1.
What if children's media was art?
Well, I guess we live in a world where that's sort of a settled question, isn't it? It's cool to watch kid's movies, and tiktok is full of recommendations for the next big Young Adult book. We live in an All Ages World.
But ok, dream up a world for me where children's books aren't considered literature, children's animation isn't "for adults too", and so on. Imagine everyone agreed this stuff was not art. Then imagine you, contrary to everyone around you, do hold it in artistic esteem and want to rally others to your cause.
What would that actually mean for how you relate to children's media? What kind of criticism would you do in this imaginary world?
2.
Recently I showed my partners a short cartoon called "Rarg". The world of Rarg is so perfect, the cartoon introduces, that the sun simply doesn't come up until it's sure everyone is awake and ready for the day. It's a delightful, silly utopia, complete with a marvelous library where the scholars of Rarg make discoveries.
The plot of the cartoon gets going when one white-whiskered scientist discovers, after years of research, that Rarg, in point of fact, exists entirely inside someone's dream. And that dreamer's alarm clock is about to go off.
Now, if children's media was art, I think it wouldn't be surprising to hear that this summary can't do Rarg justice. I can lay out the plot, which involves building a grand gateway to the real world and a desperate mission to retrieve the dreamer and take him into his own dream before he can wake up. And I could tell you the strange, unsettling, triumphant ending-- well, it's all on YouTube and it's not very long, surely you'd want to experience the art yourself, right?
There's a host of ways to approach criticism of a film like Rarg. Most of them online are pretty bad. Like, for a while critics of nostalgia flooded the internet with cartoon analysis amounting to, "Ha ha wow isn't this WEIRD? What a messed up thing to show a kid, it's a wonder we aren't all traumatized!" Rarg is, I suppose, weird. To the best of my recollection, there WAS something existentially unsettling about the film. It wasn't, by any means, The Matrix, in depth or in tone, but it started me asking questions like "just what is this thing we call a world, anyway, and how do we know what's real?" What makes Rarg special, and what a lot of gawking nostalgia criticism misses, is the artfulness of introducing expansive questions and ideas to children in a form they might connect with both narratively and emotionally, delivering without overwhelming. Art, for children.
Selma G. Lanes, in her books Down the Rabbit Hole: Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children's Literature and the much later Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures...&c., presents a radically different approach, one that felt so refreshing that I couldn't help but write this few thousand words about how much I like it. For one thing, she talks about children as thinking creatures capable of understanding art. Child audiences for Lanes show real resilience. But they're also, you know, children, and her criticism presumes that children's media can be literary, while still being comprehensible and appealing to children. The two things are always intertwined. I like this commitment of hers to the bit. I mean, to be sure her books are a project of critical elevation, of saying "these are art objects worthy of study, that can withstand sustained analysis." But it doesn't mistake the argument that these books are literary and have something to offer adults, with the notion that they are the same as adult literature, and can replace adult literature.
This involves a lot more distinction drawing and in fact sharp critique than you might expect. Lanes is out to prove that this material is worthy of study, and has pointed things to say about works that "help to perpetuate the unfortunate reputation children's literature has for prose of a marshmallow consistency and a life view corroborated only by the greeting-card industry." The fact that lines like that are so entertaining to read is just one of those added bonuses of reading really good criticism. That line comes from the opening of a chapter contrasting the work of Kate Greenaway--who she likes--with Joan Walsh Anglund--who she's less thrilled with. I had no familiarity with either, and definitely wouldn't have pulled out the distinctions Lanes does between two writers and illustrators who do, after all, write inoffensive poems and draw inoffensive drawings of small children, for- well, not for small children exactly, Lanes asserts at one point, but rather for adult readers feeling nostalgic about childhood as a concept. But she does manage to draw out a distinction between Greenaway's close observation of the "airy landscapes" of the English countryside compared to the artificiality of Anglund's pictures: "it perhaps says something of Mrs. Anglund's all-pervasive, sugar-coated sentimentality that even picket fences in her world seem always to have rounded points." And I have to hand it to Lanes: Anglund's exaggeratedly pure tykes do have a dead eyed funko pop look to them.
Lanes isn't interested in pretending that lines from a poem about growing up and sailing the world like:
We'll wait till we are older
For if we went today,
You know that we might lose ourselves
And never find the way.
are a form of adult literature, but she finds in them an adult's observation of children, and of childhood, and of the world. This she contrasts with Anglund:
"'Love is a happy feeling/that stays inside your heart/for the rest of your life.' Not so. Love is an elusive feeling, for children as well as adults. Like quicksilver, it comes and goes as an awareness. ... 'And a stone is brown,' she tells us in What Color Is Love?, simply to complete a rhyme. 'But it seldom is!' the honest child in us cries out." Just because these are books written for children, and even written with a similar approach to childhood as a time of innocence (which not all children's authors share!) doesn't mean you can just give them any old slop, and being a children's media critic means making distinctions and doing close analysis of what even things like the quality of an artist's brushstrokes do to meaning.
What if we wanted to make the case for Rarg as art, in the way Lanes makes her arguments? Just look at the way it conveys its magically surreal finale (which you DID go and watch, didn't you?). You know I do remember it unsettling me, that this entire civilization could dissolve into... flamingos! Pink flamingos! And there's something profoundly mindbending (and gnostic) about the way these characters resolve to rebel against their creator and stuff him into his own dream. But it plays the up and down of this plotline in a way to toy with anxiety while also trying never to push over too far into existential dread. I love the joke where the narrator matter-of-factly states: "The whole population panicked," and there's a long pause as we observe the Senator with a smile frozen glassily on his face in shock, before a smash cut to a bunch of people running around screaming. In the best cartoon tradition, it turns what could be nightmarish into slapstick comedy. And the sheer joy as the characters seem to recognize the transformation overtaking them and greet it in their own way... I don't think it's surprising, honestly, that I remembered and sought out the cartoon 25 years later.
I'm not sure I understood it at the time. I think I may just about have grown into it, now. What is art if not something that you find yourself growing into, year after year?
3.
Part of making distinctions is understanding why someone produced a piece of media. Sometimes art is far from the minds of the producers, and it's sort of a relief to be absolved by Lanes of any particular compulsion to take seriously what is, essentially, shovelware. There's a whole string of chapters in the book dedicated to the actual market for kids' books, and the way that market has changed and continues to evolve. It's useful stuff. I think online criticism as a whole--and god knows I've been guilty of this--tends to steer away from markets and production as anything other than footnotes used to declare cultural victory in one way or another ("look how much money James Cameron keeps making!").
Lanes, in contrast, treats production as significant, though not something that absolutely predestines a book to be good or garbage. There's a whole bracing quote at the beginning of her chapter on what she calls "merchandise books" from Robert Lasson (I wasn't able to track down the original source) that warns against mistaking things for books that are merely masquerading as the real thing:
"It's not a book. It's a product. A product that slyly takes on the trappings of the real thing. A product is intended not to inform or to instruct or even to amuse but to sell. If the product is successful, it is a good product. If it fails, it is a poor product."
It's Lanes's contention that these merchandise books aren't constructed around an intended reading audience but an intended buying audience. They frequently make use of what we'd call "recycled assets": art they've already purchased the rights to or texts that are either in the public domain (folk songs, fairy tales, children's rhymes) or were bought at a flat rate. Many are repackaged collections of shorter books. There's an awful lot of gimmicks like textured inserts or dramatically carved page shapes. And above all else they're cheap to produce and get onto stands at department stores, where an adult might grab one for an unhappy child in a state of distracted desperation.
It's not that these books can't be art, Lanes points out, it's just that art is epiphenomenal to the actual aims of production, just like actually reading is epiphenomenal to the purchase: "though the purchasers of many--possibly most--merchandise books do not themselves read much, they know that books, like vitamins, are good for children."
This can sometimes feel like the attitude here, in the world where we know children's media is art. It could be an easy trap to fall into in the other world we're imagining too. Doesn't defending this media mean defending ALL of it? Well, why should it? In fact, how could it, if we're taking criticism seriously? It's not a problem so much of adhering to some standard of artistic purity as it is a problem of getting bored with stuff that can't hold our critical attention--stuff that turns out to be so focused on maintaining its "book shape" that it forgets to be an interesting book.
It's very funny that in her later chapter on book series Lanes can only sustain a few pages of focus on eternal shelf-stackers--Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift and Tom Swift Jr (my go-to series, as a budding science fiction fan)--before drifting off topic. Both Louisa May Alcott and E. Nesbit keep popping back up, despite all of their "series" being just 3 or 4 books featuring shared characters--a series to be sure but not exactly in the same category as what always seemed to Kid Samantha Keeper like endless marching hundreds of yellow Tom Swift spines making a wall on the library shelf.
It's gotta be because there's, after a while, just not a lot to say about books that always have, about 30 pages from the end, a chapter entitled "Kidnapped!" "Trapped!" "Wrecked!" "Past Participled!" and so on, where, as Lanes notes, characters find themselves "gulping" at each new development. Whereas it's endlessly delightful to talk about a writer like E Nesbit, a chain smoking socialist who consistently and openly in her texts takes the side of her young readers, conspires with them even. Lanes relishes this, highlighting a passage where Nesbit assures her young readers that this book is all the "really astonishing things" meant for them, not the "tiresome" behaviors that might satisfy the attitudes of their aunts and uncles. And while Lanes willingly concedes all the ways that a formulaic series does genuinely appeal to young readers, she notes that "though the Hardy boys and Nancy Drew encounter assorted wicked villains who behave bizarrely, they themselves always act with commendable decorum, paragons of well-brought-up young citizenry... Just as everything in children's first picture books suggests and ordered, comprehensible universe, so, too, these mystery adventures always yield ultimately to the heroes' or heroines' applied intelligence." There's just not an awful lot you can say about such a perfect clockwork mechanism of a universe.
As a child, my family would joke that "there's always a waterfall": the kids' movie equivalent of the obligatory "Past Participled!" chapter. Maybe I was a weird kid for picking this sort of thing out, but I do think part of growing up and learning about narrative involves learning when writers are being a bit hack. You start to notice that direct to video Disney sequels in particular seem enamored of waterfalls as a dramatic device when the plot couldn't quite figure out another way of keeping itself rolling. Oh everyone is in the water suddenly, floating along a river? What peril lurks around the bend, could it be perhaps... a waterfall?? I bet a lot of you remember the joke about this in The Emperor's New Groove, a joke that was ubiquitous in the trailers. Their resigned and disaffected irony about impending waterfall doom works so well because it exists in a wider context of gravitationally afflicted river hackery, and importantly, kids are smart enough to know it.
After a while the structure dictating the rhythms of the lives of Tom, Nancy, and the Hardy Boys crept into my awareness. Oh, and I started to feel a nagging suspicion that the slow-building serial plotline where each book an alien intelligence shot Tom Swift a new message--always intercepted or sabotaged by dastardly Eastern Bloc agents, naturally--wasn't actually going anywhere. I lost interest, graduating to other books, books more than book-shaped. An author like Bruce Coville, after all, somehow contrived to just give me aliens right away from the start without all this dicking around with various "Eurasian" and "South American" villains. This meant he could get to larger questions, sometimes ones I was probably not ready to handle, like "why can't humans keep babies from starving" and "what would an advanced alien coalition think if they looked at what we were doing to our own planet and noted our drive to spread out to the wider galaxy."
I do think there's something to the idea that the children's media that attracts us as adults is a little more literary, because I think that's what calls to at least some children, once they've experienced more stories. It's the work we turn to when we get bored of cliches and hack solutions. Analyzing Tom Swift Jr or Disney's The Lion King 2 Simba's Pride makes for good sociology. Five Children and It, or My Teacher Is An Alien, make for better literary criticism.
4.
Wham! Pow! Picture Books Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!
In the world where children's media still isn't considered art, we might surmise other media get similar treatment. I know, I know, I'm adding to the scenario here, but I think it's reasonable to imagine other genres--science fiction, fantasy, horror, pornography--and even entire other forms of art--comics, games, embroidery--similarly getting the critical cold shoulder. What might advocates of gutter arts, feminized arts, pop arts do in response?
In our world, it feels often like they drew hard lines around themselves, hyperspecialized, and distanced themselves rhetorically from their rivals in the race toward respectability. Comics in the US--especially with the advent of the Adult Graphic Novel--for decades defined itself against picture books. Early press (and even some contemporary press) frequently disclaimed that "comics aren't just for kids anymore!" Robert Harvey for example launches his "Art of the Comic Book" with a serious warning that "if you've come in here hoping to find a way to understand your preteen offspring by breaking the code embodied in the principal documents of their culture, be advised that you took a wrong turn back there at the bookshelf. This book isn't about children's literature." Which is kind of funny for a purported aesthetic exploration of comics. Everything you can say about the formal properties of Will Eisner's graphic novels surely could find some relevant applications in comics for kids, even if we're excluding picture books?
Scott McCloud, the great pop theorist of the English comics tradition, is particularly weird about children's lit. I mean, it hardly even comes up! Understanding Comics spends the bulk of its opening defining comics, and yet children's books don't come up at all, despite being the most obvious comparison point. He discusses everything from Max Ernst's experimental collage novel "A Week of Kindness" to the Bayeux tapestry, but the closest we get to a discussion of picture books is... I mean I guess it's the curt dismissal of Family Circus as not being a comic because it's not a sequence? Surely the "juxtaposed sequence of pictorial or other images" there consists of in the first part the image and in the second the appended lexile: the caption! Seems like a juxtaposition to me--and McCloud does concede that you could view it that way, but words are... different. (A strange distinction to make when so much of his other analysis rests on the idea that you can simply skip back and forth across the border between a highly abstracted image and a completely abstracted word, but this digression's gone on long enough.) I guess when I initially read McCloud I sort of inferred from the Family Circus dismissal that children's books just... aren't juxtaposed enough, or sequential enough, to count, but it's weird that it doesn't merit further explanation, particularly as later he briefly mentions children's books as blending image and text in the way comics do. His lament that we lose the image-text merger as we get older feels like it takes for granted a lack of artistic interest in children's picture books. (Though in fairness, children's literature in the form of comics for children are essential to his argument--one of the many things that made McCloud's work a seismic shift in American comics theory.)
On the other side of the trenches, what does Lanes have to say about comics? Well, basically nothing. They're totally absent from her text. This is notable, because she certainly talks about children's picture books in a way any comics theory student will recognize. In her chapter on "the picture book explosion":
"with the picture book, however, illustration assumed a new role: that of an equal partner in advancing the narrative thrust of whatever the tale might be. ... The words cannot stand independent of the illustrations nor, in theory at least, can the pictures without the text. Separately, their contribution is thin, incomplete."
That last charge, that the text and images alone are weak or even substandard, is one comics also struggle to beat. Later, in her chapter on illustrators Arthur Rackham and Maurice Sendak, she describes Rackham's illustrations as "a kind of bonus" and describes him as "cheerfully accept[ing] the independent domains of words and pictures". She contrasts this with Sendak, who seems to adopt either medium in turn when it might further the story. This makes Sendak seem an awful lot like a comic artist, which makes some sense. He's apparently friends with Art Spiegelman, and the two even collaborated on a comic, apparently passing the page back and forth... though, more on that later.
Comics themselves, though, she ignores completely. Even her 2004 follow-up, Through the Looking Glass, doesn't mention them at all. She even goes out of her way to describe the relationship between words and pictures as "a special amalgam found nowhere else in the world of books"! 2004, well into the boom of "graphic novels" and growing interest in comics for at least young adults!
I have to wonder if this isn't the struggle of comics essentially mirrored. Lanes, like McCloud and so many others, is using criticism to plead for legitimization for her particular medium. For comics theorists this meant distinguishing comics as for adults, unlike children's picture books. Maybe for theorists of children's literature this meant distinguishing their artistry and humanity from disposable gutter art like comic books, long a bugbear for educators, social workers, and culture war busybodies. I picture the two mediums, so alike in nature, engaged in a cartoon farce, each trying to shove the other under the rug, behind the window curtain, into the closet or tub, when the snooty Literature Enthusiasts knock on their shared apartment, each aiming to impress by pretending they've never met the other before.
5.
One way to carefully divide children's media (or some anyway) off from the pack is its value for moral instruction. Call it an advanced version of the nutritional benefits of book-shaped objects. Kids Media Shaped Objects are practically defined by their wholesomeness, and moral suitability is baked into ratings institutions and moral busybody organizations. And not with no reason: the idea that stories told to children have a moral is deeply baked into our culture. It's the ubiquitous expectation that sets up jokes like the Achewood strip where the character Liebot tells a grim story about a brave but doomed little Dutch boy. Concluding his tale on the note of the boy's mother needing to be "sent away by the doctor to be killed", Liebot caps the tale off with: "The End! No moral." Part of why this works so well as a punchline is that culturally we expect that when something horrible happens in children's media, it's there for a moral reason.
Unfortunately, this leads to all kinds of audience confusion. There's the tendency to assume, for example, that Kids Media is edifying even for adults to consume just because of its presumed moral orientation, which doesn't require much reflection. It's simple and good, like... whole wheat, or "unprocessed foods". But then what happens if kids media has discordant morals, or has artistic goals like spurring imagination or offering empathy beyond just telling kids to be Gallant, not Goofus? That risks breaking down the whole defining quality of kids' media! Certainly it's not something anyone let alone kids should be consuming. Here in the world where we've decided children's media is art, it seems we don't always agree on just what that means for appropriate storytelling.
What about the world where children's media still has to argue for itself?
Well, things certainly looked different in the 70s, I'll say that. For example, Lanes compares the works of the venerated Dr Seuss to Wilhelm Reich's orgone box, and suggests they provide "a literary release not so far removed from orgasm." Not quite "moral instruction"! It's a provocative way of starting her analysis but it's a compelling argument, that the narratives most delightful to Seuss happen when no adults brood around overshadowing the fun, and explore all sorts of forbidden pleasures--mostly the pleasures of making a great big mess. For Lanes, this means "the sort of thing which, if it took place in real life, would place an anxiety burden on most children impossible for them to bear... like squeezing all the toothpaste out of inviting new tubes or taking apart Aunt Zelda's gift alarm clock". Even Seuss's art is drawn into the mix--"no drawing detail seems to be at rest." His books, then, are a safe place to explore fantasies that in real life would be unbearably terrifying, concluding with a final relief.
What a great exploration of how books full of nonsense words and creatures still have a literary quality, an artistry worth analyzing. It's not, of course, that Lanes misses the moral messages within Seuss's works. She praises, for example, the "act of open and willful rebellion, almost Marcusian [‼] in its purity" where Zooie Katzenbein in King Louis Katz throws down another cat's tail, which he's been tasked with hoisting about, in fed up disgust. What's interesting to her again, though, is the collision of a "demo-catic" morality, the frenetic style of Seuss's cartooning and doggerel, and the emotional resonance with children who almost certainly have run against the frankly unfair demands of various authority figures. It's not just the moral that makes his works meaningful, but the entire presentation which makes big feelings and big ideas accessible to small children.
Those ideas might, in any case, be familiar to children already. That comic I mentioned earlier, the collaboration between Spiegelman and Sendak, has Sendak talking at length about the futility of trying to shield children from alarming subject matter. They already know it, he says, but have to keep that knowledge to themselves, lest they frighten the adults. From this perspective, limiting children's media to moral fables about "appropriate" subjects just comes across as talking down to kids about their own experience of the world.
Lanes's insights into the affective, anxiety-mediating qualities of children's books reminds me of a twitter thread Juniper sent to me the other day, a brief whimsical ode to the Lego set staple, Small Structure With Skeleton. The author, Harrison Lemke, confidently asserts that I tried my god damndest to make a stable accessible archive for this and failed. nitter is currently under C&D threat and the wayback machine can't capture tweets anymore. I considered mirroring the entire thread on my own site but that is a LOT of work, which would probably be easier if I was more practiced in doing cool jquery stuff, like just sort of waving my hand like I'm a stage magician while Mindfreak plays in the background. but I'm not. so sound off in the comments if you have a good lasting solution to making this resource available and stable long-term. "lego designers understand that in order to move a low-cost and otherwise drab piece of product, it is expeditious to include a glimpse of the undead". It's true! I was always drawn as a kid to Small Structures With Skeletons. More than that, I was drawn to assuredly villainous themes--the Fright Knights, the Time Twisters, whatever the underwater guys were called--and their tendency to include all manner of witches, bats, and of course skeletons.
I was a weird little goth even as an elementary schooler, is what I'm saying.
But also, I was a sensitive kid, prone to meltdowns and freakouts and all sorts of difficulty with emotional regulation, and I think I appreciated things that could give me my fears in a manageable form. As the thread remarks of a Lego Junior set, "even the very young are to be inaugurated into the mixed horrors and pleasures of the Small Structure With Skeleton". I like that. Mixed horrors and pleasures, like I was part of some Cenobite Kids Club.
An awful lot of children's media actually still stresses me the fuck out, is that weird to admit? There's a real conviction in some shows that aiming at children means teaching Good Lessons, and what better way to teach Good Lessons than to every episode have a character screw up and get punished for it, or at least scolded so they know not to do it again? I can handle your average Cronenberg chest vagina just fine, but hooboy, second hand embarrassment? No thanks buddy! Please tag your hard kinks!
I think sometimes the simple affective quality of fantasies for children gets lost in a contemporary discourse oriented strongly towards themes and messages. Stories that exist for pleasure, particularly the kind of pleasure that addresses and alleviates "the enormous anxiety burden [grownups' love of order] places on small children everywhere", also have worth. We might even import this insight into our discourse on adult media as well--anything to cut down on claims that sex scenes are "unnecessary"!
By a similar token we might ask whether characters in fiction exist just to be punished for their transgressions, or whether they can serve other purposes. Recently Sarah talked on Cohost about the wish fulfilment qualities of Steven Universe's ending, the fantasy of "what if you really could just yell understanding into the heads of the relatives who can't accept your queerness?" This ending feels a little silly to analyze just on the level of conveying Good Moral Messages. No, you can't solve empire by yelling at your racist grandma. Instead it's an affirmation of the self, independent of what is most convenient to authority figures in a child's--or, yes, an adult viewer's--life.
Not content to let that sentiment lie, I responded with a whole ramble about a very different form of wish fulfilment, embodied in the character Spinel. Spinel is disastrously wronged by Steven's mother, in her own desperate attempt to seize independence for herself. Once Spinel discovers the extent to which she has been neglected, cast unwittingly as "the loser of the game you didn't know you were playing", she goes on her own destructive rampage. She is a paranoid, damaged, unsettlingly erratic, often kind of annoying character, who unfortunately absolutely belongs somewhere on my kin wheel. How many times has someone decided to blow up some aspect of my life for the sake of their own "mental health needs?" When's it MY turn to have a comprehensive meltdown that everyone ELSE has to graciously forgive and look past?
Spinel might be the antagonist, but the film is concerned with her subjectivity, and consistently drawing her into parallel with Steven. Figures like the Diamonds are kept at a bit of a remove, and their song and its reprise are experienced mainly through the lens of how it makes Steven feel... and then, in the reprise, how it makes Spinel feel. Spinel also voices frustrations audiences might have with Steven: it's easy for HIM to preach about "making a change". When he changes, he changes for the better. When she (or maybe you or I) change, WE change for the WORSE!
There is an element of moral instruction to this, but the core of Spinel's story is an affective one, one that plays out the anxiety of having a destructive meltdown and still finding some forgiveness and love afterward. An old Calvin and Hobbes strip happened to cross my masto dash the other day, a pretty simple strip that mostly consists of Calvin's dad, in exaggerated fury, berates Calvin for breaking his new binoculars. In the final panel, drawn in the less exaggerated, "resting" style of the cartoon, a crying Calvin responds, to the now regretful looking father, "I have an idea, dad. Let's pretend I already feel terrible about it, and that you don't need to rub it in any more." For a child, I think the strip, like Spinel, exists to offer empathy: it understands the stress of being a kid and making mistakes is punishment enough.
If there's a moral instruction in this kids' cartoon strip, it's moral instruction for the adults reading.
6.
Here's a concession to the notion of good and bad messages: Youtube is probably kinda bad for kids, right? I say this having linked to a youtube high quality upload of Rarg earlier in this sequence. I'm glad it's preserved. I'm less thrilled that it seems to be preserved as part of a gigantic undifferentiated blob of "preschooler content" of varying quality levels, with no playlists or curation. Good for an autoplay algorithm; not great for finding other stuff like Rarg. This feels like a downgrade from how I encountered Rarg: on my local Public Broadcasting Station affiliate, as part of the program Long Ago And Far Away. This brilliant program saw James Earl Jones charmingly introducing a wide, curated library of beautiful and varied cartoons from around the world. The show is how I discovered not just Rarg but other lasting favorites, cartoons that I'm happy to show other adults now on the grounds that their animation is, yes, "art for adults too". The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship. The Man Who Planted Trees. Frog and Toad are Friends--which, would you believe it, the show did an entire brilliantly animated feature on the behind the scenes production of Frog and Toad's stop motion animation, which helped inspire a childhood artistic obsession with polymer clay.
In a sense a lot of media of that period was the equivalent now to youtube channels that collect and upload children's media, or to the Little Golden Books and similar franchises whose business model Lanes lays out as essentially repackaging existing material. I encountered so many cartoons through vhs tapes by, say, the Children's Circle imprint, which as far as I can tell mostly released collections of Weston Woods animated shorts. Some of these were fully animated features; others were limited animation productions designed to cheaply adapt children's picture books. If they weren't always masterpieces of animation, they were at least memorable enough that I was able to eventually locate the name of the company through my memory of their intro and logo: a simple iconic smiley face version of the ancient comedy and tragedy masks. And doesn't that logo say something about their aspirations to be literature, for children! These companies (and public broadcasters) operated through inexpensive repackaging and licensing, but there was clearly an interest in curation and quality.
It's gotta be kind of difficult to make the case anyone on youtube cares about curation and quality, especially now that the site is flooded with AI garbage.
It baffles me that so many seemingly good parents still let their kids watch youtube. I cannot imagine in a million billion years unleashing the youtube algorithm on a child. Back when all the discourse exploded about "disturbing youtube content" I felt such frustration at how quickly people turned toward the salacious, as though youtube or the ghost production companies churning out generative sludge were deliberately producing Child Corrupting Material. The Algorithm isn't an intelligence--it's just a statistical mathematical operation. The stuff it produces can be horrifying, but I think the horror goes much deeper than these aberrant results.
The horror is that instead of humans telling stories for children, children are simply being fed disconnected colors and noise. The horror is that we have socially decided that the primary purpose of children's media is to shut the brat up for a few hours by giving them stimulus they already know they like: not unlike the desperate parent or gift-stumped uncle who Lanes describes as grabbing a mass market book-shaped object off a shelf just to give a kid something. And this model of disjointed, distracting noise as mass market is coming for everything: according to Robert Evans's research, for example, an entire industry is emerging of people flipping low quality large language and image model children's books onto Amazon, based on already popular keywords.
This is a hard sell for me, as someone who grew up on an early diet of almost exclusively PBS broadcasting, in that brief window of time where PBS had a large collection of great shows and other stations felt compelled, by social pressure I suppose, to present their own largely good educational programming. This was programming aimed at being good for children's development, or at least good at broadening children's horizons, rather than good for selling toys to children. Like, maybe it was just because it was early in the station's development and repackaging animation was a good way to fill time, but Cartoon Network ran a show called Small World that ran stuff like Pengu, Towser the Dog, the strange French stop motion produce show Soup Opera... it feels like there was a whole culture of importing a variety of animated shorts which largely ended early in the 2000s.
I'm pretty obviously not anti-cartoon but I find deeply compelling Fred Rogers's articulation before congress that Mr Rogers Neighborhood aimed to explore "the inner drama of childhood... such things as getting a haircut, or the feelings between brothers and sisters, and the kind of anger that arises in simple family situations, and we speak to it constructively". How could a statistical process possibly arrive at the narrative and communication necessary to speak constructively to a child's anger? I see people touting predictive text's capacity to imitate the stream of consciousness writing of children. Is it really ok to just drop a child into a nonsense hall of mirrors and expect them to develop into a functional adult human being? To borrow a metaphor from Doctor Who, it's the role of adults to not give children the endless candy they think they want--that's what adults are for. And by the same token, I think it's worth asking whether older cartoons that WERE glorified toy commercials had much interest in giving kids anything other than the promise of endless candy. That's, after all, the point of a commercial, isn't it?
In contrast, a song like Isn't It Over, from Mr Greg, maybe the best episode of Steven Universe, dares to present children with an adult drama, and a gnarly, ugly, complicated one at that. The whole presentation of the song is great: it's not a children's song presented to children, but a song by an adult, stemming from adult emotions, but processed through the eyes of Steven, a child trying to make sense of the complicated family relations that impact his life. Compare this song to this documentary clip about Johnny Costa, Mr Rogers's musical director. It is not just the lyrics or the scenario but the music itself, and the smoothness and beauty of the animation, that refuses to talk down to children.
The best criticism engaging with Steven Universe always captured this extraordinary ability to talk of fraught, even traumatic situations to children who may have to make sense of the adults in their lives--and by extension to adults who still struggle to make sense of their experiences long after growing up. The worst and dumbest criticism of Steven Universe demanded to know why the show wasn't, depending on your flavor of grievance, either a perfect Maoist tract telling kids to seek violent resolution to their conflicts, a simplistic depiction of clear "good" and "evil" binaries, or dumbest of all a shallow "fun" toy commercial that never uses cringe terms like "post-traumatic". The show does not derive its worthiness for artistic exploration because "animation is for everyone", but because the show is deliberately constructed as art, for children.
If it's art, though, the corporations that produce and broadcast shows like Steven Universe, Infinity Train, Gravity Falls, and so on are doing a dismal job of stewarding that art. In fact it feels pretty clear they'd rather be in the business of selling toys. Not every piece of children's media needs to be Mr Rogers' Neighborhood--I think Rogers himself might have balked at the cartoons I just listed above--but surely the people underwriting its production should have a similar interest in providing substance rather than sugar. You know... my first introduction to the existence of HIV/AIDS was through a PBS program--the long running science program Newton's Apple. My recollection is that the 1992 episode largely focused on dispelling fears about HIV transmission, humanized the people with it, and explained the science of why HIV is so hard to fight. I can't verify this, as I haven't been able to track this episode (s10e07) down, but the study guide on the Internet Archive lines up with what I remember, and even suggests that a productive debate might be had over whether condoms and clean needles should be handed out to vulnerable populations, something that would still ruffle feathers today. This episode may have been my first exposure to visibly queer, countercultural people. Years later, I look at the seemingly tempestuous relationship that Steven Universe and Infinity Train had with... christ, whatever their stupid monopolistic parent company is called after all these mergers. These were shows addressing openly queer themes. Yet nearly 20 years after that Newton's Apple episode, the company seems to have undermined its artists at every turn in an effort to make something more commercially palatable (read: conservative, simplistic). This is the dire state of old media companies, and new media companies like Youtube or Amazon simply don't have a financial incentive to ensure quality on their platforms isn't drowned out by statistical noise.
It would be nice if there was an organization like Action for Children's Television (ACT), which Juniper wrote an incredible essay about over on Propaganda Rock, one of the many projects that died with Cohost and that I miss quite a bit. ACT, notably, were not the 60s equivalent of today's odious Moms for Liberty and similar christian fascist organizations, and opposed censorship, while demanding regulation on advertising in return for access to the public good of broadcasting bandwidths. When I think of how contemporary media megacorps treat their children's programming, I find myself nodding to what founder Peggy Charren scathingly describes in a 1994 policy article: "It does seem abundantly clear that almost everyone in the commercial television business is still trying to figure out how to benefit from children, instead of how to be beneficial to children."
As it is, though, the conversation online about children's media seems increasingly dominated by either a fundamentally right wing attitude about the moral messages that these stories must impart, or by a broad positivity towards basically whatever these companies put out. Missing from the discussion on children's media, just as it's missing from our conversations about media generally, is a serious position that there should be some democratic control over the funding and production of this art, rather than it all being up to the vagaries of the market and the whims of billionaires capable of underwriting right wing propaganda outfits. But for a while an alternative did exist, and maybe we can imagine one existing again. Charren advocated for defense of the First Amendment paired with massive funding for PBS, and establishing universal daycare. In the age of the Internet, why can't we also imagine public regional youtube-likes (or more excitingly, Public Access Peertube!) with a similar requirement to support a certain amount of quality children's programming?
Publicly funded Steven Universe, a Long Ago And Far Away treatment for that show just like Rarg got 40 years ago? Well, if we really believe it's art, valuable art for everyone... why not?
7.
We've imagined a world where children's media was not considered art, but we wanted to write criticism about it as though it was. Now we're back in the real world where we already know children's media is for everyone.
Does how we talked about it in our dream world look like how we talk about it in the real one?
This Has Been
Through Into Dreamland
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