Negotiating National Boundaries in Recent British Children's Cinema and Television. In
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Citation: Shail, RS (2019) Negotiating national boundaries in recent British children’s cinema and television. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Children’s Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 365-378. ISBN 9783030176198 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17620-4_20 Link to Leeds Beckett Repository record: https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/eprint/6055/ Document Version: Book Section (Accepted Version) The aim of the Leeds Beckett Repository is to provide open access to our research, as required by funder policies and permitted by publishers and copyright law. The Leeds Beckett repository holds a wide range of publications, each of which has been checked for copyright and the relevant embargo period has been applied by the Research Services team. We operate on a standard take-down policy. If you are the author or publisher of an output and you would like it removed from the repository, please contact us and we will investigate on a case-by-case basis. Each thesis in the repository has been cleared where necessary by the author for third party copyright. If you would like a thesis to be removed from the repository or believe there is an issue with copyright, please contact us on [email protected] and we will investigate on a case-by-case basis. Negotiating National Boundaries in recent British Children’s Cinema and Television Robert Shail Abstract In his study of British children’s cinema, Noel Brown suggests its distinctive character has been challenged by the globalisation of media culture, arguing that productions with a strong reference to national contexts are under pressure to homogenise their content to please a wider demographic. This chapter examines the British animation studio, Aardman, whose output, and particularly its films featuring Wallace and Gromit, make extensive use of national cultural references. This has provided varying success internationally with some releases, especially those made with American backing, being criticised for sacrificing distinctiveness for commercial ends. How viable is it for children’s cinema and television to maintain a connection with the national culture from which it emanates? And what is lost, or gained, in the attempt to appeal to children across national boundaries? Short Biography Robert Shail is Professor of Film at the Northern Film School and Director of Research for the School of Film, Music and Performing Arts, both at Leeds Beckett University. His earlier research focused on postwar British cinema, stardom and masculinity and includes his study of Welsh actor/producer Stanley Baker for which he received an AHRC Fellowship. More recently he has investigated children’s popular culture including comic books, television and cinema. His study The Children’s Film Foundation: History and Legacy (Palgrave/British Film Institute 2016), which was supported by an award from the Leverhulme Trust, was warmly received. 1 Introduction When considering the often heated debates regarding the nature of national identities, a common starting point is Benedict Anderson’s landmark study Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (2006). Anderson is best remembered for his concept of nations as states ‘imagined’ by their own citizens, where feelings of belonging are engendered not so much by governments or outlines on maps but more by loosely defined sentiments rooted in history, culture and everyday practices (Anderson 2006). For Anderson, the imagined nation gradually came into being as two previously dominant forms of imagining identity, religion and dynasty, went into decline during the nineteenth century. As national identity rose to pre-eminence as a means of self-definition, forms of cultural communication were crucial to its influence and discourse. Initially this meant that it was printed material “which made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and relate themselves to others” within a framework of national identities (Anderson 2006, 36). Seen within this context, something as seemingly liminal as children’s cinema and television can also, therefore, play its part in both forming that sense of imagined national community and reflecting back how it has been constructed in the wider discourses. Anything created for children has the added potency brought about by its role in education and personal development, as well as through the feelings of nostalgia which it can evoke. Noel Brown’s comprehensive history of British children’s cinema often touches on the way in which key films have reflected, elaborated on, or even subverted dominant notions of national identity in the UK. His detailed analysis of The Railway Children (1970), for example, examines how the film embodied a range of national characteristics, including a strong sense of historical period and the romantic use of landscapes, as well as family bonds and relationships, which tapped into national mythologies, such that it was an easy choice for 2 the first ever Royal Matinee Performance attended by various youthful members of the wider Royal Family (Brown 2016, 183). This potency was increased further by its appearance at a time of growing national economic and social crisis. Such narratives have become embedded in the national consciousness. However, Brown suggests that the success of British children’s cinema, and by association television, has come under increasing pressure in the face of media globalisation in the last twenty years. Brown cites the cultural value of British children’s cinema as lying precisely in its ability to reflect national concerns but sees this as coming under the influence of a “necessary commercial pragmatism” as the pressure of the “global family media marketplace” has necessitated the dilution of these qualities in the pursuit of an increasingly homogenised (and, by implication, Americanised) concept of success (Brown 2016, 263). The very qualities that give British children’s cinema and television their value are, therefore, endangered by the dissolution of national cultural boundaries. This essay has been written in response to Brown’s concerns and focuses on a case study of the production company Aardman Animations whose success has been bound- up with precisely these questions of national identity and globalisation. The Context of British Children’s Cinema and Television Before looking at the debates around the impact of globalisation, and examining the example of Aardman, it’s worth outlining briefly the historical context out of which the company developed. The area remains remarkably neglected in terms of academic scholarship. A brief online search reveals one major study of British children’s cinema, the aforementioned British Children’s Cinema: From the Thief of Baghdad to Wallace and Gromit by Noel Brown. By comparison there are a far greater number of books on British children’s television but their focus remains resolutely on either children as an audience, the educational, social and psychological effects of television on children, or on questions of 3 policy and regulation, as seen in Davies and Kelley’s Children’s Television in Britain: History, Discourse and Policy (1999) or Television, Childhood and the Home: A History of the Making of the Child Television Audience in Britain by David Oswell (2002). Very little critical attention has been paid to the actual content of the films or programs themselves as creative texts, let alone their interaction with concepts of nationality. Brown’s study of British children’s cinema begins with the silent era, moves across key genres such as the adventure film, charts the popularity of star performers like George Formby or Norman Wisdom, and covers the work of influential companies like Disney (who at various periods have focused on making films in the UK with specifically British cultural content aimed at children). It’s useful to consider his analysis of a specific film to show how he delineates elements which evoke a notion of Britishness. Brown is especially fond of Bryan Forbes’ Whistle Down the Wind (1961), a film not made solely for children but which depicts childhood and has retained a strong appeal to family audiences (Brown 2016, 132- 36). Like The Railway Children, the film makes skilful use of its rural landscapes, there is an emphasis on realism in the depiction of everyday life, and children are seen as ‘embodying innocence and virtue’ (Brown 2016, 133). There is also a strong feeling for place, in this case the environs of Burnley in the industrial north west of England. Another important feature for Brown is the degree to which children, and children’s cinema, can be the home of purposefully oppositional sentiments. Here it is the innocence of the children - mistaking an escaped convict (Alan Bates) for Jesus - which contrasts all the more starkly with the failures and cynicism of the adult world. These adults are ‘joylessly self-preoccupied, they merely pay lip service to Christian precepts of love and forgiveness, and have little understanding of transcendent concepts of beauty and lyricism” (Brown 2016, 133). These oppositional 4 qualities are seen by Brown as being a recurrent motif in the British children’s cinema, where genuinely dark and challenging material is frequently dealt with. Similar qualities are to be found in the work of the Children’s Film Foundation (CFF), a unique body created in the UK, albeit imitated elsewhere afterwards. The CFF were founded in the early 1950s with the express intention of supporting a national network of Saturday morning children’s film clubs by providing suitable entertainment. Their output covered educational shorts, travelogues, adventure serials, knockabout comedy, and the distinctive sixty-minute features which usually formed the second half of the Saturday morning programs. As well as providing entertainment, the CFF strived towards shaping the adult citizens of tomorrow with an emphasis on values seen as being characteristically British such as fair play, politeness, honesty, and a concern for others (Shail 2016, 8-16).