and quantity). His technics, however, is not exactly related to mass production: it is a creative production produced on a small scale – he creates prototypes which he is willing to sell, if necessary, to finance the festival. This artisanal technology thus serves the purposes of culture, a metaphor of the idea the filmmakers hold regarding the local film industry. Although Nutty Boy 2 had a budget more than twice that of the first film, and attained a wider release with a renowned Brazilian distributor allied with a large movie theatre chain, its box office performance did not match that of its predecessor. The distribution was mishandled – the film was released some weeks later than planned, during the World Cup finals. On the following weekend, many theatres replaced Nutty Boy 2 with the Hollywood blockbuster Godzilla (Roland Emmerich, 1998). International sales were poor, and the film did not make inroads in the lucrative North American market. As a result, Vidigal abandoned his plans to continue the Nutty Boy franchise.

Concluding remarks The Hollywood family film is one of the primary agents in the construction of an international-popular memory, continuously producing global references and forming audiences. This ability is directly linked to Hollywood films’ global market penetration. In an attempt to compete, the Nutty Boy films privilege good production values, affirm national-popular elements, do not incentivise consumerism and simultaneously exploit the international-popular memory. The appreciation of national, especially rural landscapes and folk traditions, the reduction of media consumption, notably of television, and the stimulus of children’s imagination and creativity

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are some of the defensive instruments proposed by the filmmakers against Hollywood and the strong influence of national blockbusters. Nutty Boy presents a double nostalgia: on the one hand, nostalgia for (an imagined) childhood (‘a boy’s life is a good life’, as the title song asserts); on the other hand, nostalgia for a past era, attractive to adults who are able to remember their own childhood. It should be noted that this occurs not only in Brazil, but also in other national cinemas. Åberg has observed a nostalgic portrait of the 1950s and 1960s in some Swedish children’s films of the 1980s and 1990s, which contained representations associated with national rural settings.23 National identity in these films is also grounded in the past and appeals to a nostalgic mood. It seems that the nationalism that emerges from these children’s films tends to overlap with the very idea of childhood they convey: they seek to rescue a lost purity, the idyllic origins both of individual and nation. Nutty Boy 2, though also set in the 1960s, pursues modernisation and makes an effort to establish a stronger dialogue with elements from international-popular memory. It invests in impressive scenery and special effects, with a narrative emphasising greater action. Ironically, this quest for an internationalised aesthetic and mode of production did not result in greater acceptance of the film internationally. This reveals the difficulties of positioning the film effectively in a global cinema market. It is a situation in which producers and directors learn how to adapt to the market through trial and error. Both films discussed in this chapter sought to answer the demands of the context in which they were produced. In this project, there is a tension between a desire for self-assertion as authentic Brazilian product, with no affiliation to television, and a parallel desire to imitate international practices, together constituting different ways of legitimising it to the audience, creating new forms of production and aesthetic hybridisations.

Notes 1. Paulo Vieira, ‘“Maluquinho” é “ET” Caipira Picando Fumo’, Folha de S. Paulo, 10 July 1998, p. 5. 2. Ortiz, Professor of the sociology department at Universidade de Estadual de Campinas, has written extensively on the Brazilian cultural industries and their relation with national identity and mondialisation. 3. Randal Johnson, ‘Ascensão e Queda do Cinema Brasileiro, 1960–1990’, Revista USP, no. 19 (September–November 1993), p. 43.

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4. Melina Izar Marson, ‘O cinema da Retomada: Estado e Cinema no Brasil da Dissolução da Embrafilme à Criação da Ancine’ (Campinas: Unicamp, 2006), p. 72. 5. Daniel Caetano et al., ‘1995–2005: Histórico de uma Década’ in Daniel Caetano, ed., Cinema Brasileiro 1995–2005: Revisão de uma Década (Rio de Janeiro: Azougue, 2005), p. 13. 6. Renato Ortiz, A Moderna Tradição Brasileira (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1989), p. 190. 7. Ibid., p. 193. 8. Renato Ortiz, Cultura Brasileira e Identidade Nacional (São Paulo: Brasiliense), 1985, p. 185. 9. Ortiz, A Moderna Tradição Brasileira, pp. 205–06. 10. João Batista Melo dos Santos, ‘A Tela Angelical: Infância, Literatura, Mídia e Cinema Infantil’ (Campinas: Unicamp, 2004). 11. ‘Filmes com mais de um milhão de espectadores (1970/2009) por gênero’, table elaborated by Observatório Brasileiro do Cinema e do Audiovisual, Ancine. [accessed 10/8/2010]. 12. The English titles are translated by the authors. 13. José Mário Ortiz Ramos, Cinema, Televisão e Publicidade: Cultura Popular de Massa no Brasil dos Anos 1970–1980 (São Paulo: Annablume, 2004), p. 132. 14. Ibid. 15. Pablo Villaça, Helvécio Ratton: O Cinema Além das Montanhas (São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial, 2005), p. 227. 16. Ibid., p. 229. 17. André Luiz Barros, ‘Receita Mineira’, Jornal do Brasil, 25 July 1995, p. B2. 18. A once very popular game on the streets of Minas Gerais, similar to street cricket, but played without a bat. 19. Priscila Simões, ‘Menino Maluquinho no Cinema’, Jornal da Tarde, 5 July 1995, p. 8A. 20. Elizabeth Real, ‘Um Caso de Amor com o Cinema: Entrevista com Tarcísio Vidigal’, Idéia na Cabeça, no. 4 (July–August 1998), pp. 2–6. 21. Maria do Rosário Caetano, ‘Aventuras Intra-Terrestres’, Jornal de Brasília, 5 August 1997, p. 1. 22. ‘Menino Maluquinho 2 – a aventura’ (Rio de Janeiro: Grupo Novo de Cinema e TV, 1998), p. 2. Pressbook. 23. Anders Wilhelm Åberg, ‘Remaking the National Past: the Uses of Nostalgia in the Astrid Lindgren Films of the 1980s and 1990s’ in Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz, eds, Beyond Pippi Longstocking: Intermedial and International Aspects of Astrid Lindgren’s Works (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 73–86.

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Narrative, Time and Memory in Studio Ghibli Films Tom Ue

This chapter explores the manipulation of time in the Japanese animé producer Studio Ghibli’s films as a means of engaging audiences emotionally, challenging them to embrace their ethical concerns and, in the process, blurring the distinction between films for children and those for adults. Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro (1988) delays the revelation of and, thus, places emphasis on, Satsuki’s and Mei’s missing their ailing mother. If this instance of temporal manipulation is in the small scale, then time operates in rich and complex ways in the larger scale across a number of Ghibli films as well. Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday (1991) grafts Taeko’s memories as a ten-year-old into her present as a 27-year-old office worker, the integration of which provokes her mature self to wonder: ‘Perhaps the fifth-grade me was tagging along with a message for me to reflect and rethink my life.’ Tomomi Mochizuki’s Ocean Waves (1993) uses a narrative frame and flashbacks to relate its central protagonist Taku Morisaki’s Bildungsroman, with particular focus on his friendship with Yutaka Masuno and their mutual romantic interest in a new transfer student. Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997) is set in the Muromachi, a late medieval period of Japanese history, and sees the young prince Ashitaka on a long and perilous journey to the West to lift the curse upon him. At the end of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001), we learn that Chihiro’s adventure was not a dream, and that she and her parents had spent a long time in the spirit world, and we are prompted to speculate about how their own world might have changed while they were away. Gorō Miyazaki’s From Up on Poppy Hill (2011) productively employs a photo as a plot device both to link Umi’s and Shun’s stories with their fathers’ and to show the 223

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inseparability of these personal stories from the film’s larger social one of Japan healing after World War Two and the country’s preparation for hosting the 1964 Olympics. Finally, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013) offers a fictionalised biography of Jiro Horikoshi that spans from 1918 into World War Two. Taeko’s, Morisaki’s, Ashitaka’s, Chihiro’s, Umi’s, Shun’s and Jiro’s journeys of self-discovery, the implications of which affect these central characters as much as they do their companions, are related to us through the compression of long periods of story time into minutes of narrative time. Previous studies of Studio Ghibli’s films have tended to focus on their relation to Japanese cultural history or their aesthetic dimensions. This chapter, by contrast, offers, as a test case, a narratological reading of Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), arguing for the importance of temporal manipulations as a narrative technique, and for time as a recurring trope across Ghibli films. It demonstrates how time is used to engage and challenge viewers narratively and emotionally, making these films universally more popular and engaging.

Studio Ghibli and Animé Comparisons with Western animation are as inevitable as they are ultimately misleading, with animé constituting more than half of all theatrically-released Japanese films, and encompassing ‘everything that Western audiences are accustomed to seeing in live-action films – romance, comedy, tragedy [and] adventure.’1 There are various reasons for the pronounced importance of animé in Japanese culture. Art forms in Japan are broadly more visual than in Western societies, as is reflected in the ubiquity of manga, the similarly thematicallydiffuse twentieth-century visual art form roughly analogous to the comic strip, but far wider in its scope and appeal. A large proportion of animé is derived from manga. Another factor is the commercial dominance of imported Hollywood blockbusters, most of which are live-action. As Susan J. Napier observes, ‘it makes sense that filmmakers should put money and effort into an art form that does not directly compete with the Hollywood behemoth but that still appeals to a broad audience.’2 Some forms of animé are explicitly violent or pornographic, a fact which commonly provokes bemusement among Western audiences accustomed to a near-direct correlation between animation and family suitability. However, although the medium is

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accepted and consumed by all types of audiences in Japan, childorientated animé continues to dominate numerically.3 Television (both national and international) remains animé’s primary outlet, but the theatrical market is still formidable. Studio Ghibli remains the pre-eminent producer of film animé, with several of its productions ranking among the top ten most commercially successful Japanese films ever made, including Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke and Ponyo (2008). The global and universal popularity of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle – films which can be enjoyed by ‘the whole family’ – strengthened by Miyazaki’s status as a Japanese Spielberg,4 Ghibli’s vast merchandising operations (including a museum in Tokyo), and its documented arousal of inordinate levels of trust and loyalty among mass audiences, may invite comparisons with Disney.5 Indeed, Ghibli’s international success – with Spirited Away the only non-British or North American film to date to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature – owes much to the 1996 global distribution agreement between Disney and Ghibli distributor Tokuma Publishing. However, whilst Studio Ghibli has, since its inception in 1985, aligned itself more towards ‘family’ audiences than most animé producers, its films are still designed for a broader range of primary demographics than Disney’s films. They range from the more accessible fantastical ‘family’ films for which Miyazaki is best known (Castle in the Sky, 1986; Spirited Away; Howl’s Moving Castle) to the more challenging and adult-themed (Porco Rosso, Miyazaki, 1992; Pompoko, Takahata, 1994; Princess Mononoke); the charmingly whimsical and child-orientated (My Neighbour Totoro; Kiki’s Delivery Service, Miyazaki, 1989; Whisper of the Heart, Yoshifumi Kondō, 1995; The Cat Returns, Hiroyuki Morita, 2002) to the slow-paced existentialist (Fireflies and Only Yesterday). Furthermore, Ghibli’s aesthetics – neatly encapsulated by Cavallaro’s description of Miyazaki’s work as ‘characterised by stunning graphic richness, textual intricacy and scrupulous attention to the minutest and most unusual details’ – is unique.6 Like most animé, Ghibli’s work is primarily hand-drawn rather than computer-generated, separating it from an international animation market increasingly dominated by CGI. Ghibli’s worldwide popularity also underpins animé’s position as ‘a nexus point in global culture’.7 Napier calls it a ‘hybridised space’, while some Japanese commentators have referred to it as ‘mukokuseki’, or ‘stateless’.8 While not wholly negating such cultural readings, this chapter emphasises the politics of its core texts and their close relation to their narratological and thematic concerns.

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Fireflies and Castle had rather different commercial receptions. Fireflies was released in Japan in a double-bill with My Neighbour Totoro, and even though both films were well-received critically, the pairing was unprofitable, a fact which Dani Cavallaro attributes to its release outside the popular summer season, and Takahata to the incongruity of the doubling of Miyazaki’s whimsical fantasy with his own, far more downbeat, narrative.9 Fireflies’ commercial performance also suffers in comparison with Castle’s because it has never had an English dub. Castle grossed over $200 million globally, with Disney’s translation/dub, casting celebrities including Christian Bale, boosting its commercial appeal and affording it a kind of familiarity, even if the translation retains the original film’s meanings. Still, both films contributed significantly to Ghibli’s critical heritage, and its global reputation as a leading animator of hand-drawn illustrations. Typical of its output, they offer us two examples of films that manipulate time to raise questions about narration and form. Fireflies tells the story of a brother and sister in war-torn Japan during the final days of World War Two, while Castle follows Sophie’s quest to break a spell put on her by the Witch of the Waste that turned her into an old woman. The films share an interest in manipulating time as a means to explore how we relate and engage with the past. Fireflies conceals Seita’s story after he places some of his sister Setsuko’s ashes into a candy tin, and climbs down the hill, and before his own death in a train station concourse – a period that dates from sometime after Japan’s surrender on 2 September 1945 to Seita’s death on 21 September. The film’s lyrical style and its narrative structure emphasise psychological depth and show how memory is, with time, experienced and understood differently. By contrast, the Academy Award-nominated Castle places the rejuvenation and growing-up, respectively, of Sophie and Howl in the context of war to bring together the private and the public, and ultimately imagines, with the viewers, a new and more positive world order.

Temporality and Memory in Grave of the Fireflies Visually heavy in greens and greys and with plenty of shading and shadows (in contrast to the conventions of Hollywood animations), Fireflies opens with Seita (Tsutomu Tatsumi) telling us in voiceover: ‘September 21, 1945. That was the night I died.’ His spirit approaches his dead body, which is dirty and malnourished, clothed in rags and

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without shoes. Takahata opens out to a wider shot, and we see that Seita is in a train station, attracting the interest but not the sympathy of passersby. ‘Damn tramps’, complains one. ‘Disgusting!’ claims another. ‘Is he dead?’ wonders a third. ‘The Americans’ll be arriving any day now. It’s disgraceful, having these bums here!’ says someone, offering him food. He hears his sister, Setsuko (Ayano Shiraishi), saying ‘Mama…!’ and ponders, before his death, ‘What day is it?’ These initial frames of the film foreshadow its preoccupation with time – dates are mentioned repeatedly – and its narrative viewpoint: its focalisation principally from Seita’s perspective and in retrospect sutures us to his psychology. Fireflies, as Napier argues, participates in perpetuating a victim’s history, in which ‘the Japanese people were seen as helpless victims of a corrupt and evil conspiracy between their government and military’.10 She identifies, in the film, a sense that history ‘can never be escaped or transcended but [...] must be continually experienced as harrowing, painful, and relentlessly oppressive,’11 describing its time scheme as ‘an endless present punctuated by scenes of bombardment that numb the characters into miserable passivity.’12 If, on the one hand, the film (uncompromisingly for an animation) shows us the sufferings of Seita and Setsuko, on the other hand, its opening registers the deep antipathy felt towards Seita and the desire of the passersby to perform for the Americans and the world outside an image of a suffering-free, though defeated, Japan. The station cleaner’s observation, ‘another one’, and the shot of Seita’s corpse from another perspective to reveal other bodies, gesture towards the sheer number of homeless people like Seita who died in the station following the war’s end, and implicate and offer criticism of the passersby whose interest in the dying Seita never manifest to significant acts of sympathy or compassion, and who are much more driven to promote an unrealistic image of their nation. By opening his adaptation of Akiyuki Nosaka’s 1967 semi-autobiographical novel of the same title with Seita’s death, Takahata creates for the film a narrative structure that closes off the possibility of Seita’s and Setsuko’s survival, yet burrows ever deeper into their story and calls attention to the film’s narrative form. As Grave’s evocative opening suggests, the two characters go on a train journey, and we follow them, through time and memory. Owing to Seita being slightly older and more mature, his narrative voice shows greater awareness and comprehension of their sufferings than his little sister’s, and yet he prioritises Setsuko’s experiences over his

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Seita and Setsuko, the child protagonists/victims of Grave of

own. Early in the film, Setsuko loses one of her shoes, and when Seita promises to buy her better ones, she tells him that she has money. Pulling out her purse and emptying its contents on the ground, we see that she only has a few trinkets and coins. That Seita would affirm and encourage her by claiming, ‘Wow, you’re rich’, and make her giggle, show his ability to put aside his pressing concerns over their mother (Yoshiko Shinohara) in his commitment to make her happy. This becomes even more evident by his reticence over how badly injured their mother really was, her badly-bandaged body falling prey to flies and maggots, the helplessness of the doctor and her eventual death. Fireflies’ bifocal narration places emphasis on Seita’s process of remembering. The opening shows Seita’s body and his ghost, the latter of which stands out owing to its ‘distinctively unearthly, firefly-sprinkled red glow’.13 The ghost sequences frame the film: near the beginning, we see Seita and Setsuko brought together, while the film’s ending sees them together, and his telling her that it is ‘time for bed’. And yet, the two characters’ sitting on a low wall and looking, from afar, into the modern city (Kobe) emphasise its historicity. The story of the city may overlook stories like Seita’s and Setsuko’s, yet, as the film shows, our response to stories are never entirely the same. The wandering ghosts’ intrusions into the narrative allow Takahata to show us and to contrast Seita’s immediate and his subsequent response to the past. For Cavallaro,

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these scenes, together with the wordless montage of Setsuko after her death, enable Takahata ‘to disrupt linearity and create pauses for reflection’.14 After their mother’s death, Seita travels on a train to their distant aunt’s (Akemi Yamaguchi) home, where he and Setsuko are living, to deliver her ashes in a wooden box. The ghost Seita looks at them, with the ghost Setsuko resting on his knees, and we follow them as they get off the train and as they observe Seita’s return. This sequence reinforces the gravity of their mother’s tragedy, the weight that he carries in his reticence, and the import of this move both for himself and his sister. Perhaps more overtly, Takahata contrasts the responses of Seita the ghost and the experiencing Seita over his aunt’s decision to trade his mother’s kimonos for rice. Seita responds enthusiastically, which his aunt readily interprets as accepting the offer. However, Setsuko protests vehemently, and we see Seita holding her back. Seita the ghost, alone, reflects on this scene, and the camera closes up to his shutting his eyes and covering his ears from his sister’s protests. This scene precedes another flashback in which Seita thinks back to a happier time when their family had their picture taken. Even if the experiencing Seita is impressed by the promise of rice, the ghost Seita, who has knowledge of subsequent events, is understandably saddened by the loss of this material reminder of their mother, their aunt’s increasingly resentful behaviour and her taking advantage of them, and her contribution to his and Setsuko’s subsequent tragedies. Later, we see the ghosts of Seita and Setsuko running and watching, from a hilltop, their living counterparts in the refuge of the bomb shelter. The juxtaposition of these two sets of characters in these instances foreshadows their eventual demise, and, more pressingly, offers more mature viewers a different level of engagement. Takahata’s splitting of time shows us how history is subjective, and how we, in the processes of remembering and telling stories, prioritise events. Seita’s preoccupation lies with making Setsuko happy. In the refuge of their bomb shelter, after they leave their aunt’s home, they are plagued by mosquitoes. Seita tells his sister to hide under their net, drawing attention away from his own sufferings. Accordingly, Seita itemises to the doctor his sister’s symptoms of diarrhoea, prickly heat, and rashes – caused principally by malnutrition – and yet he never identifies his own, we strongly suspect, similar ailments. Despite the film’s adult thematics, it never excludes child audiences. In fact, producer Toshio Suzuki allegedly used the

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original novel’s perceived educational aspects to sell theatre tickets to schools.15 Through Setsuko, Takahata offers a much more complex child character than we might infer from her adorable image, and provides us with an analogue for thinking about the implied child viewer. Setsuko is much more perceptive than Seita or we, as the audience, might expect. She discerns his behaviour and reciprocates his attentiveness, despite her presumably limited ability to grasp the situation. In a much earlier scene, Setsuko may well have overheard a lady, given their proximity, when she was commending their aunt at the bomb shelter for her kindness in taking in the homeless children after they lost their mother. When Seita asks if Setsuko has got an itch after she scratches herself mournfully, she complains that it is hot and that she dislikes bomb shelters. However, it is only when she begins to make graves that she reveals that their aunt had told her that their mother was dead and buried, leading Seita to burst into tears. Here, the film incorporates yet another ghostly segment in red in which the camera shows us that, once again, he is lying to Setsuko when he tells her that their mother is buried in a beautiful grave under a great camphor tree, when really she is kept in a wooden box in the bomb shelter. For the first and only one of these narrative intrusions, the ghost Seita is absent, and yet we complete the thought process that the sequence suggests, sympathising with his decision to make Setsuko feel better, even if it means telling her another lie. Whether or not Setsuko is aware that their mother is buried close by is unclear, for she, too, reciprocates his attention. When Seita offers to withdraw their mother’s money from the bank to buy food, she tells him that she wants only him. Setsuko never presses her brother to apologise to their aunt, just as he never makes the offer: it was understood that that was not a possibility. By the end of the film, we learn that Seita put some of Setsuko’s ashes into the candy tin, and left the hill, never returning to the bomb shelter. The film’s closing images of Seita’s ghost reuniting with his sister recall its opening ones, when the contents of the candy tin were spilt after a station cleaner disposes of it, and when we see Seita’s and Setsuko’s ghosts for the first time. However, they do not bring us full circle. Seita looks out at a fully developed city at night, where the windows light up like fireflies. The link between fireflies and the windows of the modern city forcibly reminds us of the children’s exclusion from the national history of this living and breathing site. But this instance of looking is not bereft of hope. Indeed, it carries the possibility of seeing and remembering

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history more productively. The film’s conclusion with this instance of Seita looking forward into the future, furthermore, mimetically reminds us of its preoccupation with perspective and with memory, especially the processes of experiencing and narrating.

Ageing in Howl’s Moving Castle16 In some ways, the differences between Grave of the Fireflies and Howl’s Moving Castle could hardly be more pronounced. Whereas Fireflies is sombre in its tone, and its popularity, accordingly, limited to a coterie audience, Castle is fantastical, and was received in Japan with unprecedented enthusiasm – the film was seen by 1.1. million people on its opening weekend alone.17 Yet Fireflies’ preoccupation with interweaving the personal story with the national one is paralleled in Castle, a film that similarly engages with political questions that resonate for more mature viewers, even if it differs in visual style from Fireflies through its much wider colour scheme, extensive use of outlining, and even greater attention to details of shading. As in its source material, Diana Wynne Jones’s 1986 novel, Miyazaki’s film draws on and moves away from fairy tales. Jones’s novel begins by telling us of Sophie’s familial circumstances. ‘In the land of Ingary’, we read, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes. Sophie was the eldest of three sisters. She was not even the child of a poor woodcutter, which might have given her some chance of success. Her parents were well to do and kept a ladies’ hat shop in the prosperous town of Market Chipping.18 The story is set in a place sufficiently removed from ours to permit magical devices, and yet Jones’ narrator challenges a purely fantastical reading by drawing attention both to the known conventions of the fairy-tale story – characteristics familiar to the inhabitants of Ingary – and how Sophie undermines them. This double helix, of fantasy and its subversion, is translated in the film’s establishing shots of the wizard Howl’s (Christian Bale)19 moving castle strolling past a pastoral setting, and its introduction of its heroine: Sophie (Emily

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Mortimer and Jean Simmons) explains to her beautiful sister Lettie (Jena Malone) that Howl would not eat her heart because he ‘only does that to beautiful girls’. Sophie’s modesty here, her commitment to the hat shop because she is the eldest child and it is what their father would have wanted, and her reticence over what she wants – in short, her selflessness – align her closely with Cinderella. Miyazaki follows Jones in creating a highly self-conscious work of fantasy. Right from the film’s opening, we hear metallic sounds that belong to Howl’s walking castle. The moving structure, with its hybrid of ‘houses, cannons, and other desperate parts including ears and sorted junk’, is incongruous to the pastoral montage with which the film opens – as are the warplanes, from which the castle, we learn from the gossipy hat makers, is on the run. A central difference between Miyazaki’s adaptation and Jones’ novel lies in the film’s overlaying of its source story with one of war. This conversation between Howl and Calcifer (Billy Crystal), a fire demon who was once a dying star but who is now kept alive by Howl’s heart, is particularly telling for the light that it sheds on the film’s understanding and treatment of war, our responses to it, and its imprint on us: Howl:

This war is terrible [pause] They’ve bombed from the southern coast to the northern border. It’s all in flames now. Calcifer: I can’t stand the fire in gunpowder [pause] Those guys have absolutely no manners. Howl: My own kind attacked me today. Calcifer: Who, the Witch of the Waste? Howl: No, some hack wizards who turned themselves into monsters for the king. Calcifer: Those wizards are going to regret doing that [pause] They’ll never change back into humans. Howl: After the war, they won’t recall they ever were human. Here, Miyazaki contrasts Calcifer with the mass-produced and intrusive fire of gunpowder, and the heartless Howl with the wizards who, through their allegiance to the king, lost their humanity. As Jones claims, Miyazaki ‘crammed the story full of flying machines and war scenes on the very thin basis that the King in my book was planning a war’.20 Despite the generation to which Jones

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and Miyazaki belong, they differ in their treatments of war through art: Miyazaki and I were both children in World War Two and we seem to have gone opposite ways in our reactions to it. I tend to leave the actual war out (we all know how horrible wars are), whereas Miyazaki (who feels just the same) has his cake and eats it, representing both the nastiness of a war and the exciting effects of a big bombing raid.21 The formal and visual aesthetics of Howl’s Moving Castle – and of Miyazaki’s earlier film, Castle in the Sky – speaks to the centrality of steampunk as a genre of Japanese children’s and family films. War infiltrates into all aspects of civilian life: flying kayaks and other warplanes distribute propaganda; tanks and soldiers in uniforms abound; Sophie’s mother’s hat is decorated with cannons; their home and town empty out with increased bombing; and the cynical Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall) responds to a news report that ‘we’ have ‘won’, ‘Only idiots believe what they read in the paper’. As Howl tells Sophie, it makes no difference whether the planes that destroy his ‘secret garden’ – the idyllic scenes of his youth – belong to their side or the enemy’s. The war between two (never fully differentiated) neighbouring kingdoms, superficially over a missing prince, provides a setting for Sophie’s paradoxical rejuvenation through ageing, and Howl’s growing up. At the start of both the novel and the film, Sophie is prematurely aged by the Witch of the Waste. In her original form, Sophie complicates the familiar animé figure of the shōjo, the adolescent/teen female protagonist that embodies, as Napier puts it, ‘a certain kind of liminal identity between child and adult’ in its parallel eroticisation and ‘potential for unfettered change and excitement that is far less available to Japanese males, who are caught in the network of demanding workforce responsibilities’.22 Ghibli shōjos Kiki from Kiki’s Delivery Service and Haru from The Cat Returns typify the figure with both their vitality and their stories that explore the psychological complexities that come with adulthood. Kiki leaves home at 13, and makes her own way in the world by becoming a (benign) witch. Meanwhile, Haru overcomes her propensities for the feline/woman identification, and looks to the good cats for help in a world of realpolitik and danger. Sophie, by contrast, begins the film as an inactive, retiring figure, as befits her metamorphic identity. After her transformation, she

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Figure 13-2

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The steampunk-inspired iconography of Howl’s Moving Castle

comforts her aged reflection in a mirror: ‘Don’t worry, old thing [...]. You look quite healthy. Besides, this is much more like you really are’. Jones’ Sophie sees her grey dress as ‘quite suitable’ (33) to her new elderliness, while Miyazaki’s Sophie similarly finds that the Witch’s curse matched her age with her behaviour and lifestyle, the screenplay introducing her as ‘a pretty 18-year-old girl who acts as if she old and plain’.23 The morning following her transformation, Sophie reflects on her mirrored self: ‘This isn’t so bad, now is it? [pause] You’re still in pretty good shape [tiny pause] And your clothes finally suit you’. Yet, paradoxically, Sophie’s physical transformation pushes her to become more resourceful, and more adventurous – indeed, younger. After she asks Turnip (Crispin Freeman), the scarecrow, to find her a place to stay, and he departs, Sophie muses to herself: ‘I seem to have become quite cunning in my old age’. Castle thus reflects and negotiates anxieties concerning Japan’s ageing population (over

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20 per cent of the population are aged above 65). By showing that Sophie is empowered and not rendered weak and enfeebled by this curse, the film both valorises and makes acceptable, for the young viewer, this process in one’s life. Sophie’s narrative is not divorced from the film’s war theme, and the private and the public, as in Fireflies, are inseparable. Howl confides to her that the Witch of the Waste is searching for his castle, and admits his central flaw: ‘I am such a big coward, all I do is hide [pause] And all of this magic’s just to keep everyone away [turns head] I can’t stand how scared I am.’ The Witch of the Waste, he confesses, pursues him because he had once thought her beautiful and had since rejected her. Through free association, Howl refers not only to his private dealings with the Witch, but his more public ones with the king and his constant warfare. Sophie sighs and urges him to take responsibility: ‘Give [the king] a piece of your mind [pause] Tell him this war is pointless [...] And you refuse to take part in it.’ However, as Sophie learns from her confrontation with Madame Suliman (Blythe Danner), his teacher and the king’s head sorceress, Howl’s fears are well founded. His refusal to participate in the war brings about graver dangers, and through her warning to Sophie, the film offers the young viewer criticism of complacency and passivity: ‘If Howl reports to me and vows to use his magic to serve the kingdom, I will show him how to break from his demon. If not, I’ll strip him of all his powers’. Whereas the Witch of the Waste’s magic provokes Sophie’s rejuvenation, Suliman’s threats invite Howl (and the audience) to take a stand and ‘to grow up’. Sophie’s confrontation with Suliman is indicative both of her newfound courage and her ability to take active responsibility. When Sophie asks Howl why he made her pretend to be his mother and meet Suliman, Howl explains how she has inspired him to be braver: ‘Knowing you’d be there gave me the courage to show up [pause] That woman terrifies me – I can’t face her on my own [leans in to Sophie] You saved me, Sophie. I was in big trouble back there.’ Howl’s behaviour here may be half-mocking and at least slightly flirtatious, but for the remainder of the film, he assumes a more responsible role in both his personal and his public dealings. He agrees to the Witch of the Waste’s offer of ‘a nice, long, heart-toheart chat’, and thus, surprises her into admitting: ‘How unlike you, Howl, not running away anymore’. Howl reveals that his resolution stems from his desire to protect Sophie. He is right when, after surveying Turnip the scarecrow, he observes: ‘It seems everyone in this

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family’s got problems.’ The film’s resolution brings together Sophie, Howl, Markl (Josh Hutcherson), Calcifer, the Witch of the Waste, and Suliman’s dog, Heen, under the same roof, and this family unit provides us with a more positive way of thinking about the film’s ending. By this point, Sophie has broken the spell on Turnip, who is revealed to be the missing prince. The Witch of the Waste asks him to return home, ‘and tell your king to stop this dumb war’. If we never learn who turned the prince into a scarecrow in the first place (an omission suggesting that he is only an excuse for the war), we are even less certain that his return will ensure peace between the warring factions. The oath that wizards like Howl have sworn is still very much active and, indeed, the screenplay informs us that peace is postponed: ‘The war won’t come to an end immediately, but Sophie and Howl embark on their new life together. Sophie’s and Howl’s castle, now reborn, flaps its wings across the clear blue sky.’24 As Cavallaro convincingly argues, ‘Madam Suliman puts an end to the war for the most cogent, if also the most disarmingly plain, reason: namely, the fact that the war is idiotic […] This is a way of suggesting that the very opposite choice – the decision to start a war – could just as simply be made at any point in time, no less unexpectedly and no less capriciously’.25 Sophie’s and Howl’s new familial unit, emphatically suggested by Miyazaki’s changes to Jones’ novel, is more positive than the superficial and never-quite-instituted peace between the warring states. In the novel, the elderly Sophie sees Michael (Markl’s equivalent) as ‘the merest child, only a little older than [her sister] Martha’ (42), although, as we learn, he is really 15, and the Witch dies by the novel’s conclusion. Miyazaki’s creation of a much younger Markl and the integration of these disparate characters into a family unit – replicated metaphorically through the revitalised castle with its many miscellaneous parts – make Howl’s and Sophie’s home a multi-generational space championing mutual reciprocity: the final scene sees the castle rebuilt as a flying ship, with Markl playing with Heen, the Witch comfortably reading on a chair, and Howl and Sophie kissing. The family unit provides a universally-intelligible analogy for our (and the film’s) thinking about the nation as a unit that celebrates difference, offering us a more positive model for imagining national and international relations. If Seita no longer views his and Setsuko’s story in the same way as he was when he experienced it, and Howl is not quite the same Welshman with mud-coloured hair, an out-of-work PhD in

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a worn, shabby, and baggy outfit, in the Wales of Jones’ novel, we are hardy the same viewers having lived and relived these films.

Postscript The temporal manipulations in Ghibli films and their attendant effects on the audience are informing presences on many other Japanese animations. Mahiro Maeda, for instance, opens Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (2004–5), his 24-episode adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 novel, in a carnival set in Luna, a city in another planet, and one in which, in keeping with Dumas’s Rome, ‘all your desires can be fulfilled, no matter what they are’. Maeda creates narrative interest in young protagonists Alfred and Franz (Jun Fukuyama and Daisuke Hirakawa, respectively), and sutures us, as viewers, into a point of identification with them. If the carnival is instrumental to Edmond’s (Jôji Nakata) – the titular count’s – revenge plot, and we witness its execution largely from his perspective in Dumas’ novel, then Maeda’s narrative choices position us so that we are learning about Edmond with Albert and Franz. By opening the series in medias res, we, too, fall prey to Edmond’s deception, and sympathise with Albert and Franz more fully. This temporal distortion and the focus on Albert spur us to rethink Dumas’ novel, while exploring its broader implications about the relations between pleasure, ethics, and sympathy. These filmic projects both resist and offer commentary on many of their more mainstream American contemporaries, animations that are primarily child-orientated. Ghibli films encourage our emotional investment, enabling child viewers, in the case of Fireflies, to engage with them alongside adults, and in Castle’s case, enabling adults to enjoy them alongside children. By exploring the relations between narrative perspective and genre, they question and redefine the qualities that make a children’s film.

Notes I thank Philip Horne for many kinds of help over many years. Parts of this chapter were presented at the Natures 2010 conference in La Sierra University. I thank members of the audience for their insightful responses. For their encouragement and their votes of confidence, I am indebted to the Canadian Centennial Scholarship Fund; the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and University College London.

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1. Susan J. Napier, Animé from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, 2nd edn. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 7. 2. Ibid., p. 19. 3. Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy, ‘Kids’ Animé’ in The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917 (Berkeley, California: Stone Bridge Press, 2006), pp. 333–34. 4. Dani Cavallaro, The Animé Art of Hayao Miyazaki (Jefferson: McFarland, 2006), p. 5. 5. Clements and McCarthy, ‘Ratings and Box Office’ in The Anime Encyclopedia (pp. 527–28). 6. Cavallaro, The Animé Art of Hayao Miyazaki, p. 1. 7. Napier, Animé from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, p. 22. 8. Ibid. 9. Cavallaro, The Animé Art of Hayao Miyazaki, p. 77. 10. Napier, Animé from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, p. 218. 11. Ibid., p. 221. 12. Ibid. 13. Dani Cavallaro, Animé and the Art of Adaptation: Eight Famous Works from Page to Screen (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), p. 279. 14. Ibid., p. 30. 15. Clements and McCarthy, ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ in The Anime Encyclopedia (pp. 248–49). 16. Howl’s Moving Castle’s stage directions are from Miyazaki’s screenplay, printed in The Art of Howl’s Moving Castle (San Francisco: VIZ Media, LLC, 2005). 17. Clements and McCarthy, ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ in The Anime Encyclopedia (pp. 288–89). 18. Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle (London: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 9. Subsequent page references are given in text. 19. The characters’ and actors’ names given for Howl’s Moving Castle are taken from Disney’s English-language dub, rather than from the original Japanese version. 20. The Art of Howl’s Moving Castle. 21. Ibid. 22. Napier, Animé from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, pp. 148–49. 23. The Art of Howl’s Moving Castle, p. 210. 24. Ibid., p. 202. 25. Cavallaro, The Animé Art of Hayao Miyazaki, p. 171.

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Dark Films for Dark Times: Spectacle, Reception and the Textual Resonances of the Contemporary Hollywood Fantasy Film Fran Pheasant-Kelly

As reflections of iconic cultural moments and contemporaneous socio-political scenarios, fantasy films have long been prominent in cinema’s history, but the release of George Lucas’s Star Wars in 1977 marked a particular turning point in the genre’s development, namely fantasy’s capacity to attract large-scale audiences. In fact, Star Wars still ranks at 46th position in all-time worldwide box office figures.1 This trend continued with the successes of Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and the Indiana Jones trilogy (1981–89), and became even more noticeable with the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001) and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Chris Columbus, 2001). Indeed, the latter films went on to contribute to two of the highest grossing franchises ever. Reasons attributed to the particular success of these two films lay primarily in claims for the relief that they provided following the September 2001 attacks in New York. As one reviewer put it, ‘the first Harry Potter movie opened two months and five days after 9/11. All that first movie had to do was show up and not stink and offer a welcome escape from the sight of the World Trade Center collapsing, over and over again.’2 Kathy Smith also suggests that ‘in the wake of the realisation of events previously confined to disaster movies, the global audience looked for a different kind of fantasy into which to escape, a “guaranteed” fantasy, the reality of which was securely beyond imagination.’3 At the same time, 2001 proved remarkable for marking another significant moment in the vicissitudes of fantasy, 239

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namely, the point from which it has continuously dominated box office rankings, to the extent that almost all of the current top box office entries are fantasies released after 9/11. Partly, this turn to fantasy has been encouraged by a postmillennial affinity for franchises, attractive because they exploit readymade audiences and therefore important in a recession-hit economy. Because many franchises derive from either established literary sources or other pre-existing cultural vehicles (such as the Marvel Comic books), they automatically command a broader audience demographic. Fantasy’s ubiquity has further resulted from technological advances, with refinements in digital cinematography and motion-capture technology lending themselves to the genre’s limitless possibilities for fantastic settings and characters. Specifically, the development of digital high-definition cameras, the first of these being Sony’s F900 in 2000, and enhanced postprocessing techniques have facilitated more credible and spectacular visual effects. Indeed, digital techniques have expressly enabled the success of the animated fantasy. Additionally, Colin Campbell suggests there is a heightened affinity for fantastic narratives in Western culture arising from a turn to Eastern traditions and philosophies over the past 50 years.4 The generic hybridism of recent fantasy films further extends their market potential, whilst a postmodern inclination for increasingly complex plotlines also attracts a broader audience. As a result of the escalating primacy of fantasy (including animation), audiences of the family film and the fantasy genre have gradually converged, to the extent that the Hollywood ‘family’ film has become almost synonymous with the fantasy genre. Yet, despite Smith’s claims for such films providing ‘relief’, and their BBFC classification targeted at a family demographic, many fantasies of the past decade depart from the ‘Disneyfied’ scenarios traditionally associated with the genre and instead adopt a gritty realism and dark tone, a sensibility pervasive across much post-millennial film. Even Harry Potter’s magical world becomes a progressively darker place with each successive film. As one reviewer notes of the fourth Potter film, The Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, 2005): ‘Throughout, there is a sense of darkness pressing in from the outside, ever present but unseen, exterior menace, interior confusion’,5 while Vicky Wilson contends that ‘The Order of the Phoenix [David Yates, 2007] provided a chilling allegorical portrait of Blairite Britain’.6 In fact, even with the promise of family entertainment suggested by their classification, a theme

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of death pervades many top-grossing fantasy narratives. Certainly, nearly all of the most commercially lucrative fantasy franchises tell of traumatic events, and, regardless of their fantastic and/or magical elements, invariably entail mortal tragedy. In this respect, their visual, narrative and thematic elements commonly evoke 9/11 and/ or the war on terror, with these allusions mediated through spectacular imagery to the extent that scenes of dramatic destruction entailing collapsing edifices and falling bodies have become common currency. At times, alongside lingering images of death and resurrection, such scenes of destruction are liable to slow-motion effects, surreal visuals, and sound distortion, these characteristics typifying Barbara Klinger’s description of the ‘arresting image’ (to be discussed shortly).7 Klinger claims that such strategies enhance the emotional intensity of a scene, and even though some of the melancholic images found in recent fantasy films may be more nebulous in their links to 9/11, the way in which they are projected still promotes vague feelings of disquiet. Arguably, therefore, spectator engagement operates (at least partially) through tragedy as spectacle, which may affect family audiences in different ways. For younger viewers, the various displays associated with anthropomorphism and performance of magic have obvious attractions, while the latter’s transformative power, spiritual associations and conjuring of an afterlife evident in a common theme of resurrection may also unconsciously offer alternative meanings for adult viewers in a post-9/11 context. Utilising Klinger’s concept of the ‘arresting image’8 to discuss their spectacular visuals, this essay analyses a range of non-Disney Hollywood fantasy films, including Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008), the Harry Potter series (2001–11), Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Michael Bay, 2011) and Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–3), and claims that such imagery engages spectators through unconscious associations and memories concerned with its post-millennial contexts. Taking account of scholarly and critical reception, it concludes that fantasy is not only meaningful for children in terms of simplistic good-over-evil paradigms, but also chimes with adult audiences in respect of its distinctive post-9/11 inflections. In sum, the successful repackaging of the family film as fantasy involves a combination of 9/11 inferences, marketing opportunities, commercial strategies that adopt the adaptation/franchise model, and technological advances that facilitate spectacular visual effects.

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Fantasy and the Family Film Regardless of fantasy’s doom-laden connotations, supporting signs of congruence between fantasy and family films are evident in viewing figures and box office trends, with the new millennium witnessing, first, an overall increase in the production of films suitable for child or family viewing, and second, a rise in their commercial success. Peter Krämer sees this drive towards family-orientated entertainment as an initiative aimed to capture the baby boomer generation,9 while David Butler draws attention to marketable aspects of the fantasy film that target family audiences, and hence increase revenues.10 To this end, many fantasy films are rated as PG/PG-13 and dominate all-time worldwide box office figures.11 Moreover, these rankings for family-suitable films correlate closely with all-time worldwide box office figures for all age-groups, with fantasy and animation dominating both sets of data. The same data reveals a similar market share of 14 per cent across all age groups (except for the 25–39 demographic, which accounts for 24 per cent, perhaps reflecting the singles market) suggesting that a significant proportion of child viewers were accompanied by a parent. In general, as Noel Brown12 observes, the fantasy film has taken centre stage in family film viewing. Indeed, in his study of the Hollywood family film, Brown points out that ‘[t]he producers of such films employ a range of textual and non-textual strategies in an effort to engage mass audiences.’13 Brown goes on to state that ‘the success of a contemporary, mainstream Hollywood family film is measured largely in terms of its ability to transcend such audience divisions as age, gender, class, religion and ethnicity.’14 In short, their narratives employ commonly upheld beliefs and paradigms, Brown contending that these unifying aspects ‘almost invariably convey certain ideological values [...] attractively packaged in a narrative that fulfils certain structural expectations (e.g., a happy ending)’.15 At the same time, he recognises the diverse generic spectrum of the family film, whilst acknowledging difficulties in its definition, but contends that ‘it is socially accepted – often implicitly – that a family film must possess broad moral and thematic suitability and broad demographic appeal [original emphasis]’.16 Because it targets both children and adults, Brown describes the postmillennial fantasy family film as ‘kidult’. Yet, referring to the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Shrek franchises, he still differentiates between them as family entertainment: ‘Whilst all three franchises

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evidence the now-standard Hollywood hybridisation of classical “family” and “kidult” entertainment characteristics, each attempts to mobilise a slightly different audience base.’17 Brown further notes that these films have uplifting elements and disengage from local political and socio-cultural allusions, though he suggests that ‘references to international political currents – such as the climate change allegory in Avatar – remain acceptable, as they trade on global (rather than simply domestic) matters of importance.’18 Thomas Elsaesser also discusses Avatar in relation to its wide audience appeal (it is currently the highest-grossing film of all time) and postulates a concept of ‘access for all’19 to account for its groundbreaking success. In part, he acknowledges that Avatar’s intense marketing campaign was also responsible for its phenomenal achievements, though he states, ‘another major cause (or effect?) of the film’s visibility and success was the astonishingly different, in fact contradictory and even incompatible, access points for viewer identification which Avatar managed to combine, or rather, compress into a single storyline and textual system’.20 According to Elsaesser, these access points were precisely calibrated and encompassed ‘divergences and seeming contradictions [that] were programmed into the film from the beginning, as part of the Cameron concept’,21 a process that he labels as ‘cognitive dissonance’,22 and which supports his concept of Cameron as a ‘post-auteur author’. In other words, although Cameron presents the film to a wide audience through diverse factors (rather than focus on selected elements, as one might associate with the concept of the auteur), he nonetheless ‘exercise[s] control over the spectrum of reception’.23 There is therefore broad agreement between Elsaesser’s ‘access for all’ concept and Brown’s notion of the ‘kidult’ film, with both concurring that the muted political substance of fantasy films makes them more amenable on a global scale. While these approaches offer valid points of explanation for the diverse audiences of recent fantasy films, a third possibility (as discussed earlier) addresses fantasy’s new millennial contexts. Despite the claims of Elsaesser and Brown for the generalised political tones of Avatar, an alternative position might focus on the fact that a significant aspect of the film is its reflection of 9/11 and the war on terror. This particular ‘entry point’ for audiences, however, is not unique to Avatar but occurs consistently amongst other fantasy films released after 9/11, and, as in Avatar, is made accessible through (though often disguised as) scenes of spectacular destruction.

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Spectacle, Fantasy and the Arresting Image Ostensibly, therefore, in the guise of spectacle and often mediated through Klinger’s aforementioned visual strategies, family fantasies since 9/11 offer quite specific pleasures deriving, first, from narratives entailing simple good-over-evil paradigms. Second, their inevitable portrayals of disaster (which repeatedly resemble 9/11), presented as spectacle, mobilise, while mitigating, associated negative emotions by their reconfiguration through Klinger’s concept of the arresting image. Such fantasy films captivate younger audiences (and adults too) through their trade in spectacular displays of magic, comic performance, supernaturalism, and super-heroism, but engage older viewers through reframing the negative connotations of their socio-cultural and/or political contexts – in other words, their regular representations of death and destruction (often interspersed with equally spectacular landscapes and cityscapes) provide pleasure through fantastic display. Not only are these portrayals becoming more obviously reflective of 9/11 and (frequently critical of) the war on terror with the passage of time, but also involve an escalating degree of scale. Increasingly, in fact, fantasy is dominated by sublime aesthetics, thereby engendering feelings of terror and awe or, as Edmund Burke describes, an ‘astonishment’, an ‘emotion in the mind’ arising from images of greatness that have ‘terror for [their] basis’.24 If the 9/11 terrorists took their cue from Hollywood disaster movies that preceded 2001, this tendency for sublime visuals may, in turn, be inspired by the attack on the Twin Towers, which was also described as a sublime event,25 and is facilitated through new digital technologies. Hence, one might argue that, rather than enabling multiple points of access, the spectacular aspect of fantasy film provides a ‘unifying’ single point of access because of its inherent ability to accommodate diverse pleasures – either in simple aesthetic terms, or in the way that it fetishises destruction, and thereby represents tragedy as pleasurable display. Indeed, as Elsaesser notes, there is an ‘affinity between trauma and fetish (“nothing there”), which in turn implies a disjuncture between seeing and knowing.’26 In short, spectacle both draws attention to, and covers over its register of trauma. In this regard, an argument for the spectacularising of 9/11 and the war on terror corresponds with Carl Plantinga’s discussion of disaster in relation to Titanic (James Cameron, 1997), whereby he, too, claims that negative emotions are reframed through aesthetic devices designed to elicit pleasure.27 However, Plantinga argues that

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Klinger’s concept of the arresting image does not consider the narrative positioning of the arresting image and the meaning derived therefrom, instead contending that such arresting images gain much of their power from their narrative context. That is, they are not merely random images with affective force, but are images that gain force primarily through their meaning in a story, and only secondarily through personal memories and associations.28 Arguably, however, there are occasions when single images or short sequences can/do elicit emotion – obvious examples include the insertion of real footage into fictional films, while more obscure instances may involve a vaguer melancholic ambience. A typical example of the latter occurs in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski, 2003), when an underwater low-camera angle looks up towards sharks gliding through submerged wrecks (with their connotations of death) to provoke morose feelings. A more definitive case may be made for the emotional impact created through imagery that replicates 9/11. This is because 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror have become media events, and therefore any semblances may affect the viewer through the mechanics of memory (as in the case of inserted real footage) – specifically, flashbulb memory, a term coined by Roger Brown and James Kulik in 1977, and which, Richard McNally explains, ‘denote[s] a vivid, detailed recollection of the circumstances when one first received the news of an emotionally shocking event [...] Possessing almost perceptual clarity, flashbulb memories seem unforgettably engraved on the mind and resistant to decay.’29 In other words, an image may trigger emotions in ways separate from and very different to the effects of the narrative itself, even though narrative structure and its tenor have an undisputed capacity to elicit emotion. In Plantinga’s example of Titanic, he suggests that negative emotions are reframed to produce pleasurable sensations not only through aesthetic devices, but also by a narrative refocusing on romantic love. This melodramatic reconstitution through a romance paradigm certainly invests Titanic’s narrative with emotional potency as much as the memory/image. Yet, even if Plantinga’s premise holds true for the disaster in Titanic (which, although a real event, was not witnessed by contemporary audiences), then this is different to 9/11. The mediated nature of 9/11 triggers specific (and more recent) recollections in relation to the aircraft

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Figure 14-1

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The destruction of the Hometree in Avatar

crashing into the buildings, scenes of falling bodies, smoke billowing from the World Trade Center, and the collapse of the Towers. In a related way, frequent news footage of soldiers and amputees returning from Iraq and Afghanistan has promoted another set of disquieting flashbulb memories. Accordingly, imagery that resembles the aforementioned scenes, either consciously or coincidentally, but which is depicted as pleasurable display, may provoke emotional engagement. The argument presented here is that this mode of depiction involves flashbulb memories potentiated by strategies of the ‘arresting image’. Klinger adopts this term in relation to imagery in The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993), explaining how the film’s various cinematographic and editing strategies have the ability to elicit or enhance emotional responses in spectators. In these instances, Klinger describes how ‘the forward motion of the narrative slows down or temporarily halts, allowing the spectacle to fully capture our attention’.30 She also notes how ‘[t]he arresting image may have an additionally unusual temporal status, often appearing outside of time in a fantasy or dream-like dimension’.31 Additionally, ‘[a]rresting images are often generated by juxtaposing incongruous elements’,32 thereby conferring a surreal quality, whilst the narrative’s temporality tends to distort. These devices are common to the fantasy film because of its fundamentally unreal nature, but simultaneously facilitate the temporal lengthening of spectacular sequences, thereby further fetishising such scenes. Typical instances include the fire-fighter scene in The Dark Knight, the destruction of the Hometree in Avatar, the skyscraper destruction in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and the devastation of Hogwarts in

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Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (David Yates, 2011), with commonalities including themes of death, and visual details that resemble 9/11 in scenes of sublime spectacle. At times, this association is oblique, whereas other occasions provide a direct reflection of new millennial events. For example, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which currently ranks at sixth place in all-time worldwide box office, explicitly references 9/11 in its imagery of falling bodies and burning skyscrapers. If the tripods of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) and the destruction of the Hometree in Avatar provide examples of the sublime, then Dark of the Moon supersedes this in its depiction of ‘The Driller’, a colossal robotic structure that penetrates and destroys a skyscraper.

Representations of 9/11 and Arresting Imagery Thus, even though the fantasy genre intrinsically lends itself to certain 9/11 analogies – human flight and tropes of falling are common features of fantasy – a distinctive 9/11 iconography has emerged that is often mediated through spectacular and/or arresting imagery. One of the clearest examples occurs in The Dark Knight, a film that is saturated with 9/11 visuals within a narrative of terrorism. Its plot tells of Batman’s (Christian Bale) resort to tactics of torture in response to the Joker’s actions (the Joker, played by Heath Ledger, is portrayed as a terrorist figure). In one instance, following a bomb blast that kills Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and injures Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckart), the visual pace first speeds up as the Joker sways in a maniacal fashion, and then slackens in an otherwise action-packed, rapidly-edited sequence. The sound temporarily disappears as the camera then slowly pans across a scene that typifies Klinger’s notion of the arresting image. Here, fire-fighters are silhouetted against a blazing illuminated backdrop of burning buildings and broken girders, with the absence of sound accentuating its dramatic and emotional resonances. The contrast between the fast-motion visuals of the Joker and the subsequent slow-pan of the fire-fighters imbues the sequence with surreal qualities and arrests the narrative flow, the image clearly reflecting the aftermath of the Twin Towers’ attacks. The reference is not an isolated one, since the entire film is replete with thematic parallels to 9/11 and spectacular visuals that refer to Ground Zero. Even the film’s theatrical release poster featured a skyscraper with its upper floors ablaze.

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In a similar way, the destruction of the Hometree (an enormous tree inhabited by the Na’vi, the indigenous people of the planet Pandora) by the US military in Avatar is rendered as spectacular and mesmerising. Amid a fast-paced, rapidly-edited action sequence, the narrative momentum again transiently decelerates – the first visual of the sequence comprises a number of aircraft hovering to the foreground and the Hometree in the background (its colossal height, doubling in an adjacent tree, and billowing smoke already reminiscent of the burning Twin Towers). A slow pan across the blazing tree cuts to a close-up of protagonist Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) as he gazes upwards (as do the Na’vi), reminding viewers of the upward gazes of onlookers during 9/11 seen in news bulletins and video footage. A rapid zoom into the tree’s base discloses its splintering columns before it then crashes down in slowmotion. Accompanied by emotionally-stirring, sombre music, the aircraft fly off-screen to leave the blazing spectacle of the tree on-screen. The form of the severed trunk is distinctly reminiscent of the broken steel remains of the Twin Towers, while, like The Dark Knight, there are thematic and visual references to 9/11 throughout.33 In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the ‘Driller’ (a colossal, computer-generated entity whose metallic writhing tentacles have a drilling capability) pierces a skyscraper, drilling through in an identical manner to the aeroplanes that we witnessed crashing into the Twin Towers. An extreme low-angle camera perspective enhances the sublime effects, and again mimics the viewpoint of onlookers in the Twin Towers’ attacks. Extreme high-angle camera viewpoints also replicate the perspective of those trapped in the Towers. Slow-motion effects enhance the representation of the collapsing

Figure 14-2 The destructive capabilities of the Driller in Transformers: Dark of the Moon

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skyscraper as sublime spectacle, while inter-cutting between lowangle shots and long-shots further contributes towards its sublime display. Shattering sheets of glass, papers streaming downward and falling bodies accentuate the Twin Towers’ analogy, while extreme low-angle images of smoke billowing from the skyscraper directly replicate those seen in footage of the 9/11 attacks. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 also intimates its post9/11 contexts in numerous ways. Following the terrorism-inspired visuals of The Half Blood Prince (David Yates, 2009), the final film of the franchise entails a speech by Harry Potter’s (Daniel Radcliffe) friend and fellow student, Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis) regarding the fallen heroes in their battle against Voldemort: ‘People die every day, friends, family, we lost Harry tonight, but he’s still with us, so’s Fred, Remus, Tonks, all of them. They didn’t die in vain’, he proclaims, his words likely chiming with audiences in respect of the contemporaneous war in Afghanistan. The finale comprises a sequence between Harry and Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), which first unfolds rapidly, with fast-paced editing as the two become entangled and fly through the air, appearing as a streak of black swirling smoke. The sequence then slows down narratively, and unfolds in slow-motion. A cut to long-shot subsequently conveys the battle between Harry and Voldemort as spectacle, with incandescent, brightly-coloured flames issuing from their wands. The action continues in slow-motion as first Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) attack Nagini, Voldemort’s pet snake, before Neville decapitates it, the snake disintegrating into swirls of black smoke that spray out towards the camera in slow-motion. The sound becomes highly distorted and, overall, surreal effects arise from the visuals – for example, an edit from long-shot of Neville with his wand issuing black smoke is juxtaposed with an extreme close-up, side-on shot of Voldemort – and the reverberating screams that echo around during the scene. The finale is dominated by the spectacular vibrant colours emitted from Voldemort’s and Harry’s wands before Voldemort disintegrates into blackened ash, this also filmed in extreme slowmotion and accompanied by surreal distorted acoustics. The tendency to black smoke, ash and billowing clouds evident in this sequence are not unique to the film, but recur throughout the series, as well as being conspicuous in other fantasy films. A final illustrative example can be seen in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, when the Fellowship come under attack from the Balrog, a gigantic

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fire-breathing demon. The bridge across which the group must pass on the journey to Mount Doom is a narrow, precipitous edifice which is unstable and liable to collapse. The sequence features extreme overhead-camera angles that observe pieces of the bridge falling down into a seemingly bottomless chasm. The group must jump across one of the gaps in the bridge to reach safety and evade the pursuing Balrog. Extreme low-angles are directed upwards to view the bridge collapsing in slow-motion, and these intercut with extreme overhead viewpoints. There is, therefore, a focus on sublime, collapsing edifices, and extreme imperilment. Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) and Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) are then forced to leap across the gulf in the bridge before a huge section collapses, leaving Gandalf, the grey wizard (Ian McKellen), to fend off the Balrog. The latter is a demonic flaming creature and appears composed entirely of fire. It lashes out and causes Gandalf to fall into the chasm below, the sequence then cutting to slow-motion, and sound becoming distorted. Even though the production was filmed prior to 2001, its spectacular visuals and the way in which the group are forced to jump to evade the flaming Balrog are bound to resonate with audiences who, only weeks before, had witnessed a real version of similar events. Akin to the other films discussed here, this is only one of many resonances with 9/11 and, even though in this case it is a coincidental rather than conscious alignment, it nonetheless illustrates how the digitally-generated spectacle of the Balrog mobilises emotion and fetishises trauma.

Scholarly and Critical Reception Aside from these spectacular elements that directly resemble the Twin Towers’ attacks, critics and scholars agree that there has been a shift in visual culture, ranging from differences in the horror genre, with the development of ‘torture-porn’,34 through to revisions of the combat narrative, action film, western, fantasy, and documentary. Additionally, scholarly analysis of post-9/11 fantasy identifies some less obvious reflections. For example, Douglas Kellner suggests that the execution scenes at the outset of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Verbinski, 2007), are a chilling reminder of Bush-Cheney administration “justice”. Scores of scruffy people are hanged, presumably without trial,

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because they have been accused of consorting with pirates. This is an obvious coding of pirates as terrorists and of the established regime as murderous and oppressive.35 In the same volume, Kellner aligns the pre-emptive actions of Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002) with the Bush-Cheney administration.36 Spielberg’s War of the Worlds also comes under scrutiny for its allusions to 9/11. As David Holloway explains, its visual iconography ‘offered a tapestry of sign-posted references to famous images of 9/11’.37 He highlights the sublime aspects of the imagery, marking the trend towards enormity discussed earlier, and contends that More than any other Hollywood film of the Bush era, War of the Worlds tapped and exploited popular anxiety about terrorism, and helped reproduce it in the process as a palpable and insistent reality in everyday life [in which] terror was sublime [...] partly because the film was anchored in such overwhelming CGI spectacle.38 Likewise, Kim Newman notes that War of the Worlds ‘is an invasion informed by 9/11 [...] [in which] Spielberg’s invaders [...] stand less for al-Qaeda or Saddam Hussein than for George W. Bush’s America at work in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantanamo Bay.’39 If many criticised War of the Worlds for its semblances and allusions to 9/11, Phillips sees Transformers as a more extreme version, and of Dark of the Moon, states that ‘as their skyscrapers topple, you’re thrown directly back to the World Trade Center towers’.40 Perhaps more so than any other fantasy, Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings has been compared to 9/11 and its aftermath, and scholars and critics alike have looked beyond its visual effects to comment on thematic and metaphorical similarities. This is despite the fact that the novels were written in the 1950s, and much of the films’ production took place prior to 9/11, so that any semblances are coincidental. Yet, as Eichner et al. point out, the novel’s allusions to World War Two resonate with current anxieties about terrorism,41 while Georg Seeßlen’s comment concerning ‘the new fantasy’ proves relevant in the way that it ‘has seemingly led us away from our depressing reality; as a matter of fact it only leads us in the midst of it’.42 Related, Kellner argues that the trilogy’s thematics ‘have profound similarities to Nazi ideology and articulate in the present with the patriarchal conservatism and crusading militarism of the George W. Bush administration’.43 Kellner especially highlights analogies

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between the films’ ‘threats from the East and from Evil Ones’ and Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda,44 while Ken Gelder, too, claims the trilogy ‘“picks up” a terrorist allegory’.45 In a similar vein, Bob Rehak contends that the trilogy’s refusal to personify its primary villain echoes the changing protagonists at the centre of the United States’ response to 9/11 and Iraq: first Osama bin Laden, then Saddam Hussein’, and goes on to liken Sauron’s intangibility to that of the war on terror.46 Conversely, Lianne McLarty focuses on the elements of disgust that pervade the trilogy (for example, the orc birth scene), and contends that ‘the intense embodiment of disgust makes it a useful ideological strategy for managing social anxieties’.47 Christopher Borelli, too, discusses the way that certain details of films are profoundly affective and notes that ‘the first screening of The Lord of the Rings [...] came just weeks after the attacks of September 11. The movie had been in the works for years [...] and yet the first minute of the film delivered a queasy jolt of immediacy, a chill of recognition’.48 Borrelli then recounts the first lines spoken by Cate Blanchett and their meaningfulness as a ‘poetic 9/11 editorial’: ‘the world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth’. Borelli concludes, therefore, that ‘9/11 subtexts are nowhere and everywhere, all at once’.49 In respect of the Harry Potter films, Kilday observes ‘eerie links between Harry Potter and bin Laden’ and notes that ‘while distributor Warner Bros. has never pushed the comparison, the entire Potter saga – both the books and the movies – have an inevitable subtext, coloured by the events of 9/11’.50 Kilday goes on to suggest that these links arise through the similarities between Voldemort and Osama bin Laden, a connection strengthened by the fact that both ‘died’ at the beginning of May, a detail which Kilday suggests ‘is now likely to give the movie an extra emotional resonance for the Potter generation’.51 In additional support of the connections forged between the franchise and 9/11, Michael Phillips comments: ‘In “Deathly Hallows 2” a major character transforms into ash, floating in a gray, smudgy sky. It is an image inspired by and unthinkable without 9/11. The Potter movies [...] helped us channel our twenty-first century anxieties and escape into a world at once more and less scary than ours.’52

Conclusion There are, therefore, numerous aspects of the fantasy film that point towards 9/11 as an entry point for adult audiences. Intrinsic

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to many of these apparently diverse approaches is a common feature of spectacle and its presentation as arresting image. Thomas Elsaesser proposes a concept of ‘access for all’ in relation to Avatar, and contends that this characteristic is a trait carefully controlled by Avatar’s director, James Cameron. In contrast, Noel Brown proposes that the family film unifies audiences through the upholding of commonly held beliefs and values. Taking into account scholarly and critical analysis, this essay posits an alternative position whereby post-9/11 fantasy accesses its viewers through more ideological routes, reflected in its success since 2001. In line with Plantinga’s discussion of Titanic, recent fantasy offers audiences a reframing of disaster as spectacle that effectively fetishises 9/11 by rendering its iconography appealing – yet still identifiable. The deployment of strategies associated with Klinger’s notion of the arresting image may provoke or heighten associated emotional intensity. In short, spectacle appeals to younger viewers as a purely aesthetic phenomenon whilst engaging adults (consciously or otherwise) through its echoes of 9/11. The semblances to 9/11 cannot be in doubt, with film scholars and critical reviewers alike discerning 9/11 iconographies across a broad spectrum of fantasy, including animation and the superhero film. If fantasies after 9/11 offer magical opportunities for children, then the manifestation of 9/11 (in overt or oblique forms) as spectacle across a range of the most commercially successful films ever, suggests that their themes of terrorism and narratives of doom and mortality provide not just escapism, but resonate in more profound ways with older audiences. As Michael Atkinson contends, ‘escapist entertainments must be as large and exhaustive as the scary social realities they obscure’.53

Notes 1. ‘All-Time Worldwide’, Box Office Mojo. [accessed 11/9/13]. 2. Michael Phillips, ‘“Harry Potter” closes out the Franchise with Qualities that Brought it This Far’, Chicago Tribune, 13 July 2011. 3. Kathy Smith, ‘Reframing Fantasy: September 11 and the Global Audience’ in Geoff King, ed., The Spectacle of the Real (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), pp. 69–70. 4. Colin Campbell, ‘The Easternization of the West: Or, How the West was Lost’, Asian Journal of Social Science, 38 (2010), pp. 738–57. 5. Jonathan Barnes, ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’, Sight and Sound, 16 (2006), p. 57.

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6. Vicky Wilson, ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’, Sight and Sound, 17 (2007), p. 60. 7. Barbara Klinger, ‘The Art Film, Affect and the Female Viewer: The Piano Revisited’, Screen, 47 (2006), pp. 19–41. 8. Ibid., p. 24. 9. Peter Krämer, ‘Disney and Family Entertainment’ in Linda Ruth Williams and Michael Hammond, eds, Contemporary American Cinema (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006), pp. 265–79 (p. 275). 10. David Butler, Fantasy Cinema: Impossible Worlds on Screen (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2009), pp. 5–6. 11. MPAA, ‘Theatrical Resources’. [accessed 19/7/13]. 12. Noel Brown, The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2012). 13. Ibid., p. 2. 14. Ibid., p. 3. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., p. 8. 17. Ibid., p. 196. 18. Ibid., p. 199. 19. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘James Cameron’s Avatar: Access for All’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 9 (2011), pp. 247–64. 20. Ibid., p. 249. 21. Ibid., p. 252. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., p. 248. 24. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 145. 25. Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 2. 26. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Postmodernism as Mourning Work’, Screen, 42 (2001), p. 200. 27. Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2009). 28. Ibid., p. 144. 29. Richard McNally, Remembering Trauma (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press), p. 54. 30. Klinger, ‘The Art Film’, p. 24. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., p. 30. 33. Frances Pheasant-Kelly, Fantasy Film Post 9/11 (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 34. Kevin Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (London and New York: Continuum, 2012). 35. Douglas Kellner, Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the BushCheney Era (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 163. 36. Ibid., p. 191.

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37. David Holloway, 9/11 and the War on Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 92. 38. Ibid., p. 92. 39. Kim Newman, ‘War of the Worlds’, Sight and Sound, 15 (2005), p. 84. 40. Michael Phillips, ‘Shoot ‘em up, blow ‘em up’, Chicago Tribune, 9 September 2011. 41. Suzanne Eichner et al., ‘Apocalypse Now in Middle Earth: “Genre” in the Critical Reception of The Lord of the Rings in Germany’ in E. Mathijs, ed., Lord of The Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2006), p. 150. 42. Ibid., p. 162. 43. Douglas Kellner, ‘The Lord of the Rings as Allegory: A Multiperspectivist Reading’ in Ernest Mathijs and Murray Pomerance, eds, From Hobbits to Hollywood: Chapters on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), p. 18. 44. Ibid., p. 25. 45. Ken Gelder, ‘Epic Fantasy and Global Terrorism’ in Mathijs and Pomerance, eds, From Hobbits to Hollywood, pp. 101–18. 46. Bob Rehak, ‘Movies, “Shock and Awe”, and the Blockbuster’ in Timothy Corrigan, ed., American Cinema of the 2000s (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2012), pp. 83–103 (p. 93). 47. Lianne McLarty, ‘Masculinity, Whiteness and Social Class’ in Mathijs and Pomerance, eds, From Hobbits to Hollywood), pp. 173–88 (p. 186). 48. Christopher Borelli, ‘The Evolving Images of 9/11’, Chicago Tribune, 9 September 2011. 49. Ibid. 50. Gregg Kilday, ‘Eerie Links Between Harry Potter, bin Laden’, Thomson Reuters, 2 May 2011. [accessed 15/8/13]. 51. Ibid. 52. Phillips, ‘Harry Potter’. 53. Michael Atkinson, ‘All Surface, No Feeling’, Sight and Sound, 18 (2008), pp. 21–23.

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Select Filmography

Alesha Popovich i Tugarin Zmei. Dir Konstatin Bronzit. Melnitsa: 2004. Amazing Mr. Blunden, The. Dir Lionel Jeffries. Hemdale: 1972. Arabian Nights. Dir John Rawlins. Universal: 1942. Avatar. Dir James Cameron. Twentieth Century-Fox: 2009. Babe. Dir Chris Noonan. Universal: 1995. Babe: Pig in the City. Dir George Miller. Universal: 1999. Baxter. Dir Lionel Jeffries. EMI: 1973. Big. Dir Penny Marshall. Twentieth Century-Fox: 1988. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Dir Ken Hughes. United Artists: 1968. Coward, The. Dir Gunter Friedrich. DEFA: 1987. Dark Knight, The. Dir Christopher Nolan. Warner Bros.: 2008. Dobrynia Nikitych i Zmei Gorynych. Dir Ilia Maksimov. Melnitsa: 2006. Drum, The. Dir Zoltan Korda. London Films: 1938. Elephant Boy. Dirs Robert J. Flaherty and Zoltan Korda. London Films: 1937. E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Dir Steven Spielberg. Universal: 1982. Full Monty, The. Dir Peter Cattaneo. Twentieth Century-Fox: 1997. Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. Dir Satyajit Ray. Purnima Pictures: 1969. Grave of the Fireflies. Dir Isao Takahata. Studio Ghibli: 1988. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Dir Chris Columbus. Warner Bros.: 2001. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. Dir David Yates. Warner Bros.: 2011. Heart of a Pirate, The. Dir Jürgen Brauer. DEFA: 1988. Hook. Dir Steven Spielberg. TriStar: 1991. Howl’s Moving Castle. Dir Hayao Miyazaki. Studio Ghibli: 2004. I Remember Mama. Dir George Stevens. RKO: 1948. Ilia Muromets i Solovei Razboinik. Dir Vladimir Toropchin. Melnitsa: 2007. Jingle All the Way. Dir Brian Levant. Twentieth Century Fox: 1996. Jungle Book, The. Dir Zoltan Korda. United Artists: 1942. Kitaab. Dir Gulzar. Meghna Movies: 1977. Koi...Mil Gaya. Dir Rakesh Roshan. Filmkraft: 2003. Les Quatre Cent Coups. Dir Francois Truffaut. Cocinor: 1969. Life with Father. Dir Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros.: 1947. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Dir Peter Jackson. Warner Bros.: 2001. 256

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Mary Poppins. Dir Robert Stevenson. Buena Vista: 1964. Masoom. Dir Shekhar Kapur. Krsna Films: 1983. Meet me in St. Louis. Dir Vincente Minnelli. MGM: 1944. Monsters, Inc. Dir Pete Docter. Buena Vista: 2001. Moor and the Ravens of London. Dir Helmut Dziuba. DEFA: 1969. Mr. India. Dir Shekhar Kapur. Narsimha Enterprises: 1987. Mrs. Doubtfire. Dir Chris Columbus. Twentieth Century Fox: 1993. Night at the Museum. Dir Shawn Levy. Twentieth Century Fox: 2006. Nightmare Before Christmas, The. Dir Henry Selick. Buena Vista: 1993. Nutty Boy. Dir Helvécio Ratton. Grupo Novo: 1995. Nutty Boy 2 – The Adventure. Dirs Fernando Meirelles and Fabrizia Alves Pinto. Grupo Novo: 1999. Parichay. Dir Gulzar. Tirupati Pictures: 1972. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dir Steven Spielberg. Paramount: 1981. Railway Children, The. Dir Lionel Jeffries. EMI: 1970. Red Balloon, The. Dir Albert Lamorisse. Films Montsouris: 1956. Santa Claus, The. Dir John Pasquin. Buena Vista: 1994. Sleeping Beauty. Dir Walter Beck. DEFA: 1971. Snow White. Dir Gottfried Kolditz. DEFA: 1961. Star Wars. Dir George Lucas. Twentieth Century Fox: 1977. Taare Zameen Par. Dir Aamir Khan. UTV: 2007. Terkel in Trouble. Dirs Kresten Vestsbjerg Andersen et al. Nordisk Film: 2004. Thief of Bagdad, The. Dirs Michael Powell et al. London Films: 1940. Toy Story. Dir John Lasseter. Buena Vista: 1995. Tri Bogatyria i Shamakhanskaia Tsaritsa. Dir. Sergei Glezin. Melnitsa: 2010. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir Stanley Kubrick. MGM: 1968. Water Babies, The. Dir Lionel Jeffries. Pethurst International: 1978. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Dir Mel Stuart. Warner Bros.: 1971. Wizard of Oz, The. Dir Victor Fleming. MGM: 1939. Wombling Free. Dir Lionel Jeffries. Granada: 1977.

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Select Bibliography

Allen, Robert C. ‘Home Alone Together: Hollywood and the “Family Film”’ in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds, Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies (London: British Film Institute, 1999), pp. 109–34. Babington, Bruce and Peter William Evans. Blue Skies and Silver Linings: Aspects of The Hollywood Musical (Manchester: Manchester University Press: 1985). Bazalgette, Cary and Terry Staples. ‘Unshrinking The Kids: Children’s Cinema and the Family Film’ in Cary Bazalgette and David Buckingham, eds, In Front of the Children (London: British Film Institute, 1995), pp. 92–108. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Penguin Books, 1991). Booker, M. Keith. Disney, Pixar and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films (California: Praeger, 2010). Brown, Noel. The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2012). _____. ‘The “Family” Film, and the Tensions between Popular and Academic Interpretations of Genre’, Trespassing Journal: an Online Journal of Trespassing Art, Science and Philosophy, Issue 2 (Winter 2013), pp. 22–35. _____. ‘“A New Movie-Going Public”: 1930s Hollywood and the Emergence of the “Family” Film’, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 33, no. 1 (March 2013), pp. 1–23. _____. ‘“Family” Entertainment and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema’, Scope: an Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, Issue 25 (February 2013). Butler, David. Fantasy Cinema: Impossible Worlds on Screen (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2009). Cavallaro, Dani. The Animé Art of Hayao Miyazaki (Jefferson: McFarland, 2006). Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: University of Temple Press, 2002). Donald, Stephanie. Children’s Film and Media Culture in China (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Falconer, Rachel. The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and its Adult Readership (New York: Routledge, 2009). 258

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Krämer, Peter. ‘“The Best Disney Film Disney Never Made”: Children’s Films and The Family Audience in American Cinema since the 1960s’ in Steve Neale, ed., Genre and Contemporary Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 2002), pp. 185–200. ______. ‘“It’s Aimed at Kids – the Kid in Everybody”: George Lucas, Star Wars and Children’s Entertainment’ in Yvonne Tasker, ed., Action and Adventure Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 358–70. ______. The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars (London: Wallflower Press, 2005). MacFayden, David. Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges: Russian Animated Film Since World War Two (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005). Mallan, Kerry and Clare Bradford, eds, Contemporary Children’s Literature and Film: Engaging with Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Maltby, Richard. Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Morris, Timothy. You’re Only Young Twice: Children’s Literature and Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). Napier, Susan J. Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000). Neighbors, R. C. and Sandy Rankin, eds The Galaxy is Rated G: Essays on Children’s Science Fiction Film and Television (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011). Pheasant-Kelly, Frances. Fantasy Film Post-9/11 (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Richards, Jeffrey. The Age of the Dream Palace (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2010). Rossler, Patrick et al. Children’s Film in Europe: A Literature Review (Erfurt: University of Erfurt, 2009). Sammond, Nicholas. Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Simonton, Dean Keith, Lauren Elizabeth Skidmore and James C. Kaufman. ‘Mature Cinematic Content for Immature Minds: “Pushing the Envelope” vs. “Toning it Down” in Family Films’, Empirical Studies of the Arts, vol. 30, no. 2 (2012), pp. 143–66. Sinyard, Neil. Children in the Movies (London: B. T. Batsford, 1992). Smith, Sarah J. Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2005). Smoodin, Eric. Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era (Oxford: Roundhouse, 1993). _______, ed., Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom (London: Routledge, 1994). Staples, Terry. All Pals Together: The Story of Children’s Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).

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Thompson, Kristin. The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2007). Wall, Barbara. The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991). Wojcik-Andrews, Ian. Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory (New York: Garland, 2000). Zipes, Jack. The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (New York: Routledge, 2011).

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Index

9/11 239, 240, 241, 243, 244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253 2001: A Space Odyssey 37–52 5000 Fingers of Dr. T 54 Aardman (studio) 3, 134 ABPC (see Associated British Picture Corporation) adult–animal relationships 22 adult/child figures 14 ageing 100, 183, 231–5 Agutter, Jenny 122, 124 Ah, Wilderness! (film) 103, 105, 108, 112, 118 Ah, Wilderness! (play) 106, 107 A.I.: Artificial Intelligence 138–9 Aladdin (1992) 172 Aladin 199 Alarm at the Circus 157 Alarm im Zirkus (see Alarm at the Circus) Aldrich, Henry 87 Alesha Popovich i Tugarin Zmei 172, 174–5, 177–8, 181, 183 Alice in Wonderland (book) 76 Alice in Wonderland (1933) 87 Al-Qaeda 252 Als Unku Edes Freundin war (see When Unku was Ede’s Friend) Amazing Mr. Blunden, The 120, 127–8 Anaganaga O Dheerudu 199 Andy Hardy series 87, 103, 106, 110 animal–human communication 23–4, 28 Animal Liberation (book) 19, 20, 22, 25–6 animal narratives 19, 25, 26

Animals in Film (book) 24, 28 animation computer-generated 58, 60, 213, 225, 240, 242, 253 hand-drawn 22, 68, 70, 128, 133, 161, 171–4, 181, 183, 184, 196–97, 224–5, 226, 227, 237 stop-motion 70 Anglo-EMI (see EMI) animé 223, 224–5, 233 Annie 4 Apple, The 13 Apu Trilogy 13 Arabian Nights (1942) 97 Aragão, Renato 211–2 Arjun: The Warrior Prince 197, 199 Around the World in 80 Days 40 Associated British Picture Corporation (studio) 121, 123 Astérix (series) 3 auteur theory (in relation to children’s films and family films) 132, 243 Avatar 241, 243, 246, 247, 248, 253 Babe 6, 9, 14, 19–36 Babe: Pig in the City 19, 20, 29–36 Babelsberg (studio) 164 Back to the Future 220 Bal Ganesh 197 Bale, Christian 226 Bambi 22, 24 Barber, Antonia 128 Barrie, J. M. 140 Barrymore, Lionel 112 Bartholomew, Freddie 100, 104 261

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Batman 69 Baxter! 120, 127, 128–31 Bazalgette, Cary and Staples, Terry 2, 3, 13 BBC (see British Broadcasting Corporation) Beatles (films) 121 Beauty and the Beast (1991) 69, 172 Beck, Walter 162, 164, 166 Bedi, Mandira 197 Beetlejuice 69 Belles on their Toes 104, 106, 115 Bentham, Jeremy 19, 25, 26 Bettelheim, Bruno 25 BFI (see British Film Institute) Big 10, 137, 142–3 bin Laden, Osama 252 Black Beauty (book) 25 Black Narcissus 98 blockbusters (familyorientated) 40, 60, 121, 199, 201, 208, 211, 217, 220–1, 224, 240–1 Bollywood 186, 192, 198, 199–200 Borat 6 Born Free 121 Bourdieu, Pierre 63 Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear, The 128 British Board of Film Censors (see British Board of Film Classification) British Board of Film Classification 129, 240 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 131, 134 British Film Institute 133 Britton, Andrew 107 Bronzit, Konstantin 174, 176–7 Bug’s Life, A 29 Bugsy Malone 11, 122 Burton, Tim 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83 Bush, George W. 251–2 By the Light of the Silvery Moon 104, 105, 107, 114 Call of the Wild (book) 24

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Call of the Wild (film) 24 Cameron, James 243, 253 Cangaceiro Trapalhão, O (see Trampish Cangaceiro, The) Carry On (film series) 121 Casper 75 Cassiopéia 213 Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum, O Filme 212–3 Castle in the Sky 225 Cat Returns, The 225, 233 Cavalinho Azul (see Little Blue Horse) CEF (see Children’s Film Foundation) censorship 5, 6, 13, 37, 81, 121, 129, 156, 168, 172, 188 Central Board of Film Censors (CBFS) 188, 189 CFF (see Children’s Film Foundation) CGI (see computer-generated images) Chain Kulii Ki Main Kulii 196 Chak De! India 196 Charlesworth, John 100 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (book) 54, 79 Charlotte’s Web (book) 20, 21 Charlotte’s Web (1973) 20 Charlotte’s Web (2006) 20 Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) 106, 111 ‘Child’ Film 13–4, 193 child stars 4, 11, 87, 91, 100 child audiences 7, 10, 14, 26, 43–47, 58, 73, 74, 76, 132, 215, 217, 219, 230 Children of Heaven 14 children’s cinema clubs 4, 122 children’s film festivals 6, 7, 155, 160, 171, 190, 216 Children’s Film Foundation (CFF) 4, 122, 124, 126, 134 Children’s Film Society, India (CSFI) 5, 186, 189–92, 193–4, 200–1 children’s games 1, 70, 82, 146, 214, 222 children’s Gothic fiction 78–9

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Index children’s literature 8, 9, 10, 20, 22, 61, 62, 79, 82, 91, 103, 122, 123, 125, 132, 133, 138, 148, 158, 177, 214, 232 children’s tastes in films 8 children’s television 7, 48, 49, 53, 55, 59, 68, 80, 82, 121, 133, 134, 178, 200, 210, 211–2, 221 children’s toys 4, 9, 137–40, 142, 143–6, 147–50, 181, 213, 214, 216 Chillar Party 200 Chips 91 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 9, 120, 121 Cinematograph Act (India) 188 Cinerama 40 City Lights 20 Clarke, Arthur C. 40, 44 Clockwork Orange, A 57 Close Encounters of the Third Kind 199 Cobra Woman 97 Cold Heart, The 161 Colditz Story, The 120 Collodi, Carlos 138 Comic books/strips 1, 41, 45, 211, 214, 224, 240 computer-generated images (in live-action films) (CGI) 19, 213, 225, 248, 251 Cooper, Jackie 100 Coraline 76 Corpse Bride 79 Costa, Samuel 207 Coward, The 164–67 Cromwell, James 21, 23 crossover fiction 9–10, 200 Culkin, Macaulay 4 Czech puppet films 4 Dahl, Roald 21, 54, 61, 62, 79, 134 Dança dos Bonecos, A (see Puppets Dance, The) Danish children’s films 5 Danish Film Act 5 Danish Film Institute 5 Danny, the Champion of the World (film) 134

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Dark Knight, The 62, 241, 246, 247, 248 Darvas, Teddy 134 Das, Nandeeta 187 Dashavatar 197 Davies, John Howard 100 DEFA (see Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft) Demographics (in children’s films) 7 Desire under the Elms 103 Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) 155, 156–8, 160, 161, 162, 164, 166, 167–8 Dharmendra 188 Dickens, Charles 87 Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge 196 Dirty Harry 57 Disney (company) 1, 22, 54, 58–60, 64, 69, 70, 74–82, 100, 121–2, 128, 138, 145, 147, 148, 161, 171, 173, 180, 182, 183, 184, 197, 199, 201, 208, 220, 225, 226, 240 Disney, Walt 10, 60 Dobrynia Nikitych i Zmei Gorynych 172, 175–76, 177, 179, 182 Doctor Dolittle 23 Doctor Who 6 Dornröschen (see Sleeping Beauty [1971]) double address (see dual address) DreamWorks 58, 60 Driscoll, Bobby 100 Dr. Seuss 54 Dr. Strangelove 121 Drum, The 92–3 dual address 8, 54, 57, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 125, 128, 237, 244, 252–3 Dullea, Keir 41 Dunne, Irene 109, 111 Dumas, Alexandre 237 Durbin, Deanna 87 Dziuba, Helmut 155, 158, 159, 160–61 Eady Levy 4, 134 Elephant Boy 88

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Elizabeth Costello (book) 32, 33 Embrafilme 208–9 EMI 123, 127 Escorel, Eduardo 213 E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial 4, 72, 137, 138–40, 142, 143, 146, 148, 198, 207, 219, 239 Exorcist, The 13 Eyes Wide Shut 6 factory farming 22 fairy tale 4, 69, 73, 78, 84, 155, 160, 161–4, 165, 166, 167, 231 Fallen Idol, The 124 family 3, 21, 104–18, 124–5, 128, 129, 137–50, 164, 165, 194–6, 215, 217, 218, 220–1, 227–30 ‘family audience’ 1, 7, 56, 121, 212, 225, 241, 242 family films adult appeal 2, 4, 5, 7, 8–13, 20–2, 24, 25, 26, 31, 32, 38, 42, 43, 49, 54, 58–9, 60–4, 74–5, 82, 123, 125–6, 128, 129, 132–3, 134, 140, 156–7, 161, 166, 172, 187–9, 193, 194, 211–2, 221, 225, 229, 241, 244, 252–3 and children’s films, relationship between 2–13, 48–9, 54, 55, 60–1, 66, 72–5, 128, 132, 133–4, 217 generic characteristics 2–7 good and evil 94, 159, 162, 241, 244 happy endings 4, 133, 242 modes of address 2, 8–10, 25, 28, 54, 61–5, 125, 132, 237, 241, 242 music 27, 33, 57, 58, 63–4, 68, 74, 77, 94, 96, 107, 175, 211–2, 215, 248 naturalism 10, 11, 125, 128, 244 realism 12, 23, 54, 108, 121, 166, 171, 173, 196, 219, 240 sentimentality 10, 12, 24, 27, 59, 125, 126, 131, 134, 171, 192

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suitability ratings 5–6, 37, 38, 48–9, 55–6, 83, 129, 157, 188–9 tragedy 192, 224, 229, 241, 244 violence 3, 5, 55, 56, 66, 80, 88, 121, 123, 128, 13 fantasy (genre) 54, 57, 59, 93, 95, 135, 167, 198–9, 212, 213, 226, 231, 232, 239–53 Farfan, Federico 218 Father of the Bride (1950) 103, 104, 106, 108, 109 Father of the Bride (1991) 104 Father’s Little Dividend 106, 108, 109 Fido 83 Finding Nemo 172 Film Enquiry Committee (India) 189 Flaherty, Robert 88–91 Flintones, The 182 Flipper 4 Fofão and Sérgio Mallandro 212 Folklore (folkloric) 138, 173, 176, 183–4, 185, 210, 216, 219 Forbes, Bryan 122–3 Fossey, Diane 22 Four Feathers, The 92 franchises (family-orientated) 60, 134, 200, 217, 220, 239–41, 242, 249, 252 Francis the Talking Mule 88 Frankenstein (book) 75 Frankenweenie 75 French Connection, The 57 Freud, Sigmund 21, 22 Friedrich, Gunter 164, 167, 168 friendship 3, 6, 12, 22, 91, 92, 93, 97, 104, 125, 127, 128, 166, 167, 215, 217, 218, 223, 249 From Up on Poppy Hill 223–4 Full Monty, The 137, 138, 142, 143, 144–5, 147, 148, 150 Gandhi, Mohandas 187–8 Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo 237 Garber, Marjorie 32 Garland, Judy 87, 100

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Index genre (see family films) 1–4, 6, 13, 49, 54, 58, 66, 75, 76, 77, 81, 83, 95, 103–8, 113, 117, 118, 134, 155, 160, 162, 174, 186, 193–9, 211, 217, 233, 237, 239–40, 247 Geschichte vom kleinen Muck, Die (see Story of Little Mook, The) Ghatothkach 197 Ghosts, The (book) 128 Godzilla 220 Gone with the Wind 43 Goonies, The 218 Goopy and Bagha trilogy 4, 192 Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne 186 Gorillas in the Mist 22 Gowariker, Ashutosh 196 Grave of the Fireflies 224, 225–31, 235, 237 Greene, Graham 91 Grierson, John 90–1 Grupo Novo de Cinema e TV 207 Gulzar 195 Gunga Din 93 Gyro Gearloose (character) 220 Haathi Mere Saathi 186, 192 Halo 186, 193 Halloweentown 75 Hammer (studio) 121 Hannah Montana: The Movie 8 Hannah Montana (series) 200 Hansraj 196 Hanuman 186, 196–7 Hanuman Returns 197 Harry Potter (book series) 9 Harry Potter (film series) 4, 5, 6, 134, 200, 240, 241, 242, 252 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) 247, 249, 252 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) 249 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) 239 Has Anybody Seen My Girl? 104 Hasenherz (see Coward, The) Hauff, Wilhelm 161 Hay, Will 88 Heart of the Pirate, The 158

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Hemdale Films 128 Hemmings, David 128 Herz des Piraten, Das (see Heart of the Pirate, The) Highlander 218 Home Alone 104, 207 Homolka, Oscar 115, 116, 118 Hook 10, 137, 140, 142 How to Marry a King 160 Howl’s Moving Castle 224, 225–6, 231–7 Humpbacked Horse 181 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (1996) 76 Huston, Walter 112 I Remember Mama 9, 103, 109–10, 111, 114–8 Ilia Muromets i Solovei Razboinik 172, 176, 177, 179–81 Indiana Jones (film series) 239 Inspector Morse 134 International Velvet 123 Iqbal 196 Iranian child-centred films 13 Island of Doctor Moreau, The 6 It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World 40 Ivan Tsarevich i Servyi Volk 184 Jackson, Peter 241, 251 Jafferi, Jaaved 197 Jaldeep 190 James and the Giant Peach (book) 78 James Bond 121 Jameson, Fredric 138 Jan auf der Zille (see Jan on the Barge) Jan on the Barge 161 Jeffries, Lionel 120–35 Jingle All the Way 137, 143, 144 Jones, Diana Wynne 231, 232–3, 236–7 Jones family series 87 Journey Beyond the Stars (screen treatment) 40 Jungle Book, The (1942) 95–6 Jurassic Park 198 Just William (1940) 91

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Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... 196 Kak kazaki 171 Kalte Herz, Das (see Cold Heart, The) Kapur, Shekhar 196 Karlik nos 174 Karnaukhova, I. V. 177, 180 Kaushal, Kamini 191 Kes 13 Keshu 193–4 Khitriuk, Fedor 174 Kid for Two Farthings, A 124 Kidult 9, 10, 60 121, 242–3 Kiki’s Delivery Service 225, 233 King-Smith, Dick 19, 20, 21, 22 Kingsley, Charles 132–3 Kitaab 193, 195 Klein, Melanie 139 Koi...Mil Gaya 199 Korda, Alexander 88–9, 92–5 Korda, Vincent 95 Korda, Zoltan 88, 95 Korn, Vilmos and Ilse 158 Krishna 197 Krrish 199, 201 Kubrick, Stanley 37–52 Lagaan 196 Land of the Dead 83 Laputa: Castle in the Sky (see Castle in the Sky) Lassie Come Home 21, 22, 24 Last Bride of Gorynych the Dragon 179 Laurel and Hardy 4, 88 Lawrence of Arabia (film) 121 Lenin, Vladimir 171 Life with Father 9, 103, 106, 109–14, 115, 123–4 Lion King, The 172 ‘literal family film’ 103–19 Little Blue Horse 213 Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921) 104 Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) 87 Little Women (1933) 103, 106, 107, 110, 115 Little Women (1994) 104 Lives of Animals, The (book) 32, 33 Lloyd-Webber, Andrew 127

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Lolita (1962) 41 Lord of the Rings, The (film series) 4, 241, 242, 251 Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) 239, 249–50, 252 Love Laughs at Andy Hardy 112 Lucas, George 239 Lynd, Robert and Helen 103, 106, 116 Machado, Maria Clara 213 Mad Max films 20 Maeda, Mahiro 237 Magnificent Ambersons, The 107 Makdee 186, 198 Maksimov 179 Malli 193 Man of Aran 89 Man-Eater of Kumaon 98 manga 224 Marvel Comics 240 Marx, Karl 142, 158–61 Mary Poppins 104, 140 Mason, A. E. W. 92 Mason, James 133 Masoom 186, 194–6 McHugh, Susan 20, 28–9 Mead, Margaret 108, 115 Meet me in St. Louis 103, 105, 108, 109, 126 Meirelles, Fernando 218 Melnitsa (studio) 172, 173, 174, 175, 180, 183–4 Menino Maluquinho – O Filme (see Nutty Boy) Menino Maluquinho 2 – A Aventura (see Nutty Boy 2) Mickey Mouse 171 ‘Middletown’ 103, 106, 116 Miller, George 19, 20 Mills, Hayley 123 Minder 134 Minority Report 251 Miracle on 34th Street (1947) 143 mise-en-scène 107, 215, 219 Mistério de Robin Hood, O (see Robin Hood’s Mystery) Mistress of the World 100

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Index Mitchell, Tony 218 Miyazaki, Gorō 223 Miyazaki, Hayao 223, 224–5, 226, 231, 232–3, 234 Moana 89 Mochizuki, Tomomi 223 Mohr und die Raben von London (see Moor and the Ravens of London) Monsters, Inc. 137, 138, 142, 145–47 Montez, Maria 97 Moor and the Ravens of London 158–61, 166 Mr. India 186, 198 Mrs. Doubtfire 137, 140–1, 145, 147 Mukherjee, Hrishikesh 188 Mulay, Vijaya 191–2 Muncie, Indiana 106 Munsters, The 80 Murphy, Eddie 11–2, 173 Musicians of Bremen (1973) 172 My Dog Tulip (book) 22 My Friend Flicka 21 My Friend Ganesha 197 My Neighbour Totoro 223, 225, 226 Nagel, Thomas 24 Nanook of the North 89 National Film Finance Corporation, The 121 National identity 3, 93, 157, 158, 161, 164, 171, 176, 181, 184, 199, 200, 208–12, 216, 226–37 Nazarov 171 Nehru, Jawaharlal 5, 188, 189 Nesbit, E. 122, 123, 125, 126 Neverland spaces 137, 140 Night at the Museum 137, 142, 143, 148–50 Night of the Hunter 13 Nightmare Before Christmas, The 14, 69–84 Noonan, Chris 19 No Room for the Groom 104, 114 Norshtein 171 Nosaka, Akiyuki 227 Nu pogodi 171

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Nutty Boy 207, 208, 214–6, 220–1 Nutty Boy 2 207, 216–20 Ocean Waves 223 Oedipus Complex 138, 143 Old Mother Riley 4 Oliver! 58, 121 O’Neill, Eugene 105, 107 Only Yesterday 223, 225 On Moonlight Bay 104, 105, 107, 113, 124 Ortiz, Renato 207, 209–11 Our Gang (series) 11, 12 Our Gang Follies of 1938 11 Our Town (play) 197, 107, 108 Our Town (film) 105, 107, 108 Pan’s Labyrinth 13 Paranjpye, Sai 192 ParaNorman 79–80 Parichay 193, 194–5 Parsons, Talcott 105, 106, 110 Pasquim 214 ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’ (paintings) 27, 34 Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure 69 Penny Serenade 109 People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) 22 Percept Picture Company 197 Pererê Gang, The 214 PETA (see People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) Peter Pan (book) 140, 142 Petzold, Konrad 160 Piano, The 246 Pickford, Mary 4, 30, 104 Pinocchio (film) 138 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End 250–1 Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl 245 Pixar (studio) 58, 60, 138, 145, 146, 147 Pixote 13 Platt, Kin 128 Pocahontas 208 Pollyanna 104

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Pompoko 225 Ponyo 225 Porco Rosso 225 Poussin, Nicholas 107 Powell, Michael 94, 98, 101 Powell, William 109, 111 Pressburger, Emeric 98 Princess Mononoke 223, 225 Production Code, Hollywood (Hays Code) 5, 38, 55, 87 Puppets Dance, The 213, 214 Quatre Cents Coups, Les 13, 130, 195 Queen of Shamakhan, The (see Tri Bogatyria i Shamakhanskaia Tsaritsa) Raiders of the Lost Ark 218 Railway Children, The (film) 120, 122–7, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133–4 Railway Children, The (book) 122 Ramayana 196 Ramayana: The Epic 197 Rambo (film series) 217 Rampage 100 Rank, J. Arthur 4, 5, 88 Rank Organisation (studio) 121, 131 Rani Aur Lalpari 186, 192, 198 Rao, Atul 196 Ratton, Helvecio 213–4 Ray, Satyajit 4, 192 Red Balloon, The 12 Reddy, Kiran Kumar 188 Red Ties 160 Remarkable Mr Pennypacker, The 104, 106 Retomada 209 Rice, Tim 127 Roadside Romeo 197 Robin Hood’s Mystery 212 Robson, Michael 132 Rooney, Mickey 30, 87, 100 Rózsa, Miklós 94, 96 Rotschlipse (see Red Ties) Russian epics 174 Russian fairy tale films 4

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Sabine Kleist, 7 Jahre (see Sabine Kleist, 7 Years Old) Sabine Kleist, 7 Years Old 160 Sabu 4, 87–102 Sabu, the Elephant Boy 14, 88–91 Sabu and the Magic Ring 100 Safed Haathi 186, 192 Samat, Mahesh 201 Sanders of the River 92 Santa Claus’s Name is Willi 160 Santa Claus, The 137, 138, 143, 147 Savage Drums 100 Say Salaam India 196 Schneewittchen (see Snow White [1961]) Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot (see Snow White and Red Rose) Scruffy 91 SED (see Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland) Selick, Henry 70 Shah, Navin 197 Shaw, Peter 132 Sheep-Pig, The (book) 19, 20, 21, 22 Shōjo (figure of) 233 Shrek (film series) 60, 242 Shrek (2001) 173 Simpsons, The 64, 182 Singer, Peter 19, 20, 22, 25, 26 Singh, Shailendra 197 Single address 8, 10, 61 Sirk’s family comedies 104 Sleeping Beauty (1959) 80 Sleeping Beauty (1971) 162–4, 166 Sleepless in Seattle 104 Slipper and the Rose, The 123 Snow White (1961) 158, 161–2 Snow White and Red Rose 162 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) 80 Soiuzdetfilm 171 Soiuzmultfilm 171–2, 173, 178–9 Song of Ceylon 91 Song of India 98 Sound of Music, The 58 Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland (SED) 156, 160, 161, 164, 166, 168

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Index Special effects 58, 94, 161, 198, 218, 221, 233, 240, 241, 248, 248, 251 Spectacle 9, 187, 198, 241, 244–7, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253 Spielberg, Steven 11, 138, 140, 198, 199, 207, 218, 219, 225, 239, 247 Spirited Away 223, 225 Stalin, Joseph 171 Stanley Ka Dabba 200 Star Wars 4, 137–8, 239 Staudte, Wolfgang 161 Stone, Lew 112 Story of Little Mook, The 161 Straw Dogs 57 Stuart, Binkie 88 Stuart, Mel 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 79 Studio Ghibli 223, 224–6, 237 Studio Miniatur Filmowych 132 Summer Holiday (1948) 103, 105, 107, 108, 112 Super Colosso 212 Suzuki, Toshio 229 Sveshnikov, Maksim 174, 176–7 Taare Zameen Par 186, 193 Takahata, Isao 223, 224, 226–30 Take Me to Town 104 Tales of Beatrix Potter, The 122 Tangier 98 Tarka the Otter (book) 24 Tarka the Otter (film) 24, 122 Taxi Driver 6 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TV series) 172 teenager (audience) 121 Temple, Shirley 4, 87, 93, 100, 104 Terminator (film series) 173 Their Mother’s Sons (book) 115 Thief of Bagdad, The (1940) 93–5, 97, 101 Thomsett, Sally 122, 123 Three Knights (series) 172–84 Three Stooges, The 4 Tiger Walks, A 100 Titanic 244, 245 Tokuma Publishing 225 Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1940) 87

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Tom, Dick and Harriett 134 Tom Sawyer (book) 10, 13 ‘To Penshurst’ (Ben Jonson) 25 Toy Story 4, 9, 137, 147–48, 172 Toy Story 2 148 Toy Story 3 146, 150 toy theory 137 Trampish Cangaceiro, The 212 Transformers (series) 200 Transformers: Dark of the Moon 241, 246–49, 251 Trapalhões, The 4, 211–12 Trapalhões and the Wizard of Oroz, The 212 Trapalhões e o Mágico de Oroz, Os (see Trapalhões and the Wizard of Oroz, The) Treasure Island (book) 142 Treasure Island (1934) 87 Treasure of Bengal 100 Tri Bogatyria (series; see Three Knights [series]) Tri Bogatyria i Shamakhanskaia Tsaritsa 172, 176, 177, 181–2 Trials of Oscar Wilde, The 120 Truffaut, Francois 130, 195 Turma do Pererê (see Pererê Gang, The) Twain, Mark 10, 13 Undifferentiated address 8, 9, 10, 11, 60 Up 9 UTV Motion Pictures 189, 197, 201 Veidt, Conrad 94 Verhoeven, Paul 161 Verma, Gaurav 189 Vidigal, Tarcisio 214, 216–7, 218 Wall-E 9 war Cold War 156, 157, 167 War on Terror 241, 243, 244, 245, 249, 252 World War II 64, 87, 94, 97, 98, 227–31, 232–3, 251 War of the Worlds, The (2005) 247, 251 Warm Bodies 83

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Water Babies, The (book) 132–3 Water Babies, The 120, 131, 132–3, 134 Watership Down 22, 122 Wee Willie Winkie 93 Weekend with Father 104 Weihnachtsmann heißt Willi, Der (see Santa Claus’s Name is Willi) Weird Science 143 Weiße Wölfe (see White Wolves) When Unku was Ede’s Friend 161 Where is the Friend’s House 13 Where the Wild Things Are 66 Whisper of the Heart 225 Whistle Down the Wind 123 White Fang (book) 24 White Fang (1991) 24 White Savage 97 White Wolves 160 Wie heiratet man einen König (see How to Marry a King) Wilder, Gene 59, 64–5 Wilder, Thornton 106 Williams, Raymond 20

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Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory 14, 53–68, 79 Wind in the Willows, The (book) 24, 27 Winnicott, D. W. 139, 142 Winnie the Pooh 172 Witches, The (book) 78 Wizard of Oz, The 4, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 66 Wolper, David L. 54, 55 Wombles, The (TV series) 131 Wombling Free 120, 131–2, 133 Wright, Basil 91 Wylie, Philip 114–5 Xuxa 212 Young Adult fiction 128 You’ve Got Mail 104–5 Ziraldo 214, 217 Zokkoman 199 Zulu 121

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Cinema and Society series General Editor: Jeffrey Richards Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present Anthony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema Colin McArthur The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 James Chapman British Cinema and the Cold War Tony Shaw Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids Sarah J. Smith The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western Michael Coyne The Death Penalty in American Cinema: Criminality and Retribution in Hollywood Film Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory Annette Kuhn Femininity in the Frame, Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema Melanie Bell Film and Community in Britain and France Margaret Butler Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany Richard Taylor From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema Ewa Mazierska & Laura Rascaroli

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The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter Noel Brown Hollywood Genres and Post-War America Mike Chopra-Gant Hollywood’s History Films David Eldridge Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films James Chapman Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film James Chapman Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces Andrew Moor Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema James Chapman & Nicholas J. Cull Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 David Welch Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity Jenny Barrett Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone Christopher Frayling Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster Geoff King Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema Andrew Spicer The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–1939 Edited by Jeffrey Richards

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