Where have the children gone?

I'm not sure what rabbit hole I went down to find these articles (from this past Jan), but I find it really interesting.
io9.com/why-the-age-of-the-kids-adventur...e-is-over-1681195670

Here's the actual article I found first that led me to it. It's more on the numbers side of things:
www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/a...ids-films-animations

It's really late here and not sure what my overall thoughts are, but this is something I'm going to think about a lot tomorrow as I drive my son to his first Pokemon League day at a game store.

Has anyone here already mulled this over? Any thoughts about it?

I think the premise that there are far less kids in movies to be quite debatable in and on itself but I'm particularly bothered about this idea that "kids and their iphones" have killed the genre because they are now stuck in a world "where imagination requires no imagination at all" which "leave kids uninterested in interacting with the real world" a sentiment that to me seems born less out of genuine concern and more out of the belief that the younger generation is doing it wrong. It's an ex-post-facto rationalization, it assumes that things were perfect back when the author was a kid and that any change from that must mean something's not quite right.

Still, the main problem with the premise is that it doesn't seem to be true. The Guardian's own charts show that this period of kids being protagonists in films doesn't correspond with E.T (1982), Stand by Me (1986), The Goonies (1985), rather, it seems to arise during the mid 90s and dissapears a decade later. According to that very chart there's not a significant difference between the 80s and the 2010s as far as children protagonists is concerned, in fact, there are more now than there were back then.

I also suspect that what The Guardian calls "golden age of Children's films" is more of an artistic ghetto than an actual period of quality. Cartoons and kid's entertainment in general were very heavily censored during the 90s and an increase in children's film was probably a result of that: If you wanted to target kids you now had to target them exclusively which wasn't true in the 80s and isn't true right now.

In fact, I think children's entertainment is much better now than it has traditionally been. Works are simply smarter, Harry Potter or the new wave of shows like Adventure Time don't talk down to their audience to the degree they did during the 80s and 90s and often contain complex, interesting narratives and themes that would have seen as "too dark" or "not suitable for children" before. There are more narrative arcs, more flawed characters and women are portrayed better, they are artistically better all around because there are less constrains.

This is particularly noticiable when it comes to those unimaginative video games the articles complain about, Slenderman and Five Night at Freddie's are incredibly popular with kids and they are slashers, a genre that Disney or any traditional media conglomerate would not even dare to touch.

interesting article, but i agree, it doesn't look so much like child protagonists have declined so much as there being a weird blip in the 90s. What great 90s movies with kids in them where there? Home Alone? i must not have watched most of them, despite growing up in that period.

I would be surprised if Hollywood script writers are deliberately excluding child protagonists due to the rise of smart phones. These are two things but i doubt they are directly connected.

Erik, putting it down!

Actually, this came to mind when I watched Jurassic World recently. I realized that my tolerance for Spielburg's classic saccharine "family first!" movies has dissipated. I enjoyed the movie as dumb spectacle but could have done without the classic Spielburgian family message.

The other media I thought of to contrast with it was Adventure Time, which is essentially all about family but has a much more genuine and interesting way of expressing that (IMHO of course).

I think that the article obliquely points out an issue that really used to bug me. Of course, as it points out at some point during the 90s and 00s movies and books aimed at kids and teens started to have more kids and teens as the main characters. What bugs me about it is that the geniuses in Marketing had determined that the most important demographic wouldn't watch or read stories unless its members were the primary characters. I think the idea was that viewers identify as the protagonist so if you're targeting youngsters the protagonist must be their age. This drove me nuts because quite clearly kids have never had problems enjoying Star Wars, Raiders, Star Trek, hundreds of kid-free westerns, war movies, romantic comedies, screwball comedies... you name it, and I loathe the idea of pandering to kids and treating them like morons.

Of course the rise of the young adult genre as a publishing behemoth would seem to indicate that the marketing people are right: many kids would rather read stories about themselves. I do seem to have noticed a slowing or perhaps even a reversal of the no-adults-allowed trend in movies though.

What do you think, are we leaving "kids don't like stories about adults" in the past with the EXTREME 90s and 00s? Of course I fully admit that I may have been seeing a trend that wasn't actually there, heh.

I think Hollywood is just unwilling to risk 200 million on a film starring kids and is unwilling to greenlight 30 million dollar pictures either. They have the formula and will stick with it. Fortunately for my son he'll get all these films as he ages, his education will not suffer for it. It is a shame that he probably wont see many live action and 2D animated films in the theater (kids entertainment seems wholly locked down by CGI films these days) but then again, I doubt young kids see the theater with any where near the reverence I do.

I think children's entertainment is much better now than it has traditionally been.

This is it right here. It's not that children have suddenly disappeared from the equation, it's that there is a greater awareness that children's entertainment doesn't have to be FUCKING STUPID to appeal to kids.

Witness the difference between Barney and Yo Gabba Gabba. Why shouldn't kids listen to Ladytron instead of bullshit songs about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?

Harry Potter is the best possible example of this, and that franchise really did, in retrospect, quite a lot to change expectations for children's entertainment. After visiting the Wizardling World again at Universal last week, I've been watching the movies again...in the 1980s or 1990s, a kid-facing film like Prisoner of Azkaban would not have even been possible. It's not that it's somehow more "adult"- it's that it's more honest and specific to darker, realistic themes. Compare it to some of the ghastly kid's films from the 1990s, for example...where it always felt like adults were making films that they THOUGHT kids wanted to see. When the reality is that most children are smart enough to recognize pandering and to see how their world is NOT reflected in moronic, brain-dead "kiddie" films or shows. One of the most brilliant things about HP is how for a certain generation of kids, those characters grew up with them in the stories. I love how the stories reflect changing priorities, interests and emotions during those years. That is a much more complex proposition than anything offered in the kids' films of the 1980s.

Thinking about other recent films- Coraline, Book of Life, Paddington...these are very different kinds of kids films then were considered in the 1980s and 1990s...but ironically, they get back more to things like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (one of the darkest kids' movies ever)- truly ALL AGES fare that respects the intelligence of children and invites them into more critical, engaging narratives than "here's a cute animal! POOT!"

There is still plenty of pandering, idiotic children's entertainment out there (witness most of Dreamworks' animated features) where disco-dancing fat people/animals are de rigeur. But it's pretty easy, even for kids, to distinguish between that stuff and something like How to Train Your Dragon 2 or Toy Story 3. One of the reasons Frozen was so successful is that it was so modern, intelligent and engaging for all ages. And also reflective of current cultural trends and concepts while remaining true to timeless themes that all generations can relate to.

There's also a greater awareness on a parental level of higher quality kids' fare. I'm able to show my kids the Studio Ghibli films, for example, rather than shitty straight-to-video cartoons.

Also, can we please stop talking about The Goonies as some kind of classic film? It's cute, it's moderately fun, has a couple of memorable lines...but it's also not particularly any good. It's about on the same level as Adventures in Babysitting. That is not a put-down, it's just not this great example of...well, anything.

I don't claim to have any idea about what kids like these days, but it seems like Pixar did some great movies for the whole family. And while those Disney princess movies might be of questionable value in terms of role models, that Incredibles movie was great.

Even the Disney princess movies have changed with the times and have become smarter. Tangled, Brave and Frozen are all really quite subversive compared to the "classic" princess movies even up through the 1990s. Frozen is practically an X-Men origin story where Prince Charming is revealed to be a fraud and the only true love is family love. One princess is an antisocial mutant/witch and the other is anything but graceful and princess-y. Brave is more about mothers and daughters than wafting around and waiting for a man to come along to fulfill your dreams. Princess and the Frog is very down-to-earth, Tiana wants to open a business- not lull around staring at flowers and thinking about which tiara to wear. Tangled sort of upends the whole "waiting for a man" thing by showing the princess life as boring.

Note, however, that I am a Disney princess apologist, and I love Disney princess stuff. Scarlett almost talked me into buying these Disney princess Vans yesterday during back to school shopping. For me, not her.

I didn't read the article thinking there was a claim that current kid entertainment is worse, but that there are fewer that feature real children. With almost all kid flicks being CGI cartoons these days, there doesn't seem to be any room for real kids.

Mr. White wrote: I didn't read the article thinking there was a claim that current kid entertainment is worse, but that there are fewer that feature real children. With almost all kid flicks being CGI cartoons these days, there doesn't seem to be any room for real kids.

I wonder how much of this is due to cost and changes in the industry regarding child labor laws. In fact, I wonder how much things have changed since that horrible accident on the Twilight Zone movie where two kids were killed.

It might not be a creative choice as much as a legal choice.

Michael Barnes wrote:
Note, however, that I am a Disney princess apologist, and I love Disney princess stuff. Scarlett almost talked me into buying these Disney princess Vans yesterday during back to school shopping. For me, not her.

You and me both, you and me both.

I don't know that this has as much to do with what children are like now as is does with what Hollywood is like now. To put it plainly, Hollywood has basically zero interest in making movies with child protagonists, and exactly zero interest in making blockbuster movies with child protagonists. Fundamentally, this comes down to what drives the movie industry: money, and related to money, bankable stars. The industry doesn't believe there's enough money in it, and there's no such thing as a bankable 12-year-old.

Whether Hollywood is correct or not doesn't really matter, because there aren't any studio mavericks when it comes to blockbusters. Part of the issue is that they essentially don't make high-value original properties anymore. Look at the top 20 grossing movies of 2014. Eighteen of them are based off previously existing successful properties. The two that aren't are at numbers 16 and 20 (Interstellar and Neighbors, respectively). Unless it's animated, no one's going to take major risks for a kid's or all-ages movie.

Hollywood does still buy children's properties, but they don't keep them that way. They buy them now with the intention of "aging up" the characters to be teenagers. Case in point: one of the most successful children's novel series in recent times is Percy Jackson. In the books, Percy is 12. In the movie, he's 16. A creator who insists on keeping his kids as kids probably won't get a deal. So unless we see another Harry Potter, we won't see kids' blockbusters anytime soon. (And even if there is a new Harry Potter, the creator would basically have to hold onto film rights until the series was already a massive success, or the film would already been in the works aged up.)

And for those who think it's because kids' imaginations are poorer today because of how they grow up, well, I'm not going to say I think this age is particularly great for childhood. But it's worth noting that the market for children's books is booming, even as the book market as a whole is flat or declining.

Sadly, my experience that the majority of those children's books are being purchased and read by people who not chronologically children anymore.

About the movie industry, there was a vey telling quote I read (from interviews about Bring It On, the cheerleader movie) that are pretty apt about this kids movie discussion as well:

The marketing people at the studio, at Universal, were like, “You can’t market to girls this age.” That was a big thing – because nobody ever says, “We don’t know how to do it” – they say, “You can’t do it.

So that's the mindset, and they were talking about 15 years ago. (whole story is here ). Things have not improved for risk-takers in my estimation in Hollywood since then.