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  • The Children’s Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative by Noel Brown
  • Peter C. Kunze (bio)
Noel Brown. The Children’s Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative. Wallflower P, 2017.

Hollywood moviegoers are inundated with children’s films—or, at the very least, films that do not actively exclude children. Superhero movies, animated comedies, and adventure films are regular staples designed to appeal to a broad audience. In his new book, The Children’s Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative, Noel Brown not only takes up the children’s film as a genre—he differentiates it from the family films he discussed in his earlier work, The Hollywood Family Film (2012). Children’s films remain one of the most misunderstood areas within our field. Although they have been widely discussed by scholars interested in questions of adaptation, representation, and ideology, we rarely discuss what makes a children’s film exactly that. Of course, some scholars have advised against obsessing over such questions, but few scholars have dared to ask what we talk about when we talk about children’s film since Ian Wojcik-Andrews’s 2000 book, Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy and Theory. In that book, he makes room for all films consumed by children as children’s films. Brown takes up and challenges this broad and inclusive definition, proposing instead a series of criteria for classifying a film as such. By taking on this task, Brown’s concise new book is a rich contribution to the exciting field of children’s media studies.

Previous studies of children’s film within children’s literature studies have primarily focused on narrative. As a film studies scholar, Brown shifts to pay great attention to the contextual factors as well. He follows a model akin to the circuit of culture, emphasizing production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption in the definition and examination of children’s film. Brown identifies five “contextual processes” for classifying films as children’s films, including (in his words) marketing and distribution strategies, censorship and suitability ratings, critical reception, merchandising, and exhibition strategies. In short, it is not just what story the film tells, but who made it, who it was made for, how it was released, how accessible it was, who went to see it, how it was watched, and how has its reception changed over time. He also offers “five very broad and recurrent features” common to children’s films: an emphasis on the importance of family and community, the focus on the lives of children and adolescents, the restoration of social order after disruption, the de-emphasis on adults, and positive (even conservative) resolution. As such, he encourages children’s literature scholars to realize the fundamental differences in the two media as well as the need to ask different questions and employ different tools in analyzing children’s film. He does not suggest that narrative is unimportant, of course, but that it can be understood alongside its production, exhibition, and reception.

In the second chapter, Brown turns his attention to a history of the children’s film. In a period of Disney remakes and Marvel spectaculars, one may [End Page 316] presume we are in a heyday for children’s film in Hollywood, but Brown convincingly argues that that time may more accurately be the 1910s and 1920s, when demand was high and children often went to the movies both on their own and with their parents. Here Brown tackles the question of address, specifically how these films spoke to children, adults, or both. In particular, Brown seems interested to distinguish the children’s film from the family film, the focus of his impressive 2012 history, The Hollywood Family Film. Turning to work on narrative address in children’s literature here might have been generative, but Brown nevertheless shows the key themes and industrial trends that have defined this genre of films, particularly in terms of Hollywood.

One of the myriad strengths of this monograph is the decentering of Disney. When discussing children’s films, especially in a US context, it is hard to avoid the importance, influence, and dominance of Disney films, in particular. But film production in the United States has always been a largely...

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