The original “Bambi”
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Most original material Disney adapted was bleakier and more grisly than the adaptation.
Most of the tales collected by brothers Grimm would today be horror stories. (Did you know that Cinderella's evil stepsisters had their toes and heels cut off so they could fit in the slippers? Or that the ravens pecked their eyes as punishment? Or that Maleficent ends up in a boiling cauldron full of vipers?)
I bet Disney would be able to adapt even something like "Requiem for a Dream" into a happy hero-coming-of-age story.
You lose a lot if the only version of these classics you've seen (or read, or heard) is Disney's sweet & shiny simulacra.
There’s a theory that Hansel and Grettel represents a cultural memory of a time of famine where children were abandoned, left to starve.
I think they all used to live in a very different reality, with people dying at an earlier age and much more often then they do now. Also infant mortality was much much higher in the olden days; it was a scary time, altogether.
The olden days didn't have the luxury of clean water, antibiotics and food plenty. These are quite recent inventions...
Guy was high on some drugs when he wrote this sh%t. Talk about messed up.
"Early contributions to the tale include the medieval courtly romance Perceforest (published in 1528).[4] In this tale, a princess named Zellandine falls in love with a man named Troylus. Her father sends him to perform tasks to prove himself worthy of her, and while he is gone, Zellandine falls into an enchanted sleep. Troylus finds her and rapes her in her sleep; when their child is born, the child draws from her finger the flax that caused her sleep. She realizes from the ring Troylus left her that he was the father, and Troylus later returns to marry her.[5]"
Disney/Hollywood version is always Cinderella, and German that closely adheres to the original is called Aschenputtel. The same goes for Snowwhite and Schneewitchen, Sleeping Beauty and Dornröschen.
There's even a counter example. The 2010 film Tangled is called Rapunzel like the original fairy tale in German.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_and_the_Huntsman
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio#Fictional_character_...
1: https://slate.com/culture/2011/10/carlo-collodi-s-pinocchio-...
The part of the movie where all of the boys on Pleasure Island begin to turn into donkeys always freaked me out as a kid.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R1JOT49B5OUAL0/...
Even the opening of the review is... something:
> To be honest, I struggled with this book. I found the main character incredibly frustrating. He almost always did the wrong thing. I mean, almost ALWAYS. Well, people sometimes do (including me!), but what he does is also almost always incredibly stupid. Well, again, people do stupid things (including me!), and the main character is, after all, a puppet who is only moments old at the beginning of the book, so how is he to know better? Fair question, but still, I found the book hard work. He just did not seem to learn from his mistakes.
It's just about life, explained through metaphors from somebody who had lived it a bit to some who may have lived it less, and could benefit from a few warnings.
Collodi was also a gambler: one night he lost an especially large amount of money, then happened to meet a friend, who commissioned him a literary work so as to help with the payment of his debts. "Le Avventure di Pinocchio" was in a way born out of deeds, to warn against deeds.
>> 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio#Fictional_character_...:
> Pinocchio's bad behavior, rather than being charming or endearing, is meant to serve as a warning.
That reminds me something I read about "Inuit parenting." They live in a dangerous and difficult environment, so they'd tell kids all kinds of scary stories designed to get them to do the correct thing before they could understood the actual danger.
Or both, where vipers were boiled, and new vipers were constantly being added to bite, then turn into boiling viper soup themselves.
IDK about plot hole, I assume the both method will get the job done. But, I do question the efficiency and practicality.
Like the suggestion that "Bambi" is a parable, it has been also suggested that Brer Rabbit represents the slave of the Antebellum South surviving against the toothed and clawed Brer Fox and Brer Bear only by his wits (though in fact Brer Wolf meets his own end at the hands of Brer Rabbit's "wit" ... or boiling water in his specific case).
That's the variant I got told in my childhood (1980s West Germany). It always amuses me that these simple facts seem to be cruel and horrific to Americans.
Also, "Hänsel and Gretel" is a tale about parental abandonment, stranger danger, cannibalism, and burning old women alive, then forgiving said parental abandonment (but only after the kids bring back treasure).
And "Red Riding Hood" is essentially about sexual child abuse.
Well, if we're thinking about the moral messages of some of these old tales, I've always thought Requiem could be a good movie to show tweens+ as a cautionary against drug abuse. If Disney threw in an evil witch selling smack, a few catchy songs, a handful of dead parents, and a handsome prince to kiss Harry's arm back to life then I bet they'd have... well, maybe not a hit. But it would be something, and I'd watch it.
Those two, along with Kids (1995) could definitely be used as cautionary tales for t(w)eenagers.
what (imo) would make requiem for a dream really effective is that it shows the transition from the "honeymoon phase" of drug use to the "consequences phase" really well. I think this is the part that teenagers really don't understand (or at least I didn't). when you're starting out, it can seem like a lot of the anti-drug messaging is just fear mongering (and it is, to an extent). but most people that age don't yet have the perspective to distinguish between harmless fun and a slow motion crisis.
trainspotting is also great, and a bit more realistic than requiem for a dream. but if I had to pick one of the two to show to teens, I'd probably pick the former.
Killing depictions, mild sexual jokes... as nothing.
"Ring around the Rosie... and we all fall down" (refers to the Great Plague of London in 1665)
"Rockabye baby in the treetops" (eventually sent crashing to the ground by storm winds).
They exposed children to the idea that the chaotic world is outside your ability to control, but you must live in it and navigate it to the extent you can nonetheless. This will not always end well for you, despite your best efforts.
In contrast, the message of modern fairy tales is that life has challenges, but they can all be overcome. If you are noble, persistent and hard working, you can achieve anything. Characters nearly always end up royalty or some variation of happily ever after.
The Disney version of Cinderella is based on Charles Perraults version, which is significantly different. An Perrault is older than Grimm, although both are based on older traditions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQrqhdU99Ws
Also the father commands his son 'you must get up'; he acts like a commander.
I saw Mary Poppins three times, because of my children, and I like Julie Andrews so much that I enjoyed seeing it three times. I thought it was a charming film. I wouldn’t want to make it, but … Children’s films are an area that should not just be left to the Disney Studios, who I don’t think really make very good children’s films. I’m talking about his cartoon features, which always seemed to me to have shocking and brutal elements in them that really upset children. I could never understand why they were thought to be so suitable. When Bambi’s mother dies this has got to be one of the most traumatic experiences a five-year-old could encounter. I think that there should be censorship for children on films of violence. I mean, if I didn’t know what Psycho was, and my children went to see it when they were six or seven, thinking they were going to see a mystery story, I would have been very angry, and I think they’d have been terribly upset. I don’t see how this would interfere with freedom of artistic expression. If films are overly violent or shocking, children under twelve should not be allowed to see them. I think that would be a very useful form of censorship.Miyazaki has for some people become an alternative to Disney, but his work is full of Dumbo and Bambi moments. The difference is that in his work, the girl (and it is almost always a girl protagonist) is often substantially responsible for saving themselves, by reasonable means. They are not rescued by a boy or by deux ex machina.
Even in My Neighbor Totoro, which is almost but not quite an exception to this rule, the youngest (who is a main character, but not the main character) is saved by a magic bus. However, the main character initiates this rescue by digging deep and calling on resources she might not have thought to exploit. She asks for help from the most powerful person she knows and she gets it. She has to ask, and the terms of the rescue are very defined. Nobody white-knights her, nobody swoops in and reads her mind.
But the main struggle in that story is not a lost child. It is Death. And this resolves itself rather than being resolved by the characters, not through a miracle, but by discovering that the children don't know the situation and have invented a story that is much scarier than reality. In the end most of their fears are unfounded, and while life won't be everything they hoped, it's going to be much better than their internal catastrophizing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_of_the_Fireflies
Also, one of my childhood books was When the Wind Blows. (For those who haven't read it, it's a story of an old British couple going through the aftermath of a nuclear attack.) Similarly traumatizing. I suppose my parents meant to educate me about the horrors of war, but at such a young age (pre-teen, maybe around ten years old) my reading experience was so powerful that it felt like I lived through it. Scenes from that book still haunt me sometimes.
I just remember a part where one of the monsters reaches into a building, eats a woman and spits out a dress + bones.
Now sort of amusingly, I don't want to watch the movie again for a different reason. It's because my memory of it is entirely sort of a "native memory" going back that many years.
I’ve watched this movie many times and I am not quite sure what you mean by the terms are very defined.
As a young kid I watched Lion King and Land Before Time, which both feature dramatic depictions of the death of a parental figures, which both lead to kids fending for themselves. I don't remember being traumatized by this at all, and watched them repeatedly. As an adult I see the tragedy and it's kind of shocking, but I think as a kid it was just make-believe and I wasn't relating to the characters in that way. And obviously tons of other kids watched and loved these movies too.
On the other hand the more intense scenes from Indiana Jones were terrifying and burned deep into my brain.
11-12 is different than 6-7 but besides some nightmares, I don't think seeing scary movies have a negative impact on kids.
(Which was awesome, I thought, even though she turned out to be about as messed-up as his quote would suggest.)
1: https://old.reddit.com/r/StanleyKubrick/comments/7q86pu/10_y...
It has episode showing family of mice struggling to survive and worried about future for their babies. In following episode we get shot of same mice family impaled on needles by birds going to eat them.
https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_EkpfJKfyX8WRKQnr7H...
Entire story is told around forest dying out and animals struggling to survive in it. It was once called „that animals cartoon that traumatised generations”.
The people in the past had no youtube and no tv. They still wanted to have some fun.
Does it?
Many of these stories are embedded idiomatically in many languages? Let each parent decide at what age they should read Rapunzel, when they are ready.
Free of cost for the teacher, not for the student
That's kind of the main reason we started to write stuff down, to learn things from the past through other's experiences, so that you don't have to feel alone going through every traumatising events as if you were the first human to do so.
We have empathy, better use it than wait for the hardest part of life to "give us a lesson", most of the really hard parts only happen once so you won't learn much, but you'll suffer a lot.
My father who was financially devastated by people close to him passed on one insanely strong piece of advice that is superior to any fairy tale and saved me.
1. Always have a legal agreement at the start even/especially if it's friends and family.
2. Always have that legal agreement reviewed by your own attorney.
Years later I'm finally getting over the sudden violence and the hostility, but the law made sure their plans to intimidate, force, steal and defraud came to nothing.
I don't remember anything about consequences of moral failings in the old fairy tales, just random violence and chaos. In Sleeping Beauty the prince's mother turns out to be an ogre who tries to eat Beauty's children, but luckily the prince returns in time and kills her. Where's the moral lesson there? Don't move in with your mother-in-law?
The old stories were designed to help prepare children for the hostile world they lived in.
The moral of the story is that monsters live deep inside even the people we trust most.
--Cinderella: mean deceptive people might get their feat chopped off & eyes pecked out. (In short, Karma. though unfortunately the world doesn't quite work that way, but there's still a bit of "the world can be ugly" too)
--Cat & The Mouse: Never forget that the nature of a predator is predation
--Hansel & Gretel: Don't take candy from strangers. Also, if something looks to good to be true, it probably is. And also that maybe little children are delicious? I mean, the witch had to have her reasons.
--Rumpelstiltskin: Okay, there's some mixed messages here. Lying father, malicious greedy king, deceptive girl... Rumpelstiltskin comes out looking like a hero, saving the girl's life 3 times but then get's cheated out of his last payment & kills himself. But he also wanted her baby. She agreed, but still... anyway no one really comes off smelling of roses but Rumpelstiltskin is the only one dead.
--The Peasant in Heaven: Truly good rich people are very rare
--Snow White: Alright, maybe this one shouldn't on the list. Could be there's a lesson about jealousy in there, and also that maybe you should try the Heimlich maneuver on someone that keels over while eating, but in the end it kind of boils down to some fairly creepy borderline necrophilia.
Beware from the child rapists as an analogy. Kinda similar to The Little Red Hood.
Stories like Sleeping Beauty or ones with monsters allow kids to transfer those feelings of all encompassing fear to these bad guys, until they outgrow it and they're able to handle ambiguity.
That doesn't explain why the stories were originally told, but could explain their stickiness.
Hmm. This sounds like a hypothesis from someone who doesn't remember being a child very well. I never lived in total fear of my parents' anger or disappointment, and I'm pretty sure my kids never did either
These used to be more than just stories for kids, but modern fairy tales are rarely ever told to an adult audience anymore. For many fairy tales, the happy ending was added centuries after they spread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_of_Isaac#Possible_chil...
They were collected or written and then popular collections of folklore in some part of last century. They are not exactly bible, many of those stories don't even have some kind of moral lesson in them.
Digging a little deeper, you find tons of variants of stories, and discover all sorts of new ones, hybrids, seemingly incomplete ones, different levels of embellishment, darker and lighter. And some do have morals, but a lot of them are just things happening. Some motifs just seem to stick. And folk tales were not primarily meant for children either—we tell kids campfire ghost stories all the time, and don’t think so much on what they teach. We just like them.
Although I can imagine this being quite horrific, I also don't recall that this cartoon was all that upsetting me when I watched it as a child. Then again I grew up in the countryside so maybe it was less shocking to me because I already knew what nature was like. When it comes to animal cartoons I think Watership Down and The Plague Dogs were much worse experiences.
Still, kind of makes me wonder what's up with the UK and depressing animal cartoons.
I think a LOT of UK school kids were truamatised by this, a lot of teachers, saw it thought 'oh, same author (Richard Adams) and director (Martin Rosen) as Watership Down, lets stick the kids in front of this while we do something else.
Man, that film was harrowing.
(Also, the recent Netflix adaption of the material is a lot closer to the source material than the 1980s-era cartoon).
Va gur crahygvzngr fprar, lbh frr gur ohyyrgf fgevxr gur jngre, naq gura gur uryvpbcgre snqrf bhg. Guvf pbhyq vzcyl gung gurl uvg gurve gnetrgf naq erghearq gb onfr, juvpu zrnaf gur svany fprar vf fbzr xvaq bs nsgreyvsr, naq abg gur qbtf' qlvat qryhfvbaf nf gurl qebja nf V svefg nffhzrq. Gur zlgubybtvpny fprarf va Jngrefuvc Qbja ner n cerprqrag gb guvf xvaq bs guvat, fb vg qbrfa'g fbhaq haernfbanoyr.
The first two episodes are about two anthropomorphised ducks that meet, fall in love, move into a clog and have a spawn of babies, happily ever after until the whole family but Alfred get killed by a car. That was err. a pretty brutal thing for a four year old to see.
The show goes on to depict things like nazis, racism (waterfowl aren't real birds like us!), apartheid, classism, alcoholism, even transgenderism / gender fluidity (the stork Ollie), etc. In hindsight, it was A Lot, and most of it probably escaped me.
It doesn't seem to be available on any streaming platforms, though.
Fantastic cartoon, impressive how they handled facisme. Guess certain Dutch politicians either didn't see it or did and got inspired by Dolf.
In related news, I've also seen every episode of True and Nijnje (90s, 00s and specials) a similar number of times for kid #2 and kid #3 :)
I grew up in the UK so as a kid I was traumatised by Yellow Submarine, Tottie (dollhouse burns down killing everyone), Watership Down and the aforementioned Animals of Farthing Wood.
This "etc." includes the aids epidemic, North/South Korea-like country, and environmental topics like whaling and the seas being overfished, acid rain, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
Yeah the show was A Lot and I love it for that.
African elephants? But the original Jumbo[1] was also an African elephant.
/ notice I said “greater” leaving space for an equal ie a father’s love
You don't really know the intensity and unconditionality of the love your own mother has/had for you until you have kids yourself and see how your wife loves your child. I always appreciated my mother, but I was only able to fully appreciate her after I had kids myself.
It also burns my ass to hear my wife say “I couldn’t have imagined how much I would like being a mom”. Society and culture is so screwed up around children and raising a family.
I think we over index on how kids will hinder your ability to self actualize and become an independent woman. To value being a boss bitch rather than a mother. But there’s a huge reason why:
Men are unreliable.
For a variety of reasons it’s just a bad deal to assume every, or even many, woman will end up with a guy that’s reliable. He makes money and can provide, isn’t violent or abusive, will be respectful and stick around. A “decent guy”. There’s just too many guys that fail at this.
So the rational optimization is self dependence. And that probably means holding off on children. And in many cases becoming a lonely cat spinster that wishes they had a kid; the equivalent to the deadbeat dad in a twisted sort of way.
I don’t know the answer but if you do have a daughter then consider paying to harvest and freeze eggs in their early 20’s, if they’re a career minded person. They’ll work great 15 years later so long as they were produced when she was at an age nature optimizes around.
"We work all day, we work all night / we never learn to read or write / we're happy hearted roustabouts!!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P75mur1xF7U
But the whole premise of "the mixed race kid gets all the bullying" is a reflection of a pretty bleak society, beyond any of these specific depictions.
Coincidence both Bambi and the Black Stallion were written during or in the immediate aftermath of world wars?
Meh. Every generation has its angsts, and writers putting it down to paper.
Watership down was written in the very late 60s / very early 70s.
The context matters. The depictions of violence of people in media if typically very intentionally written in a way that does not make you feel too bad. The killed people rarely have personalities or matter. Modern media rarely kills characters that people had a chance to know or relate to. They are not cute and their deaths are sort of "clean".
The cute animals people are squeamish about are played up for cuteness, the owner is played up to be sad. It is all very intentionally made up to make you feel sad.
Don't think its much deeper than that.
Watership Down is another good one, the character of the Black Rabbit of Inle (the Grim Reaper of rabbitkind) was memorable.
However I disagree with claims that these kind of works 'traumatize' young readers. It's just an introduction to life's realities - everyone has to die, nature is beautiful but also violent, and humans can be crueler to each other than any animal ever could. Kids aren't traumatized by reading, or by playing video games - if trauma occurs, it's due to things like war and poverty and neglect and abuse.
Kids needs scary stories in a safe environment. This will help them process these thoughts and prepare them for the inevitable trauma they will face at some point in their life.
Animal Farm is also not a bleak read but also fun as you can do all the animal voices with their characteristic animal sounds.
A more apt comparison might be a story about urban war where the main character looses many immediate family members (and explores the grieving process against the backdrop of the war) - and how that would help a kid process the loss of an immediate family member.
Please stop wasting other people's.
Sure, it would be great if everyone could offer "evidence" for every position, but that's obviously unrealistic and impractical.
In other words, we told stories that specifically set them up for disillusionment and disorder. Telling stories has been the way one generation prepares the next since the telling of stories began.
Oral tradition, religious texts, myth, legend, fables, fairy tales... all of these had purposes beyond entertainment. Don't go in the woods by yourself, it's dangerous. Don't swim in that river, it's dangerous. Don't be mean to other people, because you don't want to live in that society. Don't lie, because people won't believe you when you need them to.
We've always told these kinds of stories... until recently. The kids that did get these kinds of stories built the modern world. The kinds of kids that aren't getting these kinds of stories are the ones going on shooting sprees or rioting because they didn't get that raise or someone was mean to them on social media.
We do have evidence, it just isn't organized into a formal longitudinal study for you. Here's the thing. It is possible for people to discuss an idea and even draw conclusions of efficacy without a longitudinal study.
That is a more apt response than I could muster and encapsulates my thoughts on the matter.
I feel like everywhere today we are beset with scientism. As if defending your own position is unnecessary as long as you can call into question the rigor of your opponent's. History has taught us well the value of myth
This isn't dueling anecdotes, it is the application of common sense and reason. You're taking a contrarian position against that, and lack of evidence (if that is indeed the case) doesn't create an "anything goes" situation where that take is on even footing with what you're arguing against.
They could use the knowledge to either not get into the situation entirely or to embrace the situation regardless.
The former will always result in less trauma over time. Unless I am missing something. The latter is open to debate.
Thinking like this is regards to past relationships, I have prevented a lot of self trauma through experience with trauma.
This is absurd on its face. I'm sorry I don't have a journal article to substantiate my claim.
[1] - http://web.archive.org/web/20190423155359/https://medium.com...
Don't go into the random abandoned house alone.
I'm not going to go searching for it because you can cherry pick anything off the internet, but it's well documented that scary stories in a safe space assist children with processing traumatic events.
Take the "story" of "if we get separated at the mall, meet at the fountain and wait there until we all arrive."
That's a story. You can imagine how it goes.
1. Imagine getting lost. Oh no, oh dear, sweaty palms! But hey, I'm not actually lost. No need to panic. Ok, now what?
2. I should actively work to remember the path back to the fountain.
Now, when your five-year-old brain realizes you got separated from daddy, you're not FREAKING OUT you're backtracking to the fountain and thumb-twiddling.
Your turn - all you have to do is come up with an edge case ("I'm sure there are some kids that'd forget where the fountain was") and pretend that "some" is statistically more relevant than the idea that making a plan makes a positive difference.
Lots of this research can be read if you look for the impact of developing high self-esteem in individuals (typically this is done as described above), and measuring the impact of these actions.
Example paper here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/1529-1006.0143...
By trauma I was not implying "the worst thing that can happen to a person" - just bad things in general which will happen anyway. From my personal experience strategies and coping mechanisms inspired by stories may provide true insights and help in formulating actionable strategies in novel situations. But I can't prove it as other pointed out.
My intent was not to claim terrifying stories will inoculate a person from terror, despair, loss or anguish.
I read things as a young child, without having the support to talk and parse them out, and additionally on top of the chaotic environment I was already in, where reading things like Animal Farm, or, specifically in my case, being introduced to the concept of destructive extinction events in books, movies, and magazines caused much trauma. I had a year where I didn't sleep well, until I could finally convince myself that aliens weren't going to get me in the shower, and that a giant meteor wasn't going to collide with earth any time soon (yet, at least).
This is probably the same as the fact that 70% of soldiers experiencing combat stress do not get PTSD and 30% experiencing severe combat stress don’t either. This means human variability is significant.
So it’s a question of whether you want to roll the dice. I think I’ll want to permit the autonomy for my children but it’s entirely possible they’ll be in the susceptible set and be damaged.
I recall observing with morbid curiosity a video of someone losing their life to a terrorist many years ago thinking it would be no different than a gory movie. I was very very wrong. It isn't the realism of the simulation that matters its the inability to dismiss what one knows is in fact real.
As a kid with a lot of anxieties (nuclear holocaust, overpopulation, etc) I really didn't need to be growing stalagmites from my head.
Up to about seven years old, kids take things very literally. Understanding metaphorical speech comes only after that period, and not everyone fully understands even as an adult.
“He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.”
The right there was on of the most instrumental decisions of my life.
By 5th grade I'd read the entire high school literature section. I joined an adult book readers club to better understand what I was reading. Even the adults in my club agreed an adult life is continual situational ignorance, misunderstood tragedy, betrayal by those close to you, and servitude to the powerful. I no longer believe adult life is quite so harsh, but that attitude prepared me far better than my peers. I've spent a good amount of time talking down people ready to quit everything. Thankfully, I can reference some fantastic hopeful passages, and they have not failed such situations yet.
(I'm a smart guy but reading with my parents made a huge difference imo, it is probably the single biggest thing you can do to give your kids a head-start in life. Give your kids the ability to sponge up as much information as possible during those critical years of childhood brain plasticity!)
I've always been a sensitive person (until cruel kids taught me to hide it) and Watership Down and Where The Red Fern Grows got me bad as a kid... but not like lifelong trauma or anything, just baby's first exposure to death.
I actually asked my mom to compile a list of books she could remember, because a friend had kids and was getting to the age where they were starting to read too. Here's what she came up with (note, no particular order of difficulty or maturity here):
My Father’s dragon series
Where the sidewalk ends, Shel Silverstein
A pizza the size of the Sun
Choose your own adventure books
The Great Brain
The Boxcar Children series
Captain Underpants
Roald Dahl books: The BFG, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The Twits, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/The Great Glass Elevator (not as good)
My Side of the Mountain
No More Dead Dogs
The Secret Garden
Bridge to Terabithia (Deals with death, a little older)
The Lion, the witch, and the wardrobe
Across five Aprils (civil war historical fiction, older)
The Broken Blade (Voyageur) & Sequel
Island of the blue dolphins
The witch of blackbird pond
Johnny Tremaine (a bit older)
The sign of the Beaver
Charlotte’s Web
Because of Winn Dixie
Tuck Everlasting (sad at end)
Ruby Holler
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Treasure Island
The Pushcart War
Maniac Magee
Rascal
Frindle
Hatchet (Gary Paulsen)
Mr. Popper’s Penguins (young)
Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing (Juy Blume)
Pippi Longstocking
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (young)
A Wrinkle in Time
Moccasin Trail
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
From the Mixed Up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
The Egypt Game
The Phantom Tollbooth (young)
Holes (little older)
Sideways Stories from Wayside School (young)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Homer Price (easy reading)
The Indian in the Cupboard
Misty of Chincoteague (series)
Aesop’s Fables (young)
The Eye, the Ear, and the Arm
Redwall series
Watership Down
(I'll throw in the Discworld series too for kids that are getting a bit older! It's probably very readable for, say, an advanced 5th grader. I was tearing through all the redwall books and the Golden Compass series at that point and Discworld is probably comparable. Golden Compass wasn't finished then and The Amber Spyglass ended up being kind of a disappointment. I know I was reading Discworld by 7th grade for sure.)
However, I've turned into a fairly well rounded individual (I don't try to murder rabbits or children in their dreams at least). The only downside is that I don't find horror films or rabbits particularly interesting.
Something recently made me think of Moses the raven though.
Yes, the trauma occurs when you realise how misled you were about the nature of reality, that you were sold a lie.
He said that live was nasty, brutish and short in those days, and to make an impact and a deterrence the king had to be over the top cruel.
I don't know how true that is, as I suspect there's a large element of people just liking to be cruel if they have the opportunity.
I have a couple books on the cruelties done by armies in WW2, and in the American west, and could not finish reading them.
One of my favorite things about the internet when I was younger was that it let me find books I couldn't get without begging my parents haha.
Adults really underestimate how resilient kids are, and how much media isn't able to approximate the real world (yet). Modern ppl really don't realize how dark lots of older child stories are, like the brother's grimm etc, and that kids used to be taken to executions.
EDIT: over -> under.
I think there is something to be said about Disney cartoons use of music and visual images that sort of forces viewers into a certain emotional mindset. Oral stories/books on the other hand leave it up to the imagination of the listener to conger up the emotions and images. Not sure if this makes sense, but at least in the case of my kids it does.
Other movies of the time like the Rescuers and the Fox and the Hound and Labyrinth and such were a disappointment compared to these...
Similarly, I've heard Tron was almost revolutionary by the standards of the day, but the CGI is almost comical to watch now.
I can’t say it was ground breaking, as I was a kid at the time, but it was one of the great movies of my childhood. I remember watching it many times over. I do remember the characters seeming less real, and I still knew they were puppets. But this was also the era of Sesame Street, so a movie by Jim Henson that had puppets was kinda normal. I think the fact that my parents talked about it so highly probably answers your question more — it was something adults appreciated. Ultimately, to me, the Dark Crystal wasn’t a great movie because I feel the story was there to service the technique, even if the technique was masterfully used. Maybe I was too young to fully appreciate it.
Tron was much the same. At the time, you knew it wasn’t great, but it was still new. Like the targeting computer CGI for the Star Wars trench run, the effects weren’t great. Even at the time, it was a little spartan. But the effects moved the story, and worked well enough to not be a distraction (and you had never seen anything like it before). Tron was just as much about what it foretold as much as the CGI that was available at the time. But in contrast to the Dark Crystal, I liked the story behind Tron more.
I would say that both were groundbreaking for how they pushed techniques of movie making forward. The world creation in both were amazing and they both set a new bar for future movies to meet.
To renew your trauma:
https://static.kino.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/watership-...
1. This year, “Bambi: A Life in the Woods” has entered the public domain, and the Chambers version has been joined by a new one: “The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest” (Princeton), translated by Jack Zipes, with wonderful black-and-white illustrations by Alenka Sottler
2. Stephen King called “Bambi” the first horror movie he ever saw, and Pauline Kael, the longtime film critic for this magazine, claimed that she had ever known children to be as frightened by supposedly scary grownup movies as they were by “Bambi.”
3. The film in question is, of course, the 1942 Walt Disney classic “Bambi.” Perhaps more than any other movie made for children, it is remembered chiefly for its moments of terror: not only the killing of the hero’s mother but the forest fire that threatens all the main characters with annihilation
4. With the old Prince’s prompting, Bambi concludes from this experience not that we humans are a danger even unto one another but, rather, that other animals are foolish for imagining that we are gods merely because we are powerful
5. It was adapted from “Bambi: A Life in the Woods,” a 1922 novel by the Austro-Hungarian writer and critic Felix Salten
6. What makes it such a startling source for a beloved children’s classic is ultimately not its violence or its sadness but its bleakness
7. The implicit moral is not so much that killing animals is wicked as that people are wicked and wild animals are innocent
8. Salten insisted that he wrote “Bambi” to educate naïve readers about nature as it really is: a place where life is always contingent on death, where starvation, competition, and predation are the norm
9. What purpose are scenes like that one serving in this book? Salten maintained that, despite his own affinity for hunting, he was trying to dissuade others from killing animals except when it was necessary for the health of a species or an ecosystem
10. What are we to make of this muddy, many-minded story? Zipes, in his introduction, blames some of the confusion on Chambers, contending that he mistranslated Salten, flattening both the political and the metaphysical dimensions of the work and paving the way for Disney to turn it into a children’s story
Other works of Felix Salten: https://www.locserendipity.com/TitleSearch.html?q=Salten
https://thomaspark.co/projects/no-scary-parts/
Fantasia was easy. Managed to do The Lion King. Haven't been able to pull off Bambi yet...
You no need an extension for that one. As a kid, I tried to watch it multiple times and I always fell asleep. And I was a very patient kid.
The conflict between Scar and Mufasa had a song and jaunty lead up, so the betrayal wasn't much of a surprise. The death of Bambi's mother felt senseless and shocking. What gain could her death have served her killer? Why did she have to die? Who would care for the innocent and vulnerable Bambi?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter
Scared the living crap out of me, especially the story of Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug ("The Very Sad Tale with the Matches"): A girl plays with matches, accidentally ignites herself and burns to death.
I'm a huge One Piece fan (on of Japan's most popular manga and anime for the last 22 years). In the first season, one of the main characters has her adopted mother murdered right in front of her when she's like 7 years old.
And, if that's not bad enough, her town is taken over by thugs, she spends the next 10 years working on a plan to get rid of the thugs while basically being a slave to them. Only to have them discover and ruin her plan making all the sacrifies she made those 10 years in vain.
The show at a basic level is kind of silly and definitely for kids at some level but these heart wrenching moments are what made the show.
Unfortunately, 2-3 seasons later they started pulling their punches. Characters would sacrifice themselves (so heart strings tugged) and then a few episodes later they'd show up with a few bandages recovering.
Fortunately there's still been a few major un-pulled gut punches later in the series.
As for this piece, I wish he had gone more into the difference between the translations. That's how the piece started, and it ended with him simply saying the Chambers translation (the pre-existing one) is better. Didn't even include a comparison example.
Well, in the first, lions eat some people in the first scene. In the second movie, the wild pigs attack is terrifying. Never mind the rabid animals.
They didn't want to see my recommendations after those two.
you misbehave -> some stranger called “Bag man” will come take you in a big bag
I don’t remember ever being actually scared of it but remember it since ever my memory had formed.
"“Bambi” is not a parable about the plight of the Jews, but Salten sometimes regards the plight of the Jews as a parable about the human condition. The omnipresence and inevitability of danger, the need to act for oneself and seize control of one’s fate, the threat posed by intimates and strangers alike: this is Salten’s assessment of our existence."
That was the case the author was building up to the entire time. To each their own, but I thought it was an incredibly well written article.
There’s no good reason to show children traumatic events. A lot of them do internalize it. Just because you didn’t doesn’t mean others won’t. This has little to do with bad parenting or other such things. Some children are just able to take what is in a film and vividly imagine it towards their own life or have too much sympathy.
HN obviously isn’t a great place to get advice about how to raise children from people who are known to be chronic over workers and absentee parents…