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Frankenweenie as a Gateway to Literature and Life Lessons

We watched Frankenweenie last night (I explained to the kids that some parts would be sad or scary and they voted to try it) and both during the movie and this morning it was interesting to see what they had picked up. I don’t think Tim Burton was trying to teach my kids about the literature and movies of the horror genre, or offer them life lessons, but Frankenweenie opened up opportunities to talk about these things.

Most people probably don’t have kids who immerse themselves in everything they can find out about monster movies and stop motion animation. But I do have one of those kids. To be clear, he hasn’t seen the Universal monster movies, but he is fascinated by them and reads everything he can find. He’s watched a lot of the Japanese monster movies and cheesy science fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s, and has managed to see many of the movies Ray Harryhausen worked on. He also has started to notice plays on words, and he saw a lot of things in Frankenweenie that he picked up on right away, like, say, a main character named Victor Frankenstein who digs up a body in a graveyard and brings a creature back to life during an electrical storm. “This movie is like Frankenstein! The name is the same!” He noticed that Victor’s dog is named Sparky, “like electricity has sparks, and Sparky has electricity.”  The turtle that comes back to life is gigantic “like Gamera”! It’s also named Shelley “because turtles have shells”. I told him that Shelley was also the last name of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. “Oh yeah! That’s cool! The name is both of those things!” We also talked about how Elsa’s last name, Van Helsing, is the name of the vampire slayer in Dracula, and that she gets kidnapped by a bat; that the mayor is called the Burgermeister, like in Rankin-Bass’ stop motion Christmas special “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”; that the movie, which is a stop-motion animation movie, starts with Victor showing a stop-animation film; that the movie is black and white, like the original Frankenstein movie; and that the science teacher looked a lot like Vincent Price. That’s a lot to unpack from an animated children’s movie.

The movie had a much different effect on my daughter. The attack of the reanimated pets on the town really scared her and I had to leave the room with her for awhile. She asked “did anybody get hurt”? Well, the attack is scary, but nobody is really hurt, and parts are even a little funny. Then she wanted to know why the animals turned out differently from Sparky. So we talked about how Victor decided to bring Sparky back because he loved him, but the other kids brought their pets back because they wanted to win the science fair. That was something the science teacher had talked about, the importance of doing science with love, and doing the right thing. Then she asked if bringing Sparky back, even out of love, was the right thing. At that point in the movie, Sparky had escaped from Victor’s house and returned to the cemetery. It seemed like that was where he wanted to be, at rest in the cemetery. “Sparky wasn’t ready to die. But he did, and he wants to be at rest, so maybe he should be at rest. Victor should let him.”  Smart little girl.

Later, both kids asked why the parents made the science teacher leave, because “it’s important to learn science”. It’s hard to explain to kids that adults don’t always want to understand the world, or want their kids to understand. “But science is good”! I reminded them that the science teacher had said that science is neither bad nor good– and that’s why you should be careful with how you use it.

That message gets somewhat lost at the movie’s ending, because after Sparky saves the day at the expense of his own life, and Victor is able to finally let go of his grief, his parents convince the rest of the adults in town to bring back Sparky once again. The same unthinking adults who got rid of the science teacher out of fear reanimate a dead dog without any further thought as to whether it’s right or wrong (I didn’t discuss this part with my kids). In spite of the pasted-on happy ending, though, Frankenweenie, quite unexpectedly, offered a lot of food for thought as well as entertainment value.

Although most people aren’t watching scary movies to improve their cultural literacy or provide them with opportunities for deep philosophical discussions, we can watch out for those teachable moments. It doesn’t take forever to point out a literary or cultural reference when you see it, and if your kids are interested, the Internet makes it easy to explore further. If your kids come up with a question that they really want to talk about, take it seriously and do your best to help them figure things out.  In Frankenweenie, Tim Burton provided a gateway, but I held my kids’ hands as we walked through to a larger world.

Here are a few other scary movies for kids that might lend themselves to more than just entertainment. As always, not every movie is appropriate for every child.

 

Toy Story

Monsters, Inc

Spirited Away

The Neverending Story

Coraline

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on August 18, 2013 by , Reply

Diversity is Good… So Are School Libraries.

I was saddened to read this article today in the New York Times, about a neighborhood school with forty percent of the children receiving free lunch that was struggling to save its school library. By digging deep and rallying their community the students of PS 363 in New York City raised the money to save their library and keep their school library program going for another year.

I am lucky enough to live in a district with reasonably well-funded schools, due to a referendum that passed a few years ago. This allows the schools to offer a school library program staffed with professional school librarians not just during the year but also for several days during the summer. The article in the Times notes that while diversity is considered to be a benefit of a public school education, cuts in education are creating casualties in schools like PS 363 (aka The Neighborhood School), where the socioeconomic diversity is enough to make fundraising efforts difficult, but not quite extreme enough to qualify for extra federal funding.

We’ll never escape the inequities of school funding. Some schools will have extraordinary resources available to them, and others will struggle. One way to even the playing field is to make sure that schools like PS 363 have great school library programs staffed by professional librarians- there are strong correlations to significant improvements in student achievement and literacy, for kids at all socioeconomic levels (you can check out Scholastic’s excellent report summarizing the research here– the school also has a link to the report on their fundraising webpage).  Where is the money going to come from? PS 363 showed that supporting  vital, if unfunded, educational programs requires a community effort. It is amazing to me how the school community and surrounding neighborhood pulled together and saved the library program for another year.  The only way it’s going to happen is if each of us gets personally involved in saving an imperiled school library, regardless of the situation the students, and school, find themselves in.

 

Posted on June 7, 2012 by , Reply

Is This Really A “Dramatic Advantage” For Ebooks?

I’ve seen this a couple of places now, and I just don’t understand it. First, Alan Jacobs wrote about how easy note taking is with his e-reader in his book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, and now an article by educational technology and literacy expert Jamie McKenzie is suggesting that ebooks enhance the reading experience by a.) making note taking easier and b.) using the web to explore topics that intrigue the reader in the midst of the reading experience.

First, I just don’t find it as easy to keyboard notes into the text with a touchscreen or highlight with my finger as I do to write or highlight by hand. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but hunting and pecking on my smartphone or ereader is frustrating and distracting and I’ve been known to just skip over taking notes or writing down questions while reading ebooks. Highlighting is equally frustrating for me- it could be a lack of coordination but I never seem to be able to highlight exactly what I want- I get extra lines, or miss words. It’s a complete disruption for me. I don’t think it’s just because I’m a digital immigrant- I asked a recent college graduate about this, and she had the same issues. If this is frustrating for me, an adult, then what would it be like for kids? As for browsing through the Web to explore words and ideas that I encounter when I’m reading, that doesn’t mean to me that it’s so much an interactive experience or an “advantage” as it is a distraction from the narrative. I think it’s great to have that as a resource at hand if necessary, but to browse further and further away from the book without actually interacting with the text you access doesn’t seem like an advantage… it seems like a reason you might never actually finish the book. Because, as Alan Jacobs notes, we do live in an age of distraction, which can make deep reading difficult indeed.

Jacobs’ argument for the advantage of ebooks over print is, in fact, that ebooks (or at least Kindle books) enable concentrated reading because features like Web browsing are difficult to access, and (at least in Kindle books) the lack of page numbers means readers are less likely to flip back and forth. I tend to agree with this so far. I haven’t been tempted to leave the text to browse the web (but this could have to do with both the kind of reader I am and the kind of ebooks I read) and the location numbers that the Kindle uses make it very difficult to go back. I find the second more annoying than advantageous because I read very quickly and one of the disadvantages of reading quickly is that I end up skipping over sections of text that I need to understand the story going forward. But the lack of page numbers does mean that you keep going forward, and since you aren’t cued by the physical length of the book as to how much more there is to read, you are more likely to keep going. When you’re in the flow, which happens easily when there are no defined physical limits, it’s hard to stop. If you love being swept up in the story, that’s a definite advantage. Unless you’re like me, and reading is like an addiction, where setting limits is REALLY important (especially when you’re reading, say, Outlander).

Speaking of Outlander, there is, I think, one advantage that I have discovered ebooks have over physical books, and that’s flexibility. In reading Jacobs’ book, I was convinced to turn back and look at some of the “classics” that I hadn’t touched since high school. It was a lot more comfortable to reread Oliver Twist on my smartphone than it would have been to carry a clunky physical copy around- Dickens was paid by the word, and his books aren’t short (and neither is Outlander– you could break your wrists carrying around the physical copy). It’s also probably unlikely that I would have sought out a physical copy of The Canterville Ghost after seeing the movie (with Patrick Stewart as the ghost) as it’s a very short work. But it certainly is well worth a read!

Well, now I’m rambling a bit, so to return to my original point- is it really a “dramatic advantage”, as McKenzie describes it, to be able to wander away from the book in midstream, even to explore the events and ideas you encounter? In my personal experience, no. Is note taking and highlighting easier and more organized? Well, my experience is that it’s not easy enough for me to discover whether it’s a better way to organize my thoughts. Do ebooks, as Jacobs suggests, enable more concentrated reading at a time when that’s becoming more difficult? I think they can, and that’s an overall advantage for readers. Can ebooks encourage us to try new genres, different lengths of texts, or more challenging works? I think so, if we consciously attend to what and how we read.

But when it comes to really paying attention to what’s between the covers, I’ll take the physical book, pen and highlighter in hand, thank you very much.

Posted on June 1, 2012 by , 2 comments
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