in ways quite distinct from the reception of children’s literature, the film is viewed,
reviewed, extracted by adults in subsequent generations with or without their children.
Stylistically, The Wizard of Oz reveals what for many years in America was thought to be
an essential ingredient of a full-length feature film for children—music and song. In fact,
one film—a cartoon film—The Jungle Book (1967) rests almost entirely on animation
shaped and cut to fit some witty song writing, rather than following much that Rudyard
Kipling had to say in The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895). It
shows quite clearly, that audiences initiated in a given children’s book, cannot expect
what are called ‘faithful’ reproductions in the cinema.
Mary Poppins (1964) and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang (1967) (the latter taken from Chitty-
Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car (1964) by Ian Fleming) were two films that continued
the tradition of what is in effect the Hollywood musical comedy form. P.L.Travers’s books
about Mary Poppins started to come out in 1934, with quirky illustrations by Mary
Shepard. Though they were fairly well-known up until the 1950s, the Disney film made
the character and a version of the stories popular with millions of people. Such films are
then integrated into the television and video systems and are watched by millions more.
In this way, the Mary Poppins concept is diversified into many different conditions of
reception: child and the book at home, child and the book at school, child with or
without adults in the cinema, child at home with a video and so on. In this way, children
have come to take hold of Mary Poppins, possess the character in a variety of ways, by
far the most popular being to sing and re-sing the songs that Julie Andrews sings in the
film.
Incidentally, this process is then incorporated into a version of the star structure,
whereby children who like Julie Andrews can (and do) follow her to other films—like The
Sound of Music (1965)—even if they are not expressly made for children. Christmas
viewing in Britain usually finds a place for one or more of these films where they are
seen and re-seen by several generations of people.
A question arises here about risk. The film industry as a whole frequently makes
challenging, awkward and dangerous films for adult audiences. Can the film industry do
the same with films that they put out as children’s entertainment? If not, why not? In
Britain, the Children’s Film Foundation put out many films through the late 1940s and
1950s that were shown in cinemas on Saturday mornings and even now occasionally
turn up on satellite television stations. These were generally low-budget knock-about
comedies, thrillers or both. Occasionally they graduated to the role of being B-movies
(support acts) to comedy films such as those acted in by the English actor Norman
Wisdom. With the blockbuster children’s films such as Mary Poppins, which has a mildly
subversive tone to it concerning behaviour and greed, the children’s film becomes a kind
of sanitised zone, where the film industry puts on its decent-family-values face.
Meanwhile for the rest of the year it can show its normal round of adultery, murder and
horror. With television and video, children see most of these films too. So what has
grown up, at least since the 1970s, is a strange schizophrenic viewing structure. Film
makers, publicity managers and critics create something everyone calls a children’s film
like ET The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), but which cannot really be defined as such on the
basis of audience alone, for just as many children will see The Terminator (1984) or
Ghostbusters (1984) which are classified by the film boards as adult, and needing
THE CONTEXT OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 527