By Noel Brown
There is a long history of radical children’s film and television. This statement might seem – if not quite radical – then at least a little surprising: children’s film and television are often seen as vehicles of enculturation that educate young people in the codes and conventions of adult society, teaching children how to behave and how to think, supporting the status quo and (more damningly) serving the interests of those in power.
While there is some truth in this perspective, it fails to account for surprisingly prevalent traditions of children’s film and TV that radically deviate from accepted practices and challenge political and aesthetic orthodoxies, often beneath a cloak of innocence. Children’s culture has the capacity to make a critical intervention in culture and society, and it has often led to subversive practices from both children and adults alike.
These days, radicalism sometimes gets a bad rap because it is associated with extreme actions and beliefs. But it’s important to remember that anything substantially outside the realms of common practice can be regarded as radical, including things that are widely accepted today. The abolition of slavery, suffrage and the legalisation of homosexuality used to be extremely radical positions in liberal Western democracies, just as surrealist art and literary modernism were once the epitome of avant-gardism. In these terms, a belief in the importance of radical children’s film and television which profoundly depart from the ideological and aesthetic norms of society is not, itself, a radical position. Norms and conventions are forever changing, and what is radical today may be common practice tomorrow.
In our new book published with Edinburgh University Press, my co-contributors and I explore children’s film and television as a vehicle for transformative practices across a range of countries and historical periods. We focus on three broad (and often overlapping) categories of radical children’s film and television: content that is politically subversive; content that is aesthetically radical; and content that is appropriated for radical purposes by individuals, communities of fandom, political groups and creative practitioners.
Politically subversive
In trying to make sense of radical traditions of children’s culture, we immediately run into a problem. Radical politics or aesthetic practices for adult audiences are often explicit, but in the more protected realm of children’s film and television overt radicalism is much rarer. To protect their livelihoods, reputations and even their safety, very few producers, distributors or exhibitors actively draw attention to a radical agenda. Instead, they generally utilise a ‘cloak of innocence’ that shrouds subversive aspects in recognisable narrative and stylistic conventions.
Alternatively, more explicit radical aspects might take the form of brief, punctuating interludes, such as the avant-garde ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’ sequence in Dumbo (1941), or the fleeting lesbian kiss in Lightyear (2022), which was originally cut from the film, then reinstated, a move that ultimately led to the film being banned in several countries.
Lightyear
If we look closely at the wider global history of children’s media, we find it has long been a vehicle for ideological protest. Films and TV series have reflected on an iniquitous past, warned of a precarious present and offered up manifestos for a better future. One episode of the Argentinian animated series La Asombrosa Excursión de Zamba (2010–) reflects on the lessons of history, introducing young audiences to the atrocities committed by the country’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. The Bengali-language film Kingdom of Diamonds (1980), written and directed by the great Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, is an explicit socialist critique of political and economic oppression of the masses by the ruling elite. In this case, Ray’s fictional society reflects on the political failures of the present, allegorising Indira Gandhi’s notorious ‘Emergency’ government of the late 1970s. And Hayao Miyazaki’s classic anime film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) grapples with the future consequences of humans devastating the environment.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Such films attempt to engage children as active citizens empowered to make a positive contribution to the world at large as arbiters of moral authority, eco-warriors, and social activists.
Aesthetically radical
Radical aesthetics have been practised in children’s film since the early part of the twentieth century. Even otherwise largely conservative texts might contain radical bursts of energy: in the psychedelic ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’ number in Dumbo, the title character drunkenly hallucinates pink elephants morphing into abstract, impossible and often unsettling forms. This sequence is now widely considered a dazzling display of the possibilities of the animation medium, but has also been interpreted – much like the similarly trippy ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ number in Yellow Submarine (1968) – as an ode to the joys of an acid trip.
Some productions manage to sustain an avant-garde aesthetic for their entire duration. With a screenplay by Dr Seuss, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T. (1953) presents a fractured, wilfully obscure, dreamlike structure of the kind Bertolt Brecht may have approved of. In Britain, ITV’s six-part adaptation of Alan Garner’s young adult novel The Owl Service (1969) captures much of the formal and political urgency of the period.
The Owl Service, 1969-70
There are several obvious examples of children’s film and television influencing ‘adult’ fiction. The anarchist, self-reflexive ‘adult’ humour and formal experimentalism of the Warner Bros animated shorts directed by Tex Avery and Chuck Jones is a major influence on contemporary adult animated series such as South Park, Family Guy and BoJack Horseman, and Lotte Reiniger’s pioneering silhouette animation paved the way for subsequent auteurist creators of stop-motion animation for adults, such as Jan Švankmajer.
Finding queer and other radical meanings
Children’s film and television is also an enormously rich site for appropriation for radical purposes by adults. Hypothetically, these practices of radical appropriation could take any number of forms, but they mostly fall into two common types. The first is systematic (re)interpretation, where individuals or communities make apparently conventional content radical or subversive. One example is the practice of ‘queering’, in which LGBTQ audiences interpret or ‘decode’ queer meanings or otherwise co-opt seemingly heteronormative culture.
On the face of it, The Wizard of Oz is not very radical at all, yet the film – and its star, Judy Garland – have become icons for generations of queer people to the extent that the phrase ‘Friend of Dorothy’ became a common codeword for homosexuality in the mid-20th century. And while the relationship between Bert and Ernie in Sesame Street might be viewed ‘innocently’ as purely platonic (as repeatedly claimed by the Sesame Workshop) scholars like Ryan Bunch advocate for ‘guilty’ readings, interpreting Bert and Ernie as a queer couple.
Bert and Ernie
Queering is just one of many ways in which (oppressed) communities colonise mainstream media content. Appropriations aren’t always innocuous: they’re often implicated within practices of social activism. James Cameron’s Avatar franchise has been adopted as a focal point for climate activists, building on the films’ clear ecological themes and exploiting their popularity to buttress an international political movement. In a similar vein, in the early 1970s Yellow Submarine lent its name – and part of its ethos – to a series of communes ostensibly built on countercultural, radically utopian principles. In these instances, audiences have taken seeds of ‘radical potential’ in children’s film and television as fuel for transformative social practices.
This leads us to the second dominant form of radical appropriation – parodic subversions of children’s film and television culture for either aesthetic or political ends. In the infamous ‘copypasta’ Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life, an anonymous first-person narrator recalls an incident in childhood in which Shrek entered their bedroom and raped them. The story was later developed into various short animated films and pieces of artwork that have been accessed online millions of times.
These texts might be seen as underground precursors of lucrative, commodified forms of mainstream participatory culture such as the hentai and deep fake porn that circulates freely on digital platforms, many of which feature characters from the mainstream landscape of children’s entertainment, and the seemingly subversive (but actually facile) horror parodies, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023), and The Mouse Trap (2024). Both these films are based on beloved icons of children’s culture newly in the public domain. These parodies of beloved children’s cultural figures are clearly predicated on a desire to subvert the projections of innocence and restraint supposedly at the heart of the properties.
The Mouse Trap
This impulse to puncture excessive ‘childish’ sentimentality seems to be particularly strong when directed at the mainstream children’s cultural industry, which commodifies values of ‘childhood’ and ‘innocence’ for mercenary ends by conglomerates that hide their ethically dubious practices beneath a veneer of respectability. Many of these appropriations may appear to be crafted for the consumption of adults, and their foregrounding of sex, death and depravity is certainly ‘adult’ in the sense of violating common conceptions of suitability for child audiences, reminding us that much of what passes for ‘children’s culture’ is actively consumed by adults – and, of course, is usually the work of adults in the first place.
However, it is as well to remember that what children consume beyond the supervision of adults is similarly (and shockingly) ‘adult’. In fact, many children and young people themselves are avid producers of audiovisual content, often in ways that subvert the very structures and conventions that the (adult) mainstream children’s media industry maintains through institutional mechanisms and regulatory control.
There is a caveat to all this talk of radicalism, of course. Definitions of radical culture are rarely clear-cut, and this is especially true of children’s film and television. Producers have often grappled with the problem of manufacturing subversive content that is not so visibly radical that it falls foul of censorship restrictions and other unspoken codes that curtail children’s culture. A large proportion of children’s media culture occupies a safe middle ground, upholding simple moral binaries and reaffirming ‘good’ behavioural conduct as part of a larger apparatus of socialisation. These conventions respond to broader cultural expectations that children’s culture should be wholesome and at least appear to be non-political.
Children’s desire for justice
Despite this, there is a long, diverse and often surprising history of films and TV for young people that challenge accepted social and aesthetic norms, aiming to disturb our view of the world at large and reimagine childhood as a site of potentiality for building a better future. Radical traditions of children’s film and television present manifestos for change: they offer up a counterpoint to what Michel Foucault calls ‘the silent sedimentation of things said’. Children’s film and television culture is also fertile ground for a range of social and political movements, and has had a transformative effect on the hearts and minds of generations of people, young and old. And in that sense, a radical children’s film and television isn’t just possible – it is inevitable.
A final thought about the importance of radical children’s culture. This article (like the book it represents) isn’t intended as a piece of advocacy, but I do maintain that radical content for children has a role to play in challenging the status quo. It’s worth acknowledging that the very mention of ‘radical’ children’s film and television would elicit horror – both real and manufactured – in some quarters. But we should remember that children are often innately radical themselves, in two very different ways. The first is obvious: their behaviour is often anarchic in a way that adult society views as anathema to civilisation. The second is more subtle, and more pertinent: children often believe – because they’re taught by adults to believe – in fairness, equality and diversity, and to challenge injustice and irrationality.
Children’s desire for justice
Ironically, this desire for a just world can make children seem radical in societies afflicted by falsehoods, division, corruption, structural inequality and rampant destruction. The radicalism of children, and children’s film and television, is not a matter for disquiet; it reveals our own failures and hypocrisies and turns them back on us. In a radically damaged world, we need a children’s media culture that offers up new ways of thinking and living, and which gives young and old people alike the tools to change culture and society – hopefully for the better.
Radical Children’s Film and Television, edited by Noel Brown, is available here.
