FILM COMMENT : Where’s the Joy, Magic in Today’s Children’s Movies?

Everybody is always yapping about how there aren’t enough good movies for adults, but that’s nothing compared to how children are neglected. With the exception of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” the year just past was a particularly dismal one for kids’ films. Did the studio execs who are crowing over the box-office receipts for “The Addams Family” and “Hook” actually have to sit through them?

It’s curious that children’s literature, as opposed to children’s films, is at an unusually high level right now. The work of such writers and artists as Maurice Sendak and Shel Silverstein shows up most of the recent kids’ movies for the pap that they are. The best children’s movies, like the best children’s books, have always had a range and a resonance that extended far beyond the childhood years.

It is not, I think, too starry-eyed an assumption to say that children are probably the ideal audience for the magic of movies--or for at least those movies that sweep the eye and the spirit. Think back to your first vibrant movie memories and most likely the images you summon up will still retain a hallowed, ecstatic quality. The specialness of great children’s movies is that, in watching them as adults, we can feel transported and elated and yet, somehow, cheated as well. When a friend of mine saw Carroll Ballard’s “The Black Stallion,” he called me up right away to say how much he loved it but added, rather mournfully: “I wished I had seen it as a kid.”

But with most of the new children’s films, which are often euphemistically referred to as “family films” by the studios in order to suck in the parents, it doesn’t really matter at what age you see them. They have all the resonance of a Nintendo game. Some of the movies, like “Home Alone,” have evolved accordingly--you can now purchase the “Home Alone” video game while you hang on for the sequel.

Video games are, of course, coexistent with television. And television, which includes the specialty, non-theatrical videocassette market for children, has largely co-opted the children’s film market. With the glorious exception of “The Simpsons,” there’s very little to occupy an imaginative child’s mind on TV that is not essentially “educational” in nature. The morning cartoon shows, which are mostly debased, by-the-numbers stuff, vie with the “Afterschool Specials” and “Sesame Street” and “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” reruns. And the rare shows that are extraordinary are punctuated with commercials; and, even when they’re not, the images are still encased in a piece of furniture.

One of the reasons why big-screen movies can seem so magical to children is precisely because of their bigness. With the diminishing of the image comes a diminishing in the child’s imaginative rapport with the screen. And yet renting videocassettes is one of the only ways left for kids to see many of the greatest children’s classics. (And don’t the movie companies know it. The videocassette business has made the kids’ market, which used to be limited to half-price ticket theatrical sales, into a Matterhorn of moolah.)

This is a problem that affects adults too, of course, but most adults grew up watching movies in theaters to a far greater extent than the current generation of kids. At least when adults watch movies on video they know what they’re missing (even if they don’t care). Is it possible that the visual flatness, the lack of beauty in so many of the current movies by the twenty- and thirtysomething generation of directors is at least partially explained by the fact that so many of these directors were raised on the tube?

Even more damaging for children is the experience of seeing movies on the big screen that only serve to deaden their imaginations. What must they think of the magic of movies if they get the idea that the most transporting experience they can have in a theater is watching (and rewatching) “Home Alone”?

In a climate where children’s entertainment fare is expected to be up-to-the-minute and cross-plugged in the media a million different ways, what incentive is there for busy parents to seek out the occasional film society or revival house screening of, say, “The Black Stallion” or, more to the point, Chaplin or Keaton films? What incentive is there even to track down the few good children’s films of the past few years--not only the hits like “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” “Little Shop of Horrors,” “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and “Beetlejuice” but also “The Witches,” “Gremlins 2,” Carroll Ballard’s “Never Cry Wolf” and “The Nutcracker” (designed by Sendak) and the first two episodes of Kurosawa’s “Dreams,” which are perhaps the most poetically perfect evocations of childhood I’ve ever seen on film? (The rest of the movie is not really suitable for children, nor was it meant to be.)

If more and more children’s films (and not just children’s films) resemble big-screen TV, that can’t be entirely coincidental. A children’s film like last year’s “All I Want for Christmas,” which was rushed through production in a matter of months in order to cash in on the holiday trade, is the handiwork of Paramount Chairman Brandon Tartikoff, whose TV network background is considered an asset in the New Hollywood. The ongoing televisionization of the art of movies is most apparent in the children’s film arena because, of all the vaunted demographic target audiences, children, up until now at least, have been among the least courted--and therefore the most neglected.

They’re neglected even when they’re being courted. What is there to entertain or inspire children in the pointless bedlam of “The Addams Family,” or in that slag heap of taffeta, “Hook”? Yes, these movies are making money, but are these the films children really want to see or are they just the “events” that children will line up for in the absence of anything better?

Children love animation, and so it’s potentially good news that there are currently at least a half dozen animated features in various stages of development. With no live-action stars or live-action production to bankroll, animation is clearly the most cost-effective way for the studios to tap into the family market.

But it would be a grievous joke if this new-found enthusiasm resulted in animated versions of the usual tepid live-action fare. One of the reasons why “Beauty and the Beast,” despite the usual Disney corn, is enthralling is because there’s zest in the songs and storytelling, flourish in the animation. You get the sense that the filmmakers aren’t simply making a movie for children; they’re also tapping into their own childlike realms.

The best children’s movies don’t offer easy demarcations between child and adult, and certainly they are not created in such a divide-and-conquer spirit. They accept the ways in which, for both child and grown-up, childhood is an ongoing, and essentially mysterious process of revelation. There is no such thing as a good children’s film that is also not a good film for adults (although obviously the reverse is not true). This explains why--studio propaganda notwithstanding--it’s not out of bounds for adults to criticize the quality of children’s films. On the contrary, it shows that you respect children as you would respect yourself.

The degeneration of the children’s film since “E.T.” can be traced to the divide-and-conquer mentality: What belongs to the child must not belong to the adult. If it sometimes seems like all the movies for adults these days are about reverting to childhood, it’s equally true that many of the kids’ movies are about the jollies of carrying on like an adult. When Spielberg was still in his late 20s and early 30s, at the time that he made “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.,” he was, both chronologically and spiritually, closer to his childhood imaginings than he would appear to be now. The pop transcendence of those films grew out of the notion that childhood is a poetically heightened state of mind, a state of grace. The adults in those movies, like Richard Dreyfuss in “Close Encounters” or Dee Wallace in “E.T.,” were honorific big kids--in Spielberg’s realm, that was high praise indeed, and we gladly concurred.

The advent of John Hughes signaled a shift in the children’s film. Whereas the Spielberg films validated for both child and adult the beauty of child-like wonder, the Hughes movies, first with teens and now with tots, revel in their lack of wonder. The rift between child and adult is exploited cartoon-style; while this can be amusing and liberating, especially for kids, in the long run what the Hughes movies, as well as non-Hughes variations like “Look Who’s Talking,” are saying is that being an adult is no great feat--any kid can do it. In the Hughes universe, all adults are jerks, all kids wised-up.

If the screens are aswarm with peewee tyrants right now, it could be because this is the only way Hollywood knows how to commercialize the disruption of the modern family. Spielberg has often featured the broken-home scenario but, in his early films, you felt that it had a personal meaning for him. (You can feel it still does for Tim Burton, who, in a film like “Edward Scissorhands,” carries Spielberg’s exalted longingness to more baroque heights.) When the broken-home or absent-parent scenario is employed in movies like “Home Alone” and “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” and “Problem Child” and “All I Want for Christmas,” the result is a kind of peewee variation on “Rebel Without a Cause.”

In the “E.T.” era, the suburban tract-home ethos was comfortably humdrum; it was the cradle that rocked the dreamer. The comfy middle- and upper-middle-class home life in the new children’s films is a big suffocating cage; well-heeled parents, who often are heedlessly uncaring of their children, or too busy managing their careers, are targets for pipsqueak retaliation. Juvenile classics have often worked to disrupt adult pieties, but many of these movies offer nothing but disruption--unless it be the occasional dreary “prestige” item like “Little Man Tate,” a kiddie weepie like “My Girl,” or the occasional passage like the old-man subplot in “Home Alone,” or the Dickensian waif stuff in “Curly Sue.” In Hollywood, sentimentality is the flip-side of cynicism.

The great children’s fairy tales were almost always posited on a blissful dream of family togetherness and security; the fear in those tales was often that that security would be destroyed. Maybe the popularity of today’s pipsqueak marauder movie is signaling us that the emotional security of the family--even as a dream--is no longer really believed in. In the new children’s film, the parents who never had time for their children get their comeuppance. Overworked filmmakers and studio heads can churn out these films as penance.

We’re looking at the revenge of the Children of the Yuppies.