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.
The Brothers Grimm already toned the horror down. Sleeping Beauty was based on a tale called Sun, Moon, and Talia [0] which has the prince having sex and impregnating her while she sleeps, and she only wakes up from her newborns sucking the splint out of her finger when she can’t find the breast.
"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]"
Many children's stories of old had an entirely different moral sentiment than today.
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.
Ah, this reminds me of a review of the book I stumbled upon recently that is eye opening... eye opening as it shows how the context of the reader is imprinted on their experience of the reading.
> 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.
> 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.
I'm not sure "messed up" is the most appropriate expression, if that may refer to a shaky mental status. It's all probably very intentional and lucid. Benedetto Croce - one of the greatest Italian philosophers - would not had taken that book in such high regard otherwise.
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.
For Cinderella, the story also existed in an older version told by Perrault, which is way less bleak than Grimm's tale. Especially as the Disney adaptation is closer to Perrault's tale (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella#Cendrillon_ou_la_pe...)
I know Disney pretends that "Song of the South" never existed, but Joel Chandler Harris' "The Tales of Uncle Remus" etc., includes a few stories where the animals meet their ends. Disney passed on those tales of course (leaving them as well out of the Disney book that followed the film and included additional Harris tales).
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).
> (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?)
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.
Trying to imagine the boiling cauldron full of vipers. Were they magical vipers that could live in boiling water? Would Maleficent really be able to feel any snake bites as she was being boiled alive? Huge plot hole. 17th century writers didn't think this through.
Yea, I wasn't sure if this was water or oil with resistant high temperature vipers. Or someone smashed up vipers and boiled it, to be painful and extra gross?
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.
Children's songs are also often cruel. "Il etait un petit navire" tells the story of a young sailor about to be eaten because the ship ran out of food. "Sur le pont du Nord" tells the story of a brother and a sister who ran off to a ball without their parents' approval and die when the bridge collapses. "Il etait une bergere" tells the story of a young shepherd who kills her mischievous cat in anger. These are examples from French folklore, but I would be surprised if it was different in other cultures.
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.
Tween-me would have been wondering what the adult showing me the film was thinking right around the time a grinning man suggested for the crowd "Ass to ass."
The section of the book where he sends Marion off to get money from Arnold, is some of the most haunting writing I've ever come across. The book is truly amazing. I've never come across another novel to so aptly relate the feelings of addiction.
kids is a cool film, but not much of a cautionary tale. it's more like a 90s urban euphoria, in that the message is really more to adults: "this is what teenagers are actually doing right now".
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.
That's why Germans refuse to refer to Disney movies by the names of the original Grimm stories.
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.
I wouldn't say this applies as a rule. Both Snow White (Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge) and Sleeping Beauty (Dornröschen) kept their original titles in German. Cinderella is really the only exception which makes sense since it's more based on the Perrault version.
There's even a counter example. The 2010 film Tangled is called Rapunzel like the original fairy tale in German.
"Snowwhite and the Huntsman" kept its original Hollywood name, it was never translated as "Schneewitchen und der Jägger". But you're right, it's “based on” a Grimm story, not a literal story adaptation.
> Did you know that Cinderella's evil stepsisters had their toes and heels cut off
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.
Many of the Grimm tales in their original form were also somewhat bizarre or surreal. I agree with you, but sometimes think the Disney versions were crafted as they were in part just to make sense as much as anything.
not just them, look at "thousand and one nights", but not at an adaption, look at something close to the original, these used to be very cruel, also the old Russian folk tales used to be quite cruel.
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...
I think that Bambi is something of a war movie; look at the forest fire scene, there is fire everywhere, it must have been inspired by bombing raids during the battle of Britain. I wonder if some of the artists had first hand experience of these events.
I recall something Stanley Kubrick said about Bambi being traumatizing:
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.
I think as adults we downplay how difficult first experiences can be, and so I don't think we get that the stories of loss and struggle in kids movies are speaking to them about real problems they either already have or will soon.
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.
Speaking of Miyazaki, I watched the Grave of the Fireflies when I was a child, and it was a devastating experience. (For those who haven't seen, it's a story of a brother and sister in Japan at the end of WWII.) It was as if I myself had lived through (and perhaps died in) a war. I watched it one more time in my life, but I cannot even write about it without tears coming to my eyes.
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.
Not that you explicitly said otherwise, but I just want to point out that Grave of the Fireflies was written and directed by Isao Takahata (RIP), who was a co-founder of Studio Ghibli and frequent collaborator with Miyazaki.
As a kid I was traumatized by War of the Gargantuas.
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 told the kids they aren’t allowed to watch that until they’re old enough to drink. Mostly so they can drink immediately afterward. That’s one of hose movies you really only need to see once, like Schindler’s List.
I think conflating violent or frightening scenes with tragic scenes is a mistake here.
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.
Where's that quote from? Was it before or after he let his daughter help out on the set of A Clockwork Orange? [1] Her job was said to be cutting out the letters on the wall.
(Which was awesome, I thought, even though she turned out to be about as messed-up as his quote would suggest.)
Don't know -- I saw The Shining when I was 11 or 12 and it freaked me out pretty badly but I don't think it left any scars. It's a lot scarier than Psycho at any rate which mostly holds up but seems incredibly tame today.
11-12 is different than 6-7 but besides some nightmares, I don't think seeing scary movies have a negative impact on kids.
I’ve grown watching „The Animals of Farthing Wood” (1993 cartoon).
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.
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”.
I loved a cartoon growing up as a child, called Alfred J. Kwak [0], a Dutch / Japanese series about a duck and his adventures; I believe a lot of it is on youtube if you want.
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.
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.
I've watched pretty much every episode at least 50 times, my wife also watched it as a kid and got our oldest addicted to it.
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.
I've been split on this. On the one hand it is a bit unpleasant and can be traumatizing, and we tend to shy away from unpleasant things, but on the other hand lots of generations grew up on Grimm's Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and learned a bit about how difficult life can be and the consequences of moral failings or lack of hard work. It is important to prepare children for the fact that life is not all rainbows and unicorns, but still important to protect them from the depravity of the world so that childhood is pleasant and magical with healthy emotional development. I guess there is a right way to do it, and a wrong way to do it, and that's part of the complexity of life/the universe/everything.
> learned a bit about how difficult life can be and the consequences of moral failings or lack of hard work
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?
--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.
The same thing most poor kids learn growing up: Just because someone looks and speaks nicely or is nice to you doesn't tell you anything meaningful about them. And it can be a fatal mistake to not be careful.
The old stories were designed to help prepare children for the hostile world they lived in.
I forget who said it, but one theory I've heard is that kids are naturally afraid of their parents and haven't built the ability to hold opposing views at the same time, so they have trouble reconciling these loving god-like figures they depend on 100% for survival and the total fear they have when the same figures are angry or disappointed in them.
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.
> the total fear they have when the same figures are angry or disappointed in them
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
IIRC, many of the most popular fairy tales give happy endings by pure luck and happenstance. Catch a fish with a magic ring, etc…. The ones with moral lessons are too on-the-nose to be enjoyable.
The most popular fairy tales also have been modified to be more kid friendly. Nobody saved Little Red Riding Hood. Sleeping Beauty wasn't kissed, she was raped in her sleep and gave birth; it was her child sucking the needle out of her finger that woke her up.
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.
Try looking on youtube for a version of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" that ends with the boy being properly eaten. They've all been changed to have narrow-escape happy endings, wholly destroying the point of the narrative.
I think the popular mistake is to assume that every story in folklore collection must be for children and we must be able to derive some moral message out of it. This was time before TV and youtube. Adults told each other stories meant for adults and kids might or might not listen.
Folktales around the world are only partly to be enjoyed, being also thrilling, emotionally-stirring (and thus more memorable) stories to help people of all ages make healthier decisions.
I don't mind scary stories for children, especially when told by people who know those kids and can easily judge the effect. But, the generations growing up on that and them taking deep moral lessons from it point is overstated.
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.
This is something I wish was brought up more. It is almost a meme that “the originals were darker,” but really the famous tales of the Grimms and Perrault et al are just local snapshots of a living tradition of the common people telling stories. I suppose the focus on the older recorded versions is a reaction against Disney and modified versions of stories marketed to children (e.g. Lang perhaps). And to be clear, I think all these, including Disney, are important culturally and present fine variants of the stories. Still, I don’t want us to forget the others.
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.
I feel like part of the problem is the medium. I read a lot of books as a kid. And there were many stories that I had no problem reading, but I really struggled watching on screen, even if I already knew what happened. Lord of the Rings being an example that comes to mind.
Because you can go decades without any kind of serious events in your life, living in a perfect bubble until shit hits the fan. That's when you learn nothing prepared you for that and no one cares or knows how to behave.
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.
The hardest part about being involved in a life altering event/catastrophe is that even having the preperation you're often blindsided by someone's or some groups avarice.
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 operate on the assumption that any sort of loan could end up as a "gift". If I'm going to loan friends or family money I ask myself if I'm OK not getting it back.
Don't lend more than you can claw back in small claims court. And have a written agreement. The small claims court size limits the potential downside, and the written agreement is proof of intent enough to stand up in small claims, so long as it's SMART (just like goals: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound).
That seems to be a key reason for fairy tales and such things— gentle preparation for life. It’s better to be equipped before battle rather than being tossed into the fray wholly unawares.
Imo, key reason for fairy tales is that both adults and children want to have fun. I watch movies and read books to have fun. Some of what my kids watch is written with proper moral lessons in it, but plenty of it is pure fun or with anti-lessons.
The people in the past had no youtube and no tv. They still wanted to have some fun.
Over lifetimes this works, sure. Any animal capable of passing on information to offspring likely does so, because it confers a boost in survival chance. For examples: sea turtles lay a bunch of eggs and leave, while a wolf family raises a much smaller number of pups.
Eventually. Other commenters have made note that you can coast for decades without encountering any though, so best be somewhat prepared by reading and listening to others.
I don't follow. Human history until recently was sustained largely by oral tradition and story telling; superseded by written story telling. What's the problem with telling stories that confer some wisdom or some sense of history or for fun?
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.
> It was once called „that animals cartoon that traumatised generations”.
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.
Watership Down is mostly traumatising as a cartoon. I've read the book last year, and it feels a lot more as a deeply mythologic piece than a psychedelic horror. It's essentially a shorter Lord of the Rings, with bunnies. Highly recommended.
(Also, the recent Netflix adaption of the material is a lot closer to the source material than the 1980s-era cartoon).
The Plague Dogs is so unrelentingly bleak, few films have the spine to just be utterly hopeless. It's like a "children's" version of something like Threads or The Lighthouse lol
If we're talking about bleaker topics in older Disney works, I'll ask you to take a moment and consider the entire premise of _Dumbo_ (1939). Why are the other elephants scandalized by the baby elephant with the big ears, asking what Mr. Jumbo would think? Why did they mean, just a few moments earlier when they said elephants are "a proud race"? Why would they shun him, declaring that he is not one of their kind? ... What kind of elephant has big ears?
The tear jerking properties of the treatment of Dumbo’s mother doesn’t get enough attention. There really is no greater love than that of a mother for her child.
/ notice I said “greater” leaving space for an equal ie a father’s love
> There really is no greater love than that of a mother for her child.
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.
Totally agree. I go pretty far out of my way to make sure my mom gets plenty of time with her grandson, which she loves.
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 agree - but it’s a rather complex state of affairs. There’s not a single thing that’s absolutely correct.
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.
With all of the elements in Dumbo directly from Minstrel Shows (black face, white face/Irish stereotypes) I think it's incredible that Dumbo isn't already in the same "Never to Reopen" Vault with Song of the South.
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.
It wasn't the first horror film my children saw (they watched Jaws, Alien, and Stranger Things) but the most terrifying and traumatic experience they've seen was the shipwreck scene in the Black Stallion. If you want to frighten children, murder what they love while they watch: their parents and animals.
Coincidence both Bambi and the Black Stallion were written during or in the immediate aftermath of world wars?
Parents being murdered is in plenty of kids movies. I don't think it has much to do with war I think it's more just you're writing a story with kids as the protagonists. How do you build a plot where they can overcome things if their parents are still in the picture.
One thing I've really noticed is that a lot of people - children and adults both - have no qualms about depictions of violence and murder of people in media, but they get really squeamish when it's (cute) animals. I wonder what causes that, is it just a kind of desensitization? Or a built-in kind of justice that bad people dying is fine but innocent animals isn't?
This is a pretty well-observed phenomenon that the relative sadness of humans and cute animals dying in movies and real life is (presumably) reversed. Someone had even coined a term for it - “dog-dying-in-movie sad.” I’m at a loss to explain why, but it feels like Peak Internet Discussion so hopefully someone here will feel like expanding on it.
There are movies that show violence against people in a way that hits and in a way that people react to. However, not in typical action/war/thriller story.
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.
For some reason I got my hands on George Orwell's "Animal Farm" at a very young age, as it looked like a kid's book. That's a fairly bleak book, for example when the pigs sell the draft horse to the glue factory, but only the goat (whose only friend is the horse) knows what's going on.
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.
I read the Animal Farm to my below K12 kids on one sitting and they were hooked.
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.
Stories don't prepare kids for trauma, and I don't think there's any real evidence in support of that idea. I would wager a large sum that a child who has heard scary stories is not more likely to better handle, say, the loss of an immediate family member, than a child who has only heard happy stories about unicorns, rainbows, and friendly interactions.
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.
Not commenting on whether you’re right or wrong, but that’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison there - nearly to the point of arguing in bad faith.
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.
List a single shred of scientific evidence showing that kids who are exposed to stories with similar themes to traumatic events they experience in real life are more likely the have better outcomes. Be afraid to call someone wrong without more than just-so stories and anecdotes.
This is a form of McNamara's fallacy. In reality, the data you are looking for is impossible to obtain. In practice, causing traumatic events is obviously unethical. Then, even if you had a proper study, there would be so many confounding factors that basically any conclusion is worthless. For instance, listening to an e-book on the subway is obviously different than discussing your emotions and response to the book. From first principles, it seems rather intuitive that if you expose anyone to a story of a trauma and discuss possible coping mechanisms, then that person is better prepared to cope with that trauma. Of course, being exposed to the thought might be traumatic itself (a kid might come to the realization that their dog is actually going to die) but if they react so poorly to the thought, how would they have reacted to the actual event? Intuitively, much worse. I'm all for data driven decisions, but our shared human experience can be a tremendous guiding light for things that are difficult to quantify.
Exactly. If you have an intuitive and common-sense take (exposure to stories with difficult themes can help kids cope with similar things in real life) and an unintuitive contrarian take (they don't, so let the kids get blindsided), the onus is on the contrarian to "list a single shred of scientific evidence."
Sure, it would be great if everyone could offer "evidence" for every position, but that's obviously unrealistic and impractical.
It's not contrarian...there's simply no evidence either way, that's all I'm saying. For every anecdote you can come up with showing a kid doing well after hearing scary stories, I'll come up with another of a kid doing without without hearing them. That's it.
Except that's not it. We have a whole generation of adults that can't handle rejection, can't handle difficulty, need emotional support peacocks on planes... because they were taught (repeatedly told the story, a.k.a. narrative) that they were special and would always win if they felt good enough about themselves.
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
> It's not contrarian...there's simply no evidence either way, that's all I'm saying. For every anecdote...
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.
What you call "intuitive" I call "not at all obvious or even remotely expected". There's simply no evidence either way that can't be contradicted by opposing anecdotes. That's really all I'm saying. It's not related to The McNamara Fallacy at all, because there's no obvious observation that supports the initial notion. It simply isn't common sense, even if you want it to be.
Eh, in psychology the default is "nothing ever happens ever". No one ever changes, no effect lasts, and nothing ever replicates. There are all sorts of "intuitive" results which utterly fail to replicate, so I'd be surprised if things are better when you can't do a real study even in principle. I suppose I might just be jaded from the replication crisis, but my expectation is that things mostly just kind of happen. It's why I left for the gentle shores of math, where things work exactly as much as any pure math can be said to work.
I'm actually with you on this. I've been reading articles about the trauma the war and displacement are causing Ukrainian children. I remember one mentioning older kids who knew about war already (because of stories or TV) had practically the same behavioral symptoms as younger kids who didn't understand what was happening. And this came from psychologists assessing hundreds if not thousands of kids.
I don't know if there are any controlled studies, but there's plenty of informal evidence that naive people cope poorly with traumatic events. Resilience is a product (though admittedly not a guaranteed product) of experience.
Stories definitely do help kids and adults process trauma.
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.
I see that you are talking about exposure to negative stimuli (bad stories) having no demonstrable positive impact to individuals. Perhaps this helps: Psychology has examined the impact of lots of praise (the absence of negative stimuli - e.g not allowing criticism of others, getting a 14th place ribbon) on an individual, vs those that are given critical feedback (negative stimuli is provided and/or no positive stimuli is provided e.g no ribbon or “good job” for 14th place; being excluded from the running team due to poor performance etc) for at least the past 30 years. The overall conclusion of this research is that lots of praise is a problem, and fosters the development of narcissism and leads to poor outcomes when the individual experiences “real” results (e.g they got a high five for getting a “c grade” in high school, but in their workplace performance review they get a “meets expectations” and a verbal warning from their boss that if they don’t improve they will be put on a Performance Improvement Plan).
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.
I was generally chasing the thought that reading to your kids is always good for them. Even scary stories, as long as they are don't cause too much anxiety.
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 was a fat, stuttering early elementary kid, so I read a lot to avoid the cruel other kids. To the degree my 4th grade teacher would no longer allow me to do book reports for a grade using children's or teen books any longer. She pointed me at the literature classics and said only those were grade worthy at my reading skill.
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.
haha, high-five. My parents read with us every night as a kid, and that got me going on my own. At the start of third grade I did a book report on a junior textbook about the allied air campaigns during ww2 and the teacher didn't really know what to do with that.
(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'm curious what sort of books they would read. I like to read to our kids, but it's mostly books targeted at a bit above their reading level, not adult-level stuff.
(other readers: sorry, I know this post is going to be a bit obnoxiously long, but I didn't want to put it on a pastebin or some other external service and potentially have it disappear if someone wanted to reference it in the future. If you're not interested please feel free to collapse this!)
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.)
Without your personal context, recommendations are difficult. If you like science fiction, check out "Stories of your Life" by Ted Chang; if you like historical strategies for success, check out "The 48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene; if you like grand philosophical views of an entire life well lived and how to have one "The Glass Bead Game" by Hesse; if you're interested in extremely practical advice in how to be successful today read (believe it or not) Harvard Business Review - it is far more down to earth than should be possible. If you like cynical SciFi, read Philip K Dick's Valis trilogy - it's a failed 2nd coming of god, wreaked by modern brand marketing.
I wonder if there is a difference between oral stories and movies. My kids started to cry while watching the Little Dinosaur (ages 5 and under) several months ago. I recently bought a copy of the uncensored Brother Grim stories. Taking into account how sensitive they have been in the past with G rated cartoons, I decided I would edit the stories in real time (leaving out words like 'blood') and sometimes modify the ending slightly. Recently, I stopped editing the stories. My kids still love the stories and ask me to read them more right before bed time. They even asked me to re-read them Hansel and Gretel, which is quite a brutal tale in my opinion. Show them a single clip of a 'sad/scary' cartoon and they still freak out to this day; however.
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.
Yep read animal farm in middle school and it was dope. (Along with Brave New World + Naked lunch which IMO is a bit racier)
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.
Quite a lot of adult mental illness can be attributed to being overly sheltered as a child… your brain wires itself to expect the environment it grew up in and when the adult world is substantially different the result is often mental illness.
I remember watching the Watership Down film as a young child and being rather disturbed. I think it set me up well for watching Nightmare on Elm Street when I was about 9 though.
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.
This is only true if the young ones in question are in a psychologically safe and emotionally supportive environment.
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).
I was 11 when I read All Quiet on the Western Front and maybe 13 when I read Innocent Erendira. I don’t remember talking to anyone about these, though I did feel terrible for a few days after. Honestly, no lasting effects.
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.
Do you have any evidence that there is a susceptible set? Books especially fiction come with two fundamental safety features. Firstly the book never subjects itself upon its reader. The reader is always in absolute control. Secondly the fundamental unreality of the setting allows one to dismiss it.
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.
I remember clearly as a kid scrubbing my head furiously for weeks after a local spelunking adventure where the guide jokingly told me that, after a stalactite dripped on me repeatedly, that a stalagmite would grow from my head.
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.
Reminds me of all the adults freaking out about kids being traumatized by wearing masks. Kids don’t care. For them it was like putting on pants. Not a big deal unless the adults around them make it into a big deal.
Watership Down and the Secret of Nimh were my two favorite movies as a young child in the early 80s, followed closely by the Dark Crystal and maybe Aristocats and the Black Hole.
Other movies of the time like the Rescuers and the Fox and the Hound and Labyrinth and such were a disappointment compared to these...
I've been curious about the Dark Crystal - was it particularly groundbreaking when it came out? I watched it after watching the more recent Netflix series and found the story pretty dreary.
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.
Both were groundbreaking and revolutionary. They were very ambitious projects due to the technology limitations of the time, and crossed well into the "labour of love" realm, in the same vein as Pinnochio (for example the animated bubbles in the crashing waves).
I read the book as a kid in the 70's, the same decade that all the fun stuff like Mutually Assured Destruction was an ongoing thing. I seem to remember being fairly distressed and mentally exhausted by the end of it. However the upside was becoming aware of how humans were slowly and inexorably ruining our planet.
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
I made a browser extension called No Scary Parts that skips traumatic scenes on Disney+ while trying to hold together a cohesive plot. Mainly for young kids who enjoy the music and other scenes, but aren't ready for the full story yet.
I have just realized that I may not have seen the Bambi movie I thought I saw as a child, because I could swear I remember seeing some of the scenes this article claims never made it into the film. I remember the oak leaf conversation from somewhere, as well as some of the harsher scenes they said were cut from the Disney version. I wonder if I read the book and forgot about it.
To me Bambi’s mom being killed is much milder than the death of Mufasa in The Lion King. In The Lion King you see the violence first hand and then the betrayal of a family member leading to a child’s self inflicted exile.
I resonated with the fear and pain of those moments of not knowing after the shot and subsequent feeling of loss in Bambi much more acutely than the dramatized witnessing of the fall in TLK.
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?
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.
It actually upsets me there aren't more harsh stories for kids.
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.
I grew up with this book. I absolutely loved it, and spent several years not thinking about it, until I remembered the chapter of the two leaves, which was my favorite chapter. I dug it up again and read it aloud to my wife. Just a wonderful book. I didn't really come away with half the interpretations that the author of this piece had, but that's okay. I didn't see it as an allegory for anything. I just loved how unromantic and poetic it was at the same time. I could analyze the book any which way, but the overall feeling it left me with is cohesive, strong, and original.
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.
Some of the tales from my childhood that I hold very dear to this day looked at really tough topics: death, solitude, betrayal. "Ronia, the Robber's Daughter", "Timm Thaler, or the Traded Laughter", "The Adventures of Sajo and her Beaver People" by Lindgren, Krüss, and Grey Owl are some that come to mind. Their authors were interesting, complicated people who had something to say about the world they lived in. Proponents of the coddling style of child rearing would probably declare them "traumatizing" and "inappropriate" for the 7- or 8-year old kid that I was when I read them. What turned out to be really traumatizing though was the real world, not these fairy tales — which ended up teaching me some pretty helpful lessons after all.
Ironic that the title of this post is now a sanitised version of the original in order to protect the sensitivities of the modern Hacker News readership.
Finding Nemo also has a sad beginning. And the beginning of Up is both sad and sobering. But none of those I see as traumatising. On the other hand, The little prince basically sells suicide to kids. And all the teachers always praise this book and force kids to read it while obviously the book is not written for children.
This is the most insufferable thing I've ever read in my entire life. This reads like chocolate cake with chocolate icing drizzled in chocolate syrup for smug individuals to read from the backseat of a private car service. The amount of faux insights and pop politic buzzwords while ending this with questions of whether bambi is a parable for jewish existence is astonishing and I found myself wondering if this was a parody paper submitted to the New Yorker to trick an editor into publishing it.
Did you even read it or finish it? It explicitly makes the case it is NOT a parable for Jews, as it is often interpreted, but rather the human condition in general. From the article:
"“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 a Barbar cartoon (by Nelvana, which is Canadian, so now it's on YouTube because Canadian media companies haven't all been gobbled up yet), so your kids can have the horror of watching young Babar see the hunters attack his family. My 3YO loved it.
A lot of weird people in here basically arguing for goatse to be shown to children.
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…
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.