Duncan Pelham
What with last month’s Up and this month’s Fantastic Mr Fox, there is much debate over children’s films’ tendency to cater to adults rather than children. For filmmakers, it’s a result of the age-old predicament of getting both mum and dad chortling at obscure adult pop-references as well as seating their children in front of the obligatory slapstick silliness. So hitting two birds with one stone is the name of the children’s movie game. But it’s no easy balancing act.
I propose that Up got the balance just right and Fantastic Mr Fox perhaps just missed the mark. The latter’s pernickety attention to production design details, its focus on adult themes (oh how the kids love didactic discourses on egoism!) and references to the likes of Sergio Leone westerns, distracts director Anderson from the crucial task of children’s story telling. There’s no doubting Fantastic Mr Fox is a wonderful film and a beautiful piece of animation (evocative of the endearing, juddering stop-motion animation of BBC’s Bagpuss), but its nostalgic filmmaking will undoubtedly appeal more to the (much) older audiences.
Up has received much more criticism, for dealing with issues deemed too emotionally weighty for the young target audience. I presume the criticism is mainly levelled at the opening scene, where our widowed pensioner Carl looks back at his sweet and loving marriage to his deceased wife Ellie.
I discreetly shed a manly tear beneath my 3D specs while my girlfriend unleashed an unashamed waterfall throughout, but, unsurprisingly, I failed to notice a single one of the sprightly youngsters bat an eye-lid. And this scene isn’t merely squared at adults, it seeks to capture the children’s sympathies by showing Carl and Ellie mucking around as youngsters. But the point here is that it isn’t just the animation that’s rendered in 3D, but the emotions bare a multi-dimensional character: the death of Bambi’s mother is oft lauded as the most delicately touching children’s movie moment in history, but still seems a rather 2D representation of death for children to grapple. On the other hand, Carl’s loss of his wife, the unfulfilled dreams that went with her and the morose imprint left on Carl’s spirit are truly three dimensional: upsetting, but real.
Come the end of Up, when my irksome cinephile tendency to provide an on-the-spot review kicked in, I caught myself asking, ‘why on earth do the dogs talk, and in that ludicrous way?’ It’s easy to forget: this film is, first and foremost, for children, and the balance between the two is still an art mastered best by Pixar. The recent animated film 9, for instance, missed the mark by a long way; imbued with dark imagery and a technophobic message that would most certainly fly over kids’ heads.
The problem of alienating younger viewers is something auteur directors like Anderson, who are showing increasing interest in animated films, should take into account, bearing in mind classic children’s films are those that cater to both older and younger audiences: The Nightmare Before Christmas, Toy Story and Shrek.
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