What Family's For

Portraying family in media is always a fascinating thing. There are many different outlooks on how it functions, if it naturally works well or poorly, how the different members act, etc. In The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Peter is a young hooligan who will not listen to his mother’s sage advice. In the end, Mrs. Rabbit is proven right, and Peter returns home shaken from his encounter.  He did not lose his familial rights, and Mother took good care of him despite the trauma.  The charity seen between people, or animals, of different generations is so nurturing and humane; it is humanity.

I really enjoyed watching the home movies.  It defies all of the books and films we have watched because of how real, how genuine, and how irrefutable it is.  You could see the joy and awe of Thevenin family in their little children.  I enjoyed watching Ben’s face light up as he watched his children; there is something in little home documentaries that is worth more than any Hollywood film.  Trying to capture children on camera while they are still young is almost a knee-jerk reaction. You know they will grow old so quickly, so you film them to try to bottle up experiences while they are still young.

I Wish has a really interesting perspective on intersubjectivity and on family relations.  The two brothers are separated one with each divorced parent.  In films like this normally one parent or the other is the bad guy, but I don’t think that this happens in I Wish.  They are both imperfect but do what they can.  The older boy, Koichi, desperately wants his family to live together again, but over the course of the film he comes to realize that this won’t and maybe shouldn’t happen.  The younger boy, Ryunosuke, tries to make the best of the situation, and even manipulates his father when he needs money.  Family relations are all about give and take. It isn’t perfect, but when you need to get out of school a nice grandpa who has your back can sure help convince a hardnosed teacher.  The film was delightful. I loved seeing the children find a common family in each other as they tried to get miracles from watching the bullet trains pass.  Though many, or all, of the miracles will never happen, the two brothers were able to reconnect and strengthen each other, which is what family is for.

Exploit or Empower

Why are critiques of politics and society so prevalent in children’s media? I believe that one reason is that children are the only sincere and innocent people left in our post-modern world.  With a push for moral relativism, there is almost no ground to stand on. These critiques use children to find a place to stand. In Gene Deitch’s “Munro”, by putting a young innocent child into an army, many of its practices are portrayed as absurd and ridiculous.  This would be difficult to do without the child to do it with.  And this was just a cartoon, so it doesn’t hurt any children or put them in real danger.

But sadly some films do. The use of critique through children’s media is often very exploitive of children and diminishes any semblance of empowerment.  Children are used in political arguments a lot because they are very effective at emotional appeal. They are shown as helpless and in need of saving. Adults need to take action for these children. Children become the victims of ideology and society. The clip of “Harvest of Shame” is a perfect example of this. The rich white filmmakers impose themselves on the poor black family. The black family isn’t empowered, but the white guys are because they feel like they have really helped someone and made a difference. Even though they were being just as exploitative as the companies that hire the black migrant workers.

Children just need to be treated correctly because they can be the cause of great and important change.  Like we talked about in experimentation, children don’t have the stiff structure of mind and will that adults have. This means that they can truly think outside the box and imagine the most crazy, but often genius, solutions to different problems. Instead of exploiting them, they should be heard and given power, a voice.

In Princess Mononoke, I believe that the characters Ashitaka and San exemplify more child-like perspectives. San is a very alienated youth and fights against human society with every power she possesses.  Ashitaka is different; he is able to stay aloof and mingle with both the nature spirits and with Irontown.  He is the empowered one who is able to help enact change for the better.  He realizes that both nature and Irontown have a right to exist, and that they can co-exist if they are pressed to.  The character that is used and taken advantage of is Eboshi.  Jigo uses her to get the head of the Forest Spirit. Jigo is the kind of person that can become so focused on a task that no one else matters, and everything can be destroyed as long as his objective has been accomplished. This film critiques this kind of person because what would be the point in eternal life if the only thing you could do is watch the world burn. This film has a lot to say about nature and politics, and that it isn’t clean cut. One is not evil and the other good. They are just shades of gray. 

Tumbleweeds Festival

On Saturday the 16^th, I went to a children’s film festival called the Tumbleweeds Film Festival in Salt Lake.  I got tickets for a film called “Eliot and Me”. It was an Irish film about the relationship between a young girl and her dog.  Though it was a fiction film, it tried to have a more documentary film feel.  It was about the Lucy’s experience with her life.  Lucy’s parents had divorced and the alienation was clear.  She was combative and argumentative with her mother, and she could only talk to her dad via telephone.  She struggled and it was all shown in striking detail.  The audience was full of families and children, and I wondered how children interpreted what we saw. How do they understand the dark complexities of life? I wonder how much they know about divorce and other topics.

One of these topics I wonder about is safety.  In the film, Eliot goes missing. Long story short, Lucy goes alone to a man’s house to steal him back. He catches her doing it. She is a young defenseless girl, and as a young woman myself I instantly worry for her safety.  The film almost becomes a morality tale, but she is able to get the dog and get away safely. Is that the reality of what would happen in that situation, or wishful thinking? We just don’t know.  The young kids watching can definitely understand and empathize with wanting to get Eliot back, but I’m super curious how well they understand the danger she is in. I just don’t know enough about kids I guess. It was a very good film, and did a wonderful job of portraying Lucy’s everyday life and struggles.

Before they showed “Eliot and Me”, they showed an eight-minute short called “The Boy in the Bubble”.  This film was a very imaginative piece. It was completely narrated with no dialogue, and the narration was in the form of poetry.  It also had an interesting take on the conflict between emotion and rationality after being hurt romantically.  After the pain, rationally he wants to avoid having to go through the same thing again. So he uses magic to put himself in a bubble, trying to doe something physical to protect his mental well-being. In the end, a girl breaks through the bubble as a visual representation of getting through his ego to his Id. It was a stunning film, and it was narrated by Alan Rickman, which was a huge plus.

Nostalgia Effect

Nostalgia is a topic that is particularly interesting to me. From discussions with friends, I have noticed that my ability to remember my past/childhood is especially good. I remember a lot of events and details.  I love remembering the past, even the more difficult parts.  To me, nostalgia seems to have two elements to it: a fondness at the memory and an implied loss at the past that no longer exists. Depending on the individual and the situation either one of these two elements can be emphasized more than the other. I believe that my nostalgia leans to the side of fond remembrance; I love where I am now in life, but I like to remember what got me here.

“The Sweater” by Sheldon Cohen seems to be emphasizing the other element more.  The boy in the film misses his sweater and romanticizes the time he had with it.  He compares his life to what it use to be, and how present life appears to be lacking so greatly in comparison. A term that I believe applies to both elements that make up nostalgia is rosy retrospection.  This refers to when people rate past events more positively than they would have when the event occurred.  They wear rose-tinted glasses. I think this is a very common thing for people to do.  Memories are so fluid and changeable, and people would rather be happier than they actually were at the time.

This is what makes Peter’s reaction to returning to Never-land so interesting. He reacts oppositely of rosy retrospection; he resists feelings of nostalgia to a fault.  He’s faced so much reality, so much sarcasm, contrivances, and pretentious people, that it takes him a long time to recognize sincerity, innocence, and openness.  He has to relearn how to be a child before he can become Peter Pan and feel true nostalgia.  It is easy to feel like nostalgia is worthless, it can never be made the same as it was, but it can change something: it can change the perspective of the person feeling it. Once Peter has changed, has felt that nostalgia, he may not be able to stay in Never-land as Peter Pan, but he can go back home and be better connected and a better father to his children.  I believe that the nostalgia he felt is what changed him, and it made him a better person as well.

Children's Unique Voice

Children are impossible to define. Some believe that this is because of post-modernism ideals of meaning and semiotics. Children are only defined by everything else and what they are not. Socially, there are ways to define the child: gender, race, class, religion, culture, sexuality, ableness, and many others.  Media should not classify all children in one group because their age is only one factor of many characteristics that are important to their individuality to who they truly are. Not all children are little white boys with little white boy problems.  Now those problems are important and relevant, I want to make that clear, but a rounder picture of children and the issues they face should be portrayed in media. Media needs to be de-centered.

“Bicycle Thieves”, an Italian film, delves into the culture and struggles of a family of poor Italians. This is very different from the Hollywood stories about white people that most audiences were use to.  Audience members get attached to the family and want them to be successful.  That is an admirable thing to want, right? Well, if it was a Hollywood film nine times out of ten they would end up succeeding and the audience would feel justified. They would also feel less charity towards the poor, because if they would just work harder then they would be successful like the family in the movie. “Bicycle Thieves” de-centers this idea. They don’t succeed in the end, and they end up lower than when they started.  The low man doesn’t always succeed; in this case the low man sinks lower.  That is part of the diversity of life, for bad things happen to already struggling people.

That film was about a family. Persepolis, on the other hand, is about a little girl, and not just any little girl. Persepolis is an Iranian, Muslim, from an intellectual family, and a middle class family.  Persepolis isn’t a passive victim but an active participant in that society. She has opinions, believes, ideas, and values that are important and worth being heard. “Bicycle Thieves” seemed to just emphasize the challenges/inequalities.  While Persepolis definitely described some very unfortunate circumstances, but I believe that it empowers her to speak and be heard. I know that I don’t know the most about that culture, and she was able to teach me so much by her experiences with the socio-political culture that she was raised in.

New People not Plots

Is nothing new? Many believe that is true.  All stories and ideas are just restatements and reiterations of stories and ideas of the past. If that were the case than what would be the point in creating anything?  That is where play comes in.  Just because a story has been told before doesn’t mean that it has been told the best way, or your way.  People know things and understand things differently than they did in the past, and therefore the way we tell stories now will be different and historically important.  Play makes stories and ideas new because of the people and perspective that create that play. 

Ideas and their physical counterparts are signs used to communicate between people, but their meanings are not fixed. They are actually fluid, which allows people to play with them and their meaning to create something new. This room for movement, for give and take, and for loose correlation allows us to create new juxtaposition and new meaning.  I saw a depiction of Mitt Romney where an artist had made him into a Dungeons and Dragons character (he even had an amulet with the essence of Reagan).  These two ideas put together to make a comment about how ridiculous and fantastical the artist thinks Romney is.  By intertextualizing the piece of art, it created a new juxtaposition and interpretation.

 

It is really interesting when you take the people out of play, and I don’t like it.  I watched a video called Toccata for Toy Trains.  First of all, I don’t particularly love trains, so that wasn’t a selling factor for me.  While watching, it felt eerie to see all of the toys moving without a person or child moving them. I believe that the human element has to be a part of play to make it truly playful.  Otherwise it is just objects moving of their own accord.  Without any real anthropomorphic features that can draw me into empathizing with them, I just loose interest. 

Going back to the first question, I think it is the human element that makes things new.  We played a video game in class called “Curse of the White Witch”.  Was the plot of the game new? Absolutely not. What was new and unique about the situation were the people playing it. No one experienced or will experience that game like we did last Wednesday night.  We passed around the controller, we were playing it in a college class, but more importantly, Spencer, Keala, Kelyn, and I read the text in funny voices, we laughed at “tidy”, we made fun of it.  We brought ourselves to the game and we are unique, which made our experience unique. So while stories may never be new, play is always new and fresh as more kids are born who will experience it differently.