Abstract
In Vignette B, the 22-month-old twins’ viewing of their favourite series reveals patterns of response, attention, and strategies such as proximity and screen-touching. Popular perceptions hold that movies “capture reality”: the filmic codes and conventions that construct this impression may be easy to learn but are not immediately clear to very young children. There is some consensus about what styles of moviemaking are appropriate to use in making movies for toddlers, but the makers of In the Night Garden have broken many of its boundaries. An analysis of the episodes’ opening sequence shows how it challenges but also intrigues the viewer, drawing analogies with the conventions of toddler play while at the same time encouraging them to try and figure out the different rules of each story-world, and, ultimately, to understand the nature of the system that confronts them. [139 words]
Parts of this chapter have appeared in Sign Systems Journal 48 (1) 2020, in Brown (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film (OUP 2022) and in Green et al. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children, NYC and Abingdon: Routledge.
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Bazalgette, C. (2022). The Nature of the System. In: How Toddlers Learn the Secret Language of Movies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97468-8_4
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