Children's Literature

Family Films in Global Cinema: The World beyond Disney is split into four parts. Part 1: “Questions of Identity” focuses on films such as Babe: Pig in the City, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and The Nightmare before Christmas. These films are used by Bruce Babington, Peter Kramer, Adrian Schober, and James M. Curtis, respectively, to highlight the many ways in which children’s films might be defined, including how they are related to the family film yet have their own identity. Part 2: “The Child and the Family” contains essays by Jeffrey Richards, Babington, Noel Brown, and Holly Blackford. These critics examine child stars such as Sabu, and films like The Railway Children and Toy Story to discuss the complicated relationship between children, family, and film. Part 2, not unlike part 1, draws on various film theorists: Blackford’s “‘Luke, I am your father’: Toys, Play Space and Detached Fathers in Post-1970s Hollywood Family Films,” uses Fredric Jameson, D. W. Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Jacqueline Rose, and Karl Marx to discuss E. T., Big, Hook and Toy Story from psychoanalytic and economic perspectives. Parts 1 and 2 stay away from Disney—the book’s subtitle after all is beyond Disney—by focusing on Hollywood family and children’s films. The global aspect of Family Films really appears in parts 3 and 4. Part 3: “Cinema and State,” for example, examines German Democratic Republic, Russian, and Indian films. Part 4: “National Identities” looks at films from Brazil (featuring a Brazilian child star), Japan (actually the films from Studio Ghibli), and America. From this [End Page 244] section, Pheasant-Kelly’s “Dark Films for Dark Times” from part 4 is especially worth discussing. Its thesis is that American fantasy films such as The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), and, more recently, Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005) are not just mindless Hollywood blockbusters, quintessential Disneyesque action flicks; rather, they are also complex meditations on the status and role of America and its families in a post 9/11, post-Disney world.

James Curtis’s essay, from part 1: “Questions of Identity,” first presents some basic background information on Tim Burton, including his move beyond Disney Pictures, but that studio’s lingering connection to what was obviously a labor of love for Burton, The Nightmare before Christmas. Second, Curtis notes what everyone now recognizes: that The Nightmare before Christmas has become a critical and commercial success. Curtis then gets to the issue of genre and identity and argues for Nightmare as both a children’s film and a family film that embodies themes and motifs such as the monster, gender, and the fairy tale. Curtis articulates several reasons why Nightmare contains a “child orientation” (72). Citing the psychoanalytic work of Karen Coats, Curtis argues that Jack’s “process of self-discovery” (72) is similar to the process of “individuation” undergone by most children and therefore appropriate viewing for kids. The film also contains fairy tale elements—a genre typically associated with the child—and a sense of wonderment “commonly attributed to childhood” (73). Finally, Curtis argues, Nightmare contains a classic children’s narrative pattern of “home, away, home” (73). For these reasons, Nightmare is similar to movies such as The Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio, and E. T., all of which are “child-oriented” (73).

However, Curtis notes that the movie’s Shakespearian allusions, Ooogie Boogie’s gambling and sexual attraction to Sally, and the film’s adult-oriented narratives in general, position Nightmare as a family film. And it has become a family film for specific historical reasons. The film’s evolution from “macabre children’s film” (70) created in the early 1980s by the idiosyncratic Burton to canonical Hollywood family film today is due to society’s “insatiable cultural desire for the sympathetic ‘monster’, be it werewolf...