Film Chronicle (review)

My wife and I live in Massachusetts. As I write, anti-pandemic precautions are still in force here, though in the last weeks more and more businesses have opened, and social distancing has become somewhat more casual. By the time this chronicle appears, the situation may be altogether different—a return to something like normal life (which is what we all wish), a resurgence of the pandemic in its full fury (which is what we all fear), or a new regimen of wariness and uncertainty (which is what we all expect). Going forward, some children will probably still have to remain at home rather than attend school, and their parents and grandparents will still be looking for things for them to do, perhaps seek screen works to share with them. At the beginning of this chronicle I will suggest a few works highly suitable for children to watch and readily available for streaming, and after that pass on to films in part or in whole aboutchildren. Over the decades the cinema has found many ways to explore childhood, its excitements and fears, its vulnerabilities and freedoms, its possibly determinative effects on adult life. Like countless others these days I am thinking a lot about one possible effect in real life: how will children growing up in the shadow of COVID-19 be marked by their experience?

In earlier chronicles I recommended several child-friendly works, for example Lotte Reiniger's full-length animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed, from 1926, where silhouetted figures captured in stop-action photography act out an Arabian Nights tale. A youngster finding Prince Achmeda little long might be charmed by Reiniger's shorter silhouette films, like Cinderella(1922) and Papageno(1935). The latter in particular, 11 minutes focusing on Papageno the Bird-Catcher in Mozart's Magic Flute, is wonderfully inventive. Papageno's inamorataPapagena arrives riding an ostrich, huge eggs are cracked open (by birds' beaks) to free a host of fat little Papagenos and Papagenas, and the opera's three singing boys become three lively parrots. All the lyrics are sung in German, but given the expressiveness of Mozart's music and of Reiniger's painstakingly cutout figures, that scarcely matters. In Cinderella, which is silent, note the opening sequence showing an incredibly quick pair of scissors snipping the woebegone figure of Cinderella into existence. If, seeing the sequence, a child should decide to pick up some scissors and pieces of paper and set to work herself, so much the better.

Roughly contemporaneous with Reiniger's animations are the 70 or so short cartoons that the Disney Studio created and released under the general title Silly Symphonies. These beautifully animated productions, often based on fairy tales or nursery rhymes, are accompanied by wellchosen music selections and mostly shot in eye-popping Technicolor. (The very first symphony, "The Skeleton Dance," is an absolute masterpiece in black-and-white, but it might be too scary for the youngest viewers.) When discussing the Silly Symphoniesin a previous chronicle, I singled out for particular praise "Music Land," "Flowers and Trees," "The Three Little Pigs," "The Old Mill," and "Woodland Café," and I would stand by that selection...