Abstract
Troutman explores how children’s animated horror film moves children’s media and culture in a new direction. The chapter analyzes the roles of active, aggressive child protagonists in the following films/series: Monster House (2006), Coraline (2009), and ParaNorman (2012), and Disney television series Gravity Falls (2012–2016). Using Bond Stockton’s concept of “growing sideways,” Troutman draws attention to the pivotal ways these films transition children’s media away from vertical progression and instead of roles that contain non-linear growth and development. Allowing children to “grow sideways” helps provide agency to the characters, and ultimately helps debunk the myth of the American generic child.
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Notes
- 1.
While tracing the entire history of construction of childhood in American culture is beyond the scope of this project, Nicholas Sammond’s Babes in Tomorrowland is a good study explaining incongruities between media depictions of childhood and lived experience.
- 2.
The National Child Labor Committee, formed in 1904, promoted the reform of child labor laws at the federal level and was instrumental in the establishment of the US Children’s Bureau in the Department of Commerce and Labor. Child labor legislation contributed to drawing a more distinct line between childhood and adulthood.
- 3.
Vicky Lebeau addresses sexual depictions of childhood in live-action cinema in Children and Cinema (2008).
- 4.
Didacticism in the form of allowing characters to engage in negative behavior that is then suitably punished is the one context in which otherwise deleterious content is considered acceptable in children’s film.
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Troutman, M. (2019). It’s Alive … AGAIN: Redefining Children’s Film Through Animated Horror. In: Hermansson, C., Zepernick, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Children's Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17620-4_8
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