It is Halloween season so I watched Coraline again. Love that movie but as I watched it I asked myself --not for the first time-- is this supposed to be for kids? This movie is scary as fuck!
Another movie I saw that I think was made with kids in mind is but maybe should not be seen by younger children is Tomorrowland. I don’t think it’s a bad movie at all but, boy, is grown Frank’s relationship with Athena problematic. Why is that even a theme in a movie about Disney made for kids?
Coraline is rated PG so it’s not blanket “meant” for young kids but of course since it’s animated they’re gonna watch it. The thing is, kids get scared of the weirdest things and not by any means always the things adults think are scary so it’s pretty hard to suss out what’s gonna be a problem for an individual kid. That being said, Coraline deals with a fairly common childhood terror, of losing one’s parent or having them become “wrong” in some way but the terror is resolved and that tends to leave a kid feeling okay about the movie overall.
Harlan Ellison wrote several essays on the subject of the “acceptable level of terror” in a movie and pointed out that kids raised on Universal monster movies seem to have turned out okay in the main. He figures that showing kids that they can handle scary things or that scary things are not always as scary as you think and that some things that seem to be non-scary at first actually turn out to be the biggest problem is a valuable set of information for them. I tend to agree and was fairly permissive about allowing my kids to watch scary movies–they turned out pretty much okay and have great imaginations.
I think it’s overall more of a problem that all the mothers in Disney movies get killed off–what’s THAT telling the kiddies?
Speaking about the book, author Neil Gaiman said that most adults experience it as a horror story, but most children experience it as an adventure tale.
I like the book better than the movie. In the book, Coraline don’t need no man to come to her rescue. She survives and saves her parents through her own cunning, guile, and bravery, not by a Wybie-ex-machina.
The Princess and the Frog: The dad is dead, not the mother. Moana: The grandmother dies, but of old age, and she appears to Moana as a comforting guardian spirit. Tangled: Rapunzel’s evil stepmother dies, but she never really loved her, and Rapunzel is reunited with her real parents. Encanto: Mirabel’s grandfather was murdered shortly after her mother, aunt, and uncle were born, but Mirabel grew up in a loving family, albeit one dominated by her harsh grandmother, who does love them, but puts a lot of pressure on everyone to contribute.
I grew up with the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the Banshee in Darby O’Gill and the Little People, and uncensored roadrunner cartoons. I didn’t turn into an axe murderer.
Where fictional stories are concerned, children are not as fragile as the child welfare advocates fear.
Someone once wrote that the point of fairy tales is to demonstrate that the monsters can be defeated. Saint George slays the dragon, Hansel and Gretel toss the witch into her own oven, Jack kills the giant. But defeating the monster is heroic precisely because the monster is scary.
Long ago, when my children were small, I rented Watership Down (for myself). The clerk made sure to tell me it wasn’t a sweet bunny movie for the little ones. I think he’d had some complaints!
Whoa, tags! I didn’t mean for this thread to be only about Coraline! And not only movies, either. I meant give your opinion on this and other things made for children that is, in your opinion, maybe not. Should have been clearer. Like that last sentence. Should have been clearer.
My grandson was watching Jurassic Park movies when he was five years old, which worried my wife and I, but he was really into dinosaurs and didn’t seem bothered by them. But the Borg in “Star Trek: First Contact” freaked him right the f*** out and we wound up having to turn off the movie.
Indeed. My dad frequently let me watch R-rated movies and shows when I was 6 and 7 and 8, and nothing in Terminator or Alien or Tales From the Crypt ever bothered me.
On the other hand, this bit in Super Mario Bros. 2 where the mask gate detaches from the wall and becomes an enemy you have to beat terrified me so much that the first time it happened I dropped the controller and ran away screaming and had to get my mom to beat it for me while I kept my eyes closed.
A kid came into my 7-Eleven with his father yesterday, all of six or seven years old, wearing a Jurassic World T-shirt. I said to them, “It delights me that little boys still love Jurassic Park. When the first movie came out, I was not much older than him.”
Let us not forget that the original Grimm fairy tales were really quite, well, grim, and not the sanitized, Disneyfied versions that they were subsequently turned into.
