... 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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