Films for Children
Scary children’s media: what are we so afraid of?
Channel 5 caused a stir last month when they aired the classic 1978 animated film Watership Down on the afternoon of Easter Sunday. Aside from Art Garfunkel’s tear-jerking song ‘Bright Eyes’, the film is infamous for the gore and violence inflicted upon, and by, rabbits that we would prefer to think of as cuddly and […]
Into the Woods: Being Brave with Storytelling
Fairy tales have happy endings. They may be dark and scary but the prince always finds Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood susses out the big bad wolf. Right? All too often many assume that fairy stories are, have always been and should be all about the happily ever after. The release of Into the […]
Children’s Film or rather ‘Paddington’ hits the Headlines
https://theconversation.com/paddington-sex-scandal-the-bear-would-bore-if-he-didnt-break-some-rules-34779 In response to some of the rather disparaging and hypocritical discussions of ‘Paddington’ and children’s media more broadly I created this response for The Conversation. It would be interesting to know what others think. I did break my golden rule of commenting about a film before I had seen it but I was provoked […]
Film Studies Year 3
My doctoral research is focused on children between 17 and 42 months of age, for which I undertook a longitudinal, ethnographically styled study of my twin grandchildren, “Dora” and “Sam”, gathering data in the home on their TV- and film-viewing practices. That stage is long over, and after a year’s interruption I am resuming work […]
Children and Film
On Tuesday I am heading to the European Conference on Children’s Film and then the KIDS Regio Forum 2014. I’m very keen to exchange ideas with other researchers, children’s content creators, funders and distributors from within the European film industry. The aim of the forum is to raise the profile and increase access to children’s […]
