Kids TV and Anime shows

Cafe Society
1

So, I found out my son (8) has been recording some shows on the DVR that I’m not sure I approve of.

He’s liked Japanese shows for a while, such as Dragonball Z (ugh, I hate this show, but it doesn’t seem that objectionable), Naruto (it’s not that bad, and actually somewhat interesting. But its borderline too violent, and gives me pause). We’ve watched most of the Miyazaki movies together, and I find little or nothing objectionable (although Spirited Away is pretty creepy).

Now he’s been watching two more: “Ya Ya Hakusho” and “Slayers”.

I’d caught some of Ya Ya Hakusho and it didn’t seem that bad (or very interesting), until I saw some this morning:

Bad guy has Good guy bound up in some sort of long ribbon that’s crushing Good guy. Bad guy takes the end of the tether and whips Good guy around, crashing him through the trunks of trees. Bad Guy then hangs Good guy upside down over a lake, and casts a spell to summon Hate Fish (alligator-ish) into the lake. Bad guy then “throws” a demon of some sort right at Good guy, but at the last minute un-summons the demon, and it falls into the lake and is eaten by the Hate Fish. Ok, time for school SqueegeeJr!

Moving on to Slayers, the short scene I saw was what looked like some superhero ninja guys and girls talking to this guy floating in a big light beam, asking why, oh why lightbeam-guy had killed their friend. Camera pans down to their friend, just about dead, lying in a pool of blood, and she starts speaking, blood flowing from her mouth.

Boom! I change the channel, this is waaay too violent. SqueegeeJr was upset, but he understands that myself or his mom get to veto what he watches. And I’d had a little talk with him earlier about the subject before we watched this together.

SqueegeeJr has also recently been saying stuff like “my life is cursed!” when something goes wrong. I think he gets this stuff from Ya Ya Hakusho. I tried to have a little talk with him about what being “cursed” means, and how he’s definitely not “cursed”. Man, he’s too young for angst. I don’t want him to feel I don’t listen to him or what he thinks is important… but “cursed” ?

OK, so I assume these shows are rated, but I haven’t yet found the ratings. It looks like I can safely assume these two shows are M or something like that, and we’ll probably come down on the side of shows with that rating being unacceptable until SqueegeeJr is older. MrsSqueegee also says that these shows are from Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Should I assume any show in that block is unacceptable?

Anyone else have experience with anime TV and younger kids? What do you object to? What guidelines do you use?

2

Yu Yu Hakusho was actually from Toonami, an action oriented block that airs on Saturday before Adult Swim. Toonami shows often have the most violent parts edited down or out.

Adult Swim shows can be very adult, like Robot Chicken and The Boondocks, but a few, like Inuyasha, could easily go on Toonami. And Futurama isn’t very objectionable.

At the beginning of a show they all should have that little black box in the upper left-hand corner that says the rating and whether the show contains violence and stuff like that. I believe all Adult Swim shows are rated TV-14. Or is it just the block that’s rated as such?

I though YYH was taken off Toonami ages ago.

3

I found the television rating guidelines here. It looks like there’s TV-Y7 (and permutations) which is pretty safe, then there PG (with permutations), which is the usual big swatch of maybe-okay, maybe-not shows in the middle. This isn’t very useful, it seems to me: Naruto gets a PG-V (but it doesn’t seem all that violent to me), while Slayers and gets away with a PG (it sure looks more violent than Naruto, or maybe I’m just sensitive to talking corpses lying in pools of blood). I didn’t see any TV-14 or TV-MA notices on any of the other shows I browsed.

4

I made my first attempt to read Hamlet when I was 8 and most of my friends had probably gone out hunting with their dads.

No your child won’t be warped by seeing fake blood in an animated TV show–or at least it doesn’t make murderous sociopaths out of Japanese kids. At most, he’ll learn that there’s such a thing as a real world.

And if it actually bothers him, he won’t want to watch it.

5

Sage Rat: I appreciate what you’re saying.

But, I’m a Parent, and I feel its my job to do at least minimal Parental Guidance. Due diligence: its what’s for dinner.

I actually don’t have a problem with most of these shows, and I think I’d have less problems with them if my boy were a couple of years older. But he still watches things like Backyardigans and enjoys it, so I’m keeping apprised of what else he bumps into.

I’m leaning towards telling him that, for now, all PG content is banned, but that he can lobby for specific shows to be unbanned if a parent watches some with him and finds it OK. I’d anticipate that most shows would pass muster. Naruto would, for example.

6

I should probably tell a related story – SqueegeeJr has been asking for guidance on a certain issue: there’s a commercial he kept seeing where different kids were saying that they want to talk to their parents about “s - e - x” (SqueegeeJr actually spelled it out that way, the commmercial does not). SqueegeeJr told me and MrsSqueegee that he thought that this was very inappropriate (his exact words), and wanted us to see the commercial. It turned out to be a spot pretty close to this one. MrsSqueegee and I exchanged “what the hell?” glances at each other when we saw it; it played during Avatar, the Last Airbender (excellent show, btw). I didn’t find it objectionable, but just really… odd.

7

Slayers is pretty violent. I would say it’s more a teenage/adult anime than anything else. There are scenes that include torture and they talk a lot about breasts (heh). Not at the same time.

8

On second reading: what was odd was that that commercial is obviously targeted at parents, not kids, and they were airing it during a kids show. Parents would never see it, and kids would have no clue what it was about.

9

I think it might be because Slayers is mostly a fantasy anime … there is a lot of blood, but the violence is inflicted by magic 99% of the time, so I dunno … maybe it’s less realistic? I’ve never watched Naruto, so I can’t really compare. I first started watching Slayers when I was maybe 15, and very, very infrequently there would be scenes that would make me flinch, so I agree that maybe 8 is not the best age to start watching. Lina’s breasts get felt up a lot, from what I recall, and there are a lot of scenes that involve people coughing up blood and otherwise being severely injured. There was one scene I remember where Lina pins someone to a tree by stabbing them through their guts with a sword.

(Are you sure it was Slayers, though? I don’t remember any superhero ninja guys in Slayers.)

10

Well, I said “looked like”, I didn’t catch exactly who they were, mostly they had weird colored hair and strange taste in apparel. But I guess that describes half the anime characters in the universe.

11

My teenagers watch Naruto and a few others, although I think they’ve dropped Yu Yu Hakusho now that it’s all reruns. I suppose you’d catch on to the fact that Blood Plus and Death Note are likely to be violent just from the titles, but I’d want to keep an eight-year-old clear of Full Metal Alchemist as well, and there’s one called Inuyasha you might want to keep an eye out for. It’s a tough call, and you’re the only one who can gauge your comfort level about more or less graphic cartoon violence, but I’d say the TV ratings are a pretty good guide overall.

12

Wait a sec. Are you saying that anime will teach a kid about the real world? I’ve got nothing against anime, but I don’t think that statement makes a lot of sense.

13

I’m not a parent myself, but I’ve always kinda wondered…is it better to let kids watch cartoons where characters are left battered and bleeding after fighting, or ones where there’s plenty of action/blowing things up but no one actually gets hurt?

I mean, no blood, no bodies…no consequences.

14

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ602088&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ602088
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ411513&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ411513
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-3920(197706)48%3A2<367%3ATDPOVF>2.0.CO%3B2-K

wishes he could actually read through those

But yes, stories are a key element in teaching children about real world morality and self-trust, etc. For an adult, a movie might just be for fun, but for a small child, stories are the safest way for a child to view real world interactions in a way that is symbolically simple enough for him to understand and/or not frighten them away. If they are frightened away then, indeed, the story is too advanced for the child.

People fight for things and sometimes die in the trying. Bad people do bad things and the good guys show up and throw them over a cliff. If you don’t appreciate the morality that a story is teaching then by all means turn it off, but you shouldn’t turn it off because it’s discussing something that happens in real life.

Anyways, this isn’t GD and I can’t find any cites that I can read through anyways, so I’ll just bugger off.

15

Well, while I fully agree with your statement about stories, Sage Rat, I personally would not put Naruto in quite that category. I’m more of a print person, I guess; I prefer folk and fairy tales, stories and so on, and while TV can fulfil that function, I don’t think it does it as well as oral storytelling and books.

While I appreciate the stories of some anime (esp. Miyazaki), I don’t think you can just say that all cartoons teach these things and are important to a child’s development. IMO quality is important too; I’m not convinced that the endless episodes of G-Force I watched as a kid were as important to my self-concept as the books I read.

–Dangermom, librarian and apparent stick-in-the-mud

16

Naruto probably is more realistic. Sure, there’s a lot of magic-type stuff going on, but there’s also a fair number of sharp metal objects around (a character gets nailed in the back with a HUGE four-pointed star in the first episode) and lots of good old-fashioned beat’em up fighting.

17

Hmm, I’d watched a bit of Naruto, and the fighting seemed about as dangerous as a Pokemon fight – the character might get “defeated” but never dies and there’s no blood. Maybe I’m wrong.

18

Oh, yeah: there was also some sexual innuendo in Naruto, but the stuff I saw was either goofy or obscure enough to pass over most kid’s heads, or not be important even if it didn’t.

19

There is some blood, but not a lot really…enough to get the point across basically. However, people are killed, kill themselves, are nearly killed, killed and brought back to life (which kills someone else), lose limbs, have limbs broken and crushed…I think I’ve missed something but I’m not sure what. It doesn’t happen every episode or anything like that, and again there isn’t much blood or even visual injury–usually just a lot of lines to indicate having been beaten up.

The sexual references don’t get any worse than what you’ve seen–it’s used mainly for comic relief.

20

Okay, now, just allow me to say that I get home around 10:15 p.m. and Naruto comes on a 10:30 followed by Futurama on Adult Swim and I got in the habit of watching the latter to unwind after work and the former came on first so I found myself occasionally watching and…

:stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway, I have seen occasional blood in Naruto. Usually bleeding from the mouth when one or another character is getting the crap beat out of them. I’ve seen Naruto ( the character ) do so. More specifically I remember the shy, mousy little ninja that has a crush on Naruto getting absolutely demolished by her cousin during the Chunin exams. They focused in on the drops of blood from her mouth hitting the exam floor and Naruto later scoops up some of the blood after she is hauled away on a stretcher, clenches it in his fist, then calls out her asshole opponent, vowing the kick his ass.