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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

Scary Movies: Taking The Kids to Pacific Rim

 

I’m going to confess it. I am not a fan of most of the recent horror or monster movies (with the exception of Cabin in the Woods). There’s just too much splat and gore for me. But in this house there’s no escaping kaiju movies (for the uninitiated, that’s Godzilla and friends). My husband has loved them since he was a kid and he has loved sharing them with our kids. As scary movies go, they’re not too terrifying. I mean, how scary can a guy in a rubber suit really be, especially when you’re sitting in Daddy’s lap?

Movies today are a different story. CGI effects allow moviemakers to make truly frightening creatures that actually look like they could be real. There aren’t many kaiju books, and really, with kaiju, the moving picture is worth a thousand words. And movies today have a lot more foul language, sexual content, and graphic violence. With Daddy desperate to see Pacific Rim, the brand new kaiju movie, on opening weekend, the question became, with two kaiju loving kids who also dart from the room anytime they sense potential violence onscreen, should we take them to see Pacific Rim? The reviewer at Dread Central said, “This is a movie for everyone! Bring your kids”! (see the entire review here) Geek parents on Facebook told me it was a great movie for geek kids, depending on the kid. Movie Mom loved it but brought up that there was intense violence and mild profanity (see her review here). Common Sense Media also mentioned the intense violence and suggested it for ages 12 and older (review here). And it is a movie rated PG-13. My kids are 6 and 7. Would the “intense violence” overwhelm their excitement about seeing a brand-new kaiju movie with their dad? We decided to risk it. Was it worth it? Absolutely. They were swept away by the battles between the giant robots and giant monsters. In fact, on reflection, my daughter(who kept her eyes tightly closed during the bear scene in Brave) said she loved the “cool” glowing monster tongues. Frankly, I was more concerned about what they saw in the trailers that preceded the movie than what was in the movie itself.

I loved it too, and that’s really saying something. While I deeply admire the original Godzilla movie, I have a big problem with the representation of women as mainly love interests or passive victims in most of the early science fiction and horror movies. But while this movie failed the Bechdel test. it did have one of the most awesome female characters I have seen in a long time. It is true that I don’t get out to the movies much, but Mako Mori is my new favorite character in monster movies. In spite of an overprotective father figure and her own traumatic memories, Mako Mori is one of a very few pilots, the best in the world, who save humanity from extinction by giant monster. And she does it without ever getting romantically involved with her opposite-sex partner. While it’s implied at the end of the movie that a romance may devleop, she and her partner make it through the entire movie, working together and sharing memories and feelings, without even a kiss. I’m in love with Mako Mori, and my daughter saw a hero, a capable woman, who helped to save the world.

When you are considering taking your kids out to a movie that has monsters or extreme violence, I think it’s really important to consult multiple sources (I wouldn’t have used any of the three reviews I cited above on its own to make the decision), and to know your kids well enough to make the decision about whether to take them. You can’t depend on movie ratings for much, anymore. Had this movie had extreme gore or “adult situations” we would never have considered taking the kids. But it is worth the time to research it, if you have a monster-loving family.

Posted on July 25, 2013 by , Reply

Don’t Trust Disney!

Usually when someone comments on Disney movies it’s either “They’re wonderful” or “they’re awful”.

I can run with both. You can’t escape Disney now. It’s so huge and encompasses so many brands and types of media that half the time you don’t even know you have a Disney product in your hands. I think a lot of us feel nostalgia for the first time we saw a Disney movie (especially if you are old enough to remember the time before VCRs and DVDs, when you had to wait seven years for the movie to come back to the theater so you could see it again). Some of the messages Disney, through its many faces, aggressively promotes, are uncomfortable and even sources of outrage. But something you rarely hear about in the discussions of Disney movies is that they are really scary. As in, fear-inducing. You cannot take your kid to a Disney movie with the belief that it will be all sunshine and flowers. Unless some of the flowers are roses with really vicious thorns, or the garden is on fire. Someone over at FEARnet started a discussion on movies that scared the members as kids. The first one he recalled was Sleeping Beauty. It’s true, Maleficent is terrifying, and I’ve never forgotten her (on a side note, it’s amazing to me how many people said they had watched IT or The Exorcist between the ages of 5 and 10). The shadows from the Frog Princess gave my son nightmares. And Ursula from the Little Mermaid… yikes. And those are just the animated movies.

Anyway, the folks at FEARnet did a short interview with an archivist at the Disney Archives where she showed off some of the props from a few of the past Disney movies. It’s really interesting to watch, and it does make you think. Who decides a movie is a children’s movie, anyway? If you are planning to take your child to a Disney movie, you might want to check out a trailer first, and try to evaluate whether the fright factor is one your child can handle.  Even my monster-loving kid has been known to run from the room or hide under a pillow during Disney films. Just because it’s a “princess movie”, a “children’s movie”, or a “family film”, you can’t trust Disney to make the decision an easy one.

Posted on May 1, 2013 by , Reply
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