"Children's Films" from Planet Hollywood

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Franco Moretti, "Planet Hollywood,"  _New Left Review_ 9 (May-June 
2001), at <http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24306.shtml>

... Figure 4: children's films.  In the US, 25 per cent of box-office 
hits; in most other countries, much less -- at times almost nothing 
(and I will come to that in a moment).  But the American results are 
arresting in themselves.  One in every four box-office hits aimed at 
children?  This seemed so odd that I checked the statistics for the 
years of my own childhood, and in the pages of Variety for 1955 and 
56 and 57 I found what I remembered so well: there were so few 
children's films then!  A cartoon in the top ten around Christmas -- 
for a couple of weeks, in a couple of places; period.  (I say a 
couple of places because, then, the American market was still so 
uneven that the top ten changed a lot from town to town; today, the 
very idea seems quaint.)  In the mid-fifties, not a single film for 
children made Variety's top twenty for the year, with the only 
possible exceptions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the 
World in 80 Days: both children's films in a very dubious sense (and 
both drawn from nineteenth-century French novels, by the way).

[Figure 4 omitted -- to see it, visit the URL above.]

Today, the top twenty routinely includes four or five children's 
films, and the reason, I suspect, is quite simple: money.  These 
films are more successful because much more money is spent on 
children's entertainment.  But this extra income is not available 
everywhere, and the result is the skewed distribution of Figure 4, 
where the (relative) absence of the genre tends to overlap with the 
poverty of each given country.  The correlation is not perfect, they 
never are (look at the data for Egypt, or Puerto Rico, or Singapore), 
but it seems real enough, and, incidentally, it also works inside the 
United States: studying New York videostores, my students and I 
discovered that the presence of children's films in Harlem and the 
Bronx ranged between 3 and 8 per cent; in the Upper West Side and 
Upper East Side, between 10 and 19 per cent.  Three times higher.

'Children's films' is a sloppy definition, of course: it points to 
the audience, not the film -- and to an audience which is moreover 
quite problematic.  Children, after all, don't usually go to the 
movies by themselves and, as adults must take them, a little generic 
paradox ensues: whom should the film be for -- the adult, or the 
child?  Faced with this problem, the fifties offered either 
straightforward fairy tales (for the child: Cinderella, Snow White, 
even Fantasia), or those Jules Verne novels I mentioned earlier 
(which were much more successful than the fairy tales: another sign 
of a market directed at the adult).  But today the two forms have 
converged, blending into a hybrid which appeals to children and 
adults alike: E. T., Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future, the various 
Star Wars and Indiana Jones -- these are stories designed for a new 
human species of savvy children and silly grown-ups (Homo puerilis). 
Their god is Steven Spielberg (and Benigni is his prophet: Life is 
Beautiful -- what a childish adult wants a child to know about 
Auschwitz)....
-- 
Yoshie

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