Silly Rabbit! Cartoons are for Kids! #6

This post is a continuation of my last one.  I went on a bit long there, so I decided to break it up.

I’m one of the most cynical people you’re ever going to meet. Any time a new media franchise hits my radar, the first thing I notice is how it’s marketed. I pick apart marketing tactics and fan-baits before I even stop to think about it. I don’t do that intentionally; it’s just ingrained in me from mass media research.  Sometimes I have to force myself to stop seeing everything as a marketing ploy.

I still don’t see anything wrong with Disney making a profit, or building another theme park, or doing a good job with its marketing so that the parks keep running and the movies keep coming out every year or two.  That’s because the commercial side of filmaking and theme parks doesn’t change the value of a good movie, and I want to see good animated movies.

We have a weird way of relating to money in the West, especially in the United States. We value artistic expression to the point that we idolize it. We value independence and entrepreneurship to the point that business leaders like Lee Iacocca, Warren Buffett, and Steve Jobs become cultural icons. We want to be entertained. We love our books, and our movies, our television programs, and our video games.  Yet, when our entertainers have the business sense to make a lot of money, we treat them with suspicion and snide comments.  They become our guilty pleasures because we think they’re greedy, but in reality, they’re no more greedy than the business leaders we admire.

I’m not a dewy-eyed Disney fangirl.  I don’t idealize Walt Disney or the company he built.  I do admire the man, and I appreciate the contributions that the Walt Disney Company makes in filmmaking and philanthropy. I especially appreciate the fact that Walt Disney Parks have always been leaders in making rides and attractions accessible to patrons with disabilities. There are a lot of things I would like to see Disney do better in terms of its movie content. There are a lot of things I would like to see the Disney parks do better, and I’m not blind to the environmental and social problems associated with them.  It’s still not fair to imply that Disney movies have no cultural value because they’re heavily marketed.

What else could it possibly have been today? Really.

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Silly Rabbit! Cartoons are for Kids! #5

My next couple of posts respond to criticisms of the Walt Disney Company around marketing. I tried to make my responses more general since I haven’t done Disney content for Sourcerer yet, but I felt they lost something when I took out the connection to the specific studio.

Except for a few points like the theme parks and charity involvement, all of this does apply to Filmation or any other animation house that does transmedia material or toy tie-ins.
Walt Disney was an animator. He had a dream for a theme park and made it happen. Having a dream and the commitment, ambition, and intelligence to see that dream made a reality are good things. There are now several more theme parks and the Walt Disney Company is a money making enterprise that intentionally creates media tie-ins to the theme parks.

There are good and bad aspects to that.  I’m not blind to the problems created by the parks or some unintentional social problems that come from continuing to market decades-old movies to children.  For now, I’ll just say there’s an obvious commercial aspect to any Disney movie or Disney related media.

That doesn’t mean the movies have no value. They’ve been part of our history and culture for almost 100 years. Disney Studios has done more for the advancement of Western animation than any other company. That’s valuable. The fact that Disney has a commercial side doesn’t change the artistic value and quality of the movies. (“Quality” is a subjective term, but I don’t know anyone who could reasonably argue that Disney Studios doesn’t have a reputation for pioneering animation. )

Filmmaking costs money. Feature-length cartoons take a huge commitment to produce well.  They’re a gamble.  In order to make a movie, you have to have enough money to cover the cost of the movie. That means you have to market the movie like crazy in order to get people to go see it and spend money while they’re there. You have to make a profit in order to keep making movies, and you have to convince your audience that all of your movies are worth seeing.

All of those things are also true for running a theme park (or multiple theme parks in this case.)

Disney Citizenship, Disney Voluntears, and the Disney Worldwide Outreach Program do a lot of good in the world, and since the 90s, Disney has made an effort to make more socially conscious films and attractions.  Also since the 90s, Disney has been at the forefront in making its parks and attractions welcoming to individuals with disabilities.  Those things also cost money.

I’ve blogged before about what a big deal it was (and continues to be) that so many Disney films have female protagonists.  I’ve never seen a Disney movie that didn’t present opportunities for parents to talk to their kids about social issues.  Not all of that is intentional, but it’s there.

So is Disney concerned with profit and marketing? Absolutely.  I just don’t think that changes whether the movies are worth watching.

Here’s a clip from Cinderella 2, which I am probably among a total of five people who like.

Silly Rabbit! Cartoons are for Kids! #4

In my last couple of posts, I blogged about  the over-emphasis on messages and morals in deciding the value of a children’s story. I’d like to continue that line of thought today and talk a little about the development of modern cartoons.

Until about 30 years ago, there was no concept that movies or television programs could be recorded and packaged for future generations to buy. Social values were very different, and it wasn’t considered the responsibility of authors or entertainment companies to provide social lessons for their audiences in the same way it is today. Socially relevant content and messages were there, but they were usually less overt or at least less connected to social and political consciousness.  Movies and TV programs with questionable “messages” were shocking and largely boycotted.  Ones with acceptable messages were held up, the same way they are today.  The difference is that today we seem to have a blanket assumption that animation studios are supposed to be a surrogate parents and have a responsibility to provide role models for children.

That began in the 1980s, and most of the reasons for it are related to marketing. For the first time, lots of people had home entertainment systems and access to a catalog of older cartoons that no one anticipated would gain such a wide audience. We also had a dramatic change in laws around marketing during children’s programming. That led to a whole plethora of cartoons that were intended as half-hour toy ads. Most of these cartoons created moral segments or life lessons as a way to offset the intense pressure from parents’ groups who didn’t want toy-ads like this directed at their children.

Thirty years later, we have three generations of Western children who have grown up with cartoons teaching them “lessons.” There are good and bad aspects to that. I’m obviously a huge fan of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, which was the first ever half-hour syndicated cartoon program that was written to run every afternoon. Several of my friends enjoy My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Both of those programs have episodes that basically run around “teachable moments.”

There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s an ENORMOUS problem with adults who make statements like “He-Man is better than anything running today because it always had a moral at the end,” or “I refuse to let my daughter watch Disney movies because the princesses are interested in marriage and that makes them bad role models.”

Yes, I have in fact heard both of those things.

On the other side of the issue, the fact that putting life-lessons in these stories was motivated by marketing doesn’t mean that the stories or the lessons they include have no value.  There are marketing concerns associated with any film or television production.  It’s important to be aware of that and to be discerning, but I think it’s more important to take responsibility for educating our kids instead of foisting off that responsibility onto animation studios and then complaining when the studio doesn’t step up adequately. Exactly whose responsibility is it to guide our children and to make sure they know the difference between real and pretend? I sure don’t think the answer is “animation studios.”

And because I’m feeling snarky, here are some more He-Man morals for your viewing pleasure.

Silly Rabbit! Cartoons are for Kids! #3

Last time, I mentioned some problems I have with the over-emphasis on messages and morals in deciding the value of a children’s story.

I spend an inordinate amount of time reading reviews of children’s films and television. I read discussions on forums and on Youtube where most viewers don’t seem to be commenting as parents or guardians. More and more, I see adults clamoring about messages and morals in children’s media.  Shows are “good” if they have a good lesson to teach and “bad” if they don’t.  What exactly constitutes a “good lesson” is entirely dependent on the person commenting.

I expect a certain amount of that from parents and grandparents reviewing on Amazon or Netflix. It’s natural for people who have children to be conscious of those things and to want the majority of their kids programming to be in line with their personal values.

I think most stories do have some kind of implied lesson or social commentary.  Any time you have a villain, you have an implied lesson.  Any time you have a character who experiences loss or change, there’s an opportunity for lessons of various kinds. A problem develops when we start judging stories based on the “lessons” they teach and ignore any other value they might have.

That’s what people seem to do with children’s media today.  It’s become so pervasive that anytime I go on YouTube to watch a cartoon or participate in an online discussion, I run into debates about whether this or that show is “good” based on what social message it sends or if there’s some overt “lesson” for the audience.The average YouTube viewer is probably not a conservative parent in his/her forties, so it’s not about certain demographics being uptight.  It’s all over the place.

Stories have an enormous potential to teach and to effect social change. I have a post here about why LeVar Burton is awesome because of his involvement with Reading Rainbow and the television miniseries Roots.  I absolutely believe in using media and modern technology as teaching tools, and will go to bat for their inclusion in any curriculum.

That’s still completely different from expecting an overt social message or lesson to be present in every story written for audiences under the age of 12, and complaining when the story in question doesn’t match our cultural or personal values.  Those things are all subjective and can change rapidly even within a handful of years.

Stories have value beyond social commentary and life lessons.  People like stories for all kinds of reasons. They’re valuable because they reflect our experiences or because they show us things we haven’t experienced yet. There’s nothing wrong with a story that has a moral lesson, or cultural commentary, but do those things really determine its value? If the answer is yes, what does that say about us?

Besides.  This is what you get when you insist on an explicit lesson EVERY time.