parental supervision, respectively. Television and video sales and rentals defy age rank
and age genre. It is almost as if the genre ‘children’s film’ can be defined as a film by
virtue of certain elements (for example, nakedness, sawn-off limbs) not being present.
The structuring of one of the television audiences as ‘family’ may have something to do
with all this: it being an area that satisfies criteria laid down by the agendas of religious
organisations, right-wing political parties and various so-called ‘moral’ ginger groups. All
this has a great bearing on what kind of risks children’s films can take.
Two film adaptations of Roald Dahl books, Danny (1988) (from Danny, The Champion
of the World (1975) and The Witches (1990) (from the book of the same name, 1983)
highlight this issue. In Danny, The Champion of the World, Danny narrates a series of
clashes with authority that he and his father go through. The boy narrator makes clear
that this is in order to show the importance of his relationship with his father. The film
uses the objective camera mode, the boy is not particularly favoured by the camera, and
there is no sound-over narration from him. In other words, the film shifts the focus of the
book away from the child. The book might be considered dangerous because it supports
a child’s eye view of subversive behaviour, the boy expresses solidarity with his father’s
defiance of authority—and acts upon it. The film shows the father as performing the
same subversive acts but we do not see it from the child’s point of view or with his
commentary. Quite subtly, the danger of children identifying quite so whole-heartedly
with adult illegality has been lessened and the anti-authoritarianism is made just more
acceptable. Is there a problem that children in children’s films cannot be seen to be as
much in charge or as much in control as Roald Dahl presented them? With The Witches
the film-makers changed the ending. In the book, the boy hero remains transformed as
a mouse, in the film he is restored to human form.
In both cases, Dahl, as writer, chose the least conventional (more subversive?)
approach. With Danny he allows the child to celebrate the anti-authoritarian episodes,
and in The Witches Dahl upsets a golden rule of children’s fiction— restoration after
conflict or transformation. The film-makers could not live with it. Perhaps these two
examples show that though there is no scope at all for claiming the superiority of all
reading over all films, there are grounds for saying, that the commercial film industry,
constructed as it is, is not yet able to be as unconventional as the children’s publishing
industry.
Television for children in America and Britain began with cartoons and puppets, the
latter being a curious choice given that puppetry was not at that time a deeply
embedded form in British popular culture. Perhaps it was derived in part out of the
pseudo-puppetry of many children’s book illustrations of the previous thirty years, as
with Mabel Lucy Attwell or the illustrations for Enid Blyton’s ‘Noddy’ books (beginning
1949); and also in part out of the highly popular children’s radio series ‘Toytown’ (1929–
1964). Puppetry and cartooning have proved to be great survivors in children’s television.
Cartooning, a highly labour-intensive process, is sustained by multinational deals which
help determine the films’ aesthetic to be either American or ‘mid-Atlantic’ or non-local.
In recent years the Japanese have very successfully entered the market with a series of
warrior fantasies derived in part from the ancient Greeks (there has been a modernised
sequel to The Odyssey) and ideas derived from Japanese horror films. In fact there is an
international marketplace for cartoons where television companies bid for silent versions
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