The Palgrave Handbook of Children's Film and Television

The Palgrave Handbook of Children’s Film
             and Television

Casie Hermansson · Janet Zepernick
              Editors

   The Palgrave
    Handbook
of Children’s Film
  and Television

Editors
Casie Hermansson                                   Janet Zepernick
Pittsburg State University                         Pittsburg State University
Pittsburg, KS, USA                                 Pittsburg, KS, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-17619-8         ISBN 978-3-030-17620-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17620-4

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Foreword

Like many of the children’s films discussed in this volume, the editors’ journey
was—no doubt—first imagined as an “exciting adventure” and probably pro-
gressed—as the editing took its toll—into a surprisingly dark “coming of age”
narrative. Luckily for us, the “happy ending” for those intrepid editors and
their contributors is that this Handbook of Children’s Film and Television will
be received and appreciated as deeply engaging and effective pedagogy.
    Which is to say, while the field of children’s film and television is (nearly)
always entertaining, it is often a lot scarier and more complicated than it often
appears to be when we first start our journey. It may also teach us things—
about ourselves, our cultures, and our place in the world—that will stay with
us for the rest of our lives. This is not hyperbole: the richness, wonder, dark-
ness, silliness, and expansive, messy generosity of film and television made
for, by, and about children is captured here, with chapters reflecting not just
the diversity of children’s experience but the extraordinary range of formats,
techniques, and stories intended to engage a child audience.
    The challenges that any Handbook of Children’s Film and Television is
bound to face, however, are the contradictory demands of “too much”
and “not enough.” Despite the burgeoning academic discipline(s) inves-
tigating children’s film and media, “too much” time often has to be spent
explaining the “who, what, and why” of the complex and often controver-
sial interactions between actual children, texts produced for children, and the
represented child. There is also simply “too much” material, especially when,
as the editors have rightly attempted here, the texts discussed range beyond
Anglo-American productions. Conversely, this means there will always be
“not enough” space and time in one Handbook to comprehensively cover the
entire category of “children’s film and television.” This is, in part, because
children, childhood, and the child are universalizing categories: We per-
ceive this universality in spatial terms, since children are “everywhere” and

                                                                                v

vi   Foreword

from a temporal perspective, when we observe “we were all children once.”
Children and the business of childhood thus seem to be something that we
can freely observe all around us and which we can all understand, since for a
period in our lives we have all inhabited a child’s body and point of view. In
another twist in the tale, however, we are also obliged to recognize that con-
versely, while the “child” may be a universal category, each individual child
is unique—since they are, just like adults, distinguishable and differenced by
age, race, class, gender, geography, and ability. To simply discuss and univer-
salize the child is therefore never, and certainly not, “enough.” This is not a
mistake that the editors and contributors make here.
    In addition, adults easily and inevitably forget what it meant and how it
felt to be the child they once were. As an adult author of documentaries,
fiction, or academic scholarship, to adopt the position of the child is often
promoted as a liberating and creative experience. In my opinion, however,
it can also become an act of creepy ventriloquism. One of the most disturb-
ing moments for me, as a film viewer, was watching the prologue to Terry
Gilliam’s Tideland (2005), the story of an abused little girl, adapted from the
novel by Mitch Cullin. In his deliberately monstrous appearance, shot in black
in white, presented as a direct address to the audience, he warns us, just as
the original extra-diegetic prologue to James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein did,
that what we are about to see will be “shocking.” During his minute-long
preamble, Gilliam also makes several assertions about children that—like most
generalized assertions about children—are both plausibly true and patently
ridiculous. He says children are “innocent” (as Henry Giroux has indicated,
this is a vacuous concept, frequently irrelevant to children and primarily pre-
cious only to adults); resilient (I would suggest this may be true sometimes
but not always); that children are “designed to survive” (yet we know many
do not); and that if we drop a child “they will bounce.” Most alarmingly, he
claims that he was “64 years old when I made this film, and I think I finally
discovered the child within me … it turned out to be a little girl.” This is
not funny peculiar or funny at all—it simply reveals the perverse and all too
ready co-option of the freedom, license, and creativity that we adhere to the
childlike qualities of children.
    The various contributors to this volume, however, are far more honest
about their genuine interest in the child’s point of view. In an entirely less
ghoulish manner, many authors attempt to take up, advocate, and adopt
the position of the child to uncover the complex terrain of children’s media.
Here, the wealth of contributions embraces the diversity of children and plu-
rality of childhood experience. Here, we can find chapters on films and pro-
grams made outside of the USA and the UK: films and television for and
about children in India, the Philippines, Hungary, Iran, Japan, China, and
South Korea. And while, necessarily, several contributions recognize that
much of children’s media remains bound to literary antecedents—fairy tales,
classic, and contemporary children’s literature—and is therefore frequently

Foreword     vii

adaptations, this does not circumscribe their content and effects. Several of
the chapters provided here engage seriously with the fact that films and tele-
vision programs intended for, or about, children are informed by discourses
and generic characteristics that we usually perceive as oriented toward adults.
Yet, as the contributions here demonstrate, many children’s stories are implic-
itly and explicitly about sex, horror, and violence, and while contributors
refuse the seedy voyeurism embodied for me by Gilliam, at the same time they
acknowledge that children’s lives are as morally and emotionally complicated,
difficult, desiring, and despairing as those of the adults they live alongside.
    The aesthetic complexity and richness of children’s media is also commu-
nicated via fascinating chapters exploring the use of animation and CGI, and
attention is further paid to children’s media texts employing the sophisticated
techniques of seriality and metafictional narration. I would also draw the
reader’s attention to the innovative inclusion of chapters illustrating a variety
of ways that children are themselves the authors and producers of their own
films. By encompassing chapters on initiatives such as Le Cinéma, cent ans
Jeunesse and other media education projects, the editors have boldly refused
the usual divide in children’s media studies. In the twenty-first century—in
the era of YouTube, where children engage with, produce, and absorb audio-
visual material via the circulation of GIFs, memes, and Snapchat—it surely
makes little sense to preserve the seeming divide between the child as pro-
ducer and the child as viewer.
    It also, as Becky Parry usefully argues in her contribution, makes little
sense to continue to disassociate the study of children’s film and television
from the kinds of analysis we have long been conducting in relation to media
forms primarily intended for adults. For too long perhaps, “grown ups” have
been wary of colonizing children’s media and children’s engagement with
film and television, whether this is in the form of an apparently infantilized
viewing position as “kidults” or when we anxiously monitor children’s media
use as “helicopter parents.” If we are scared off by the monstrous ventrilo-
quism of Gilliam, for instance, we may inadvertently abandon the analysis and
production of children’s media to others who we may find equally disturbing:
large corporations with nefarious commercial interests, conservative censors,
and self-appointed moral guardians. Instead, as this volume demonstrates, we
can and should participate, collaborate, listen to, and appreciate children’s
media texts in all their diversity and complexity. It goes without saying, of
course, that this also means that we listen and work alongside children them-
selves, as producers, performers, and viewers. This Handbook takes an impor-
tant step in that direction and provides, appropriately, a map of sorts, for
those of us willing and brave enough to undertake an “exciting adventure.”

Glasgow, Scotland                                                    Karen Lury

viii   Foreword

Karen Lury is a Professor of Film and Television Studies in the School of Culture
and Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow (Scotland). Her work on the child
in film was developed through her Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded
project “Children and Amateur Media in Scotland,” research from which appears in
her recent collection, The Zoo and Screen Media: Images of Exhibition and Encounter
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She is also a long-standing editor of the international
film and television studies journal, Screen.

Editors’ Note

The chapter by Robyn McCallum, “Adaptations for Young Audiences:
Critical Challenges, Future Directions” was previously published in
International Research in Children’s Literature (volume 9, issue 2, 2016) and
is reprinted here with permission of IRCL and Edinburgh University Press.
    Some of the material from Chapter 1 was previously published in Filming
the Children’s Book: Adapting Metafiction, by Casie Hermansson (2019) and
is used here with permission of Edinburgh University Press.

                                                                           ix

Contents

1   Children’s Film and Television: Contexts and New
    Directions		1
    Casie Hermansson and Janet Zepernick

Part I Adaptation and Intertextuality in Children’s
        Television and Film

2   Adaptations for Young Audiences: Critical Challenges,
    Future Directions		37
    Robyn McCallum

3   Easy A(daptation): Sex, Fidelity, and Constructing
    the Unknowing-Knowing PG-13 Teen Audience		55
    Casie Hermansson

4   In Medias Res: The Remediation of Time in Lemony Snicket’s
    A Series of Unfortunate Events		75
    Madeleine Hunter

5   Revisiting Comfort Women History and Representing
    Trauma in South Korean Films Never Ending Story
    and Herstory		93
    Ian Wojcik-Andrews and Hyun-Joo Yoo

6   New Shoes, Old Paths: Disney’s Cinderella(s)		111
    Sally King

                                                            xi

xii   Contents

7     Reimagining Alice Through the Intertextual Realm
      of Children’s Film and Television		131
      Jade Dillon

Part II The Possibility of Childhood: Gaining Experience
         Without Coming of Age

8     It’s Alive … AGAIN: Redefining Children’s Film Through
      Animated Horror		149
      Megan Troutman

9     From Anxiety to Well-Being: Openings and Endings
      of Children’s Films from Japan and South Korea		167
      Sung-Ae Lee and John Stephens

10 The Reign of Childhood in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise
   Kingdom		187
   Maria-Josee Mendez Troutman

11 Growing Up in the Upside Down: Youth Horror
   and Diversity in Stranger Things		205
   Jamie McDaniel

Part III Adult Discourses in Children’s Film

12 Change and Continuity in Contemporary Children’s
   Cinema		225
   Noel Brown

13 Entering the Labyrinth of Ethics in Guillermo del Toro’s
   El laberinto del fauno		245
   Evy Varsamopoulou

14 Male Wombs: The Automaton and Techno-Nurturance
   in Hugo		261
   Holly Blackford

15 Constructing Childhood in Modern Iranian Children’s
   Cinema: A Cultural History		279
   Amir Ali Nojoumian

Contents   xiii

Part IV Identity, Race, and Class

16 Dancing in Reality: Imagery Narration and Chinese
   Children’s Film in the New Millennium		297
   Fengxia Tan and Lidong Xiang

17 In Search of the Elusive Bird: Childhood from the Margins
   in Fandry		315
   Sonia Ghalian

18 Re/Presenting Marginalized Children in Contemporary
   Children’s Cinema in India: A Study of Gattu and Stanley
   ka Dabba		329
   Devika Mehra

19 Power, Prejudice, Predators, and Pets: Representation
   in Animated Animal Films		345
   Meghann Meeusen

Part V The Tension Between Global and Local

20 Negotiating National Boundaries in Recent British
   Children’s Cinema and Television		365
   Robert Shail

21 Global Stories, Local Imagination: Glocal Innovations
   in Filipino Children’s Films		379
   Anna Katrina Gutierrez

22 The Iron Curtain Opens: The History of Hungarian
   Children’s Television in Five Acts		399
   Katalin Lustyik

Part VI Film Literacy and Education

23 Children’s Literature on Screen: Developing a Model
   of Literacy Assets		417
   Lucy Taylor and Jeannie Bulman

24 Pedagogies of Production: Reimagining Literacies
   for the Digital Age		435
   Michelle Cannon and John Potter

xiv   Contents

25 Bridging Urban/Rural and Digital Divides:
   New Directions in Youth Media Education		451
   Steven Goodman

26 Film, Arts Education, and Cognition: The Case
   of Le Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse		469
   Mark Reid

Part VII The Influence of Form and Platform

27 Perpetuating Gender Stereotypes from Birth: Analysis
   of TV Programs for Viewers in Diapers		487
   Dafna Lemish and Nelly Elias

28 Data Science, Disney, and the Future of Children’s
   Entertainment		507
   Siobhan O’Flynn

29 Never-Ending Sequels? Seriality in Children’s Films		 533
   Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

30 Contemporary Children’s Film, CGI, and the Child
   Viewer’s Attention		549
   Michael Brodski

31 Finding the Hidden Child: The (Im)Possibility
   of Children’s Films		567
   Becky Parry

Index		585

Notes      on    Contributors

Holly Blackford is a Professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden
(USA), where she teaches American and children’s literature and film and
is an associate member of the Childhood Studies doctoral program. Her
recent books include the edited volume, Something Great and Complete: The
Centennial Study of My Ántonia (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2017), and a mono-
graph, Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel
(University of Tennessee Press, 2018). She is currently at work on another
monograph, The Animation Mystique: The Interplay of Street Art and Divine
Grace in Puppets of Page, Stage, and Screen.
Michael Brodski is currently working on a Ph.D. on cinematic representa-
tions of childhood and child figures at the University of Mainz (Germany),
where he also works as an associate lecturer. His main research interests
include childhood studies, children’s film and intermedial representations of
childhood and children’s culture, cognitive film theory, Soviet and Russian
cinema and culture, as well as cinematic portrayals of remembrance.
Noel Brown   is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at
Liverpool Hope University (UK). His publications include British Children’s
Cinema: From the Thief of Bagdad to Wallace and Gromit (I.B. Tauris, 2016),
The Children’s Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative (Wallflower Press, 2017),
the forthcoming Contemporary Hollywood Animation (Edinburgh University
Press), and, as co-editor, Family Films in Global Cinema: The World Beyond
Disney (I.B. Tauris, 2015) and Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated
Feature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). He is also editor of the forthcoming
Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film.
Jeannie Bulman earned her Ph.D. from University of Sheffield (UK) and
specializes in Primary English Teaching and Learning. Her 2015 doctoral
research won the UK Literacy Association’s award for research in 2016,

                                                                           xv

xvi   Notes on Contributors

and her monograph, Children’s Reading of Film and Visual Literacy in the
Primary Curriculum: A Progression Framework Model (Palgrave Macmillan,
2017), was nominated for UKLA’s Academic Book Award 2018. She has also
co-authored Film Education, Literacy and Learning with Becky Parry (UKLA
mini book series 2017).
Michelle Cannon   is a Lecturer in Digital Media, Culture, and Education at the
University College London Knowledge Lab, Institute in Education, University
of London (UK), is an executive member of the Media Education Association,
and has worked as a creative practitioner in schools in London since 2000.
She is on the editorial board of the journal Film Education and has collabo-
rated on numerous British Film Institute education programs as well as related
international research projects. Her recent publications include Digital Media
in Education: Teaching, Learning and Literacy Practices with Young Learners
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Jade Dillon is a doctoral researcher and English tutor in the Department
of English Language and Literature in Mary Immaculate College (Ireland),
where she co-organized Mum’s The Word: Voicing the Female Experience
in Popular Culture (2017) and Villainous Victims: Redefining the Anti-Hero
from a Postmodern Perspective (2018). She is a peer reviewer for Continuum
Journal of Media and Cultural Studies and publishes in cinematography and
critical literary analysis with Fantastika Journal and the IRSCL.
Nelly Elias is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication
Studies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel). She is a member
of the Learning in a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research
Excellence (I-CORE), where she leads a series of projects on uses of media in
early childhood; family media practices in the changing technological environ-
ment; and critical analysis of television programs addressing infants, toddlers,
and preschoolers.
Sonia Ghalian has recently submitted her Ph.D. thesis on children’s film in
India at Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal University (India). Her the-
sis explores the nuances of representing children and childhood narratives in
the larger continuum of Indian cinema, with a particular focus on contem-
porary films about childhood. As a research scholar she has taught literature,
literary criticism, and film studies and is the recipient of the Charles Wallace
India Trust research fellowship (2017).
Steven Goodman is the founding executive director of the Educational
Video Center in New York City (USA) and has taught in New York City
transfer high schools, Appalachian community youth organizations, New York
University, University of London Institute of Education (UK), and SUNY
Old Westbury (USA). He is the author of Teaching Youth Media: A Critical
Guide to Literacy, Video Production, and Social Change (Teachers College
Press, 2003) and, most recently, It’s Not About Grit: Trauma, Inequity, and
the Power of Transformative Teaching (Teachers College Press, 2018).

Notes on Contributors     xvii

Anna Katrina Gutierrez earned her Ph.D. in Children’s Literature at
Macquarie University (Australia) and has held fellowships at the Swedish
Institute for Children’s Books (Sweden), the Hans Christian Andersen Centre
(Denmark) and the International Youth Library in Munich (Germany). Her
recent publications include Mixed Magic: Global-local Dialogues in Fairy
Tales for Young Readers (John Benjamins, 2017). She is a director of Lantana
Publishing, where she pours her academic energies into the creation of pic-
ture books all children can enjoy.
Casie Hermansson is University Professor of English at Pittsburg State
University (USA), and a Fulbright Scholar (Finland, 2014). She is the author
of Reading Feminist Intertextuality through Bluebeard Stories (Edwin Mellen,
2002); Bluebeard: A Reader’s Guide to the English Tradition (University Press
of Mississippi, 2009); A Study of Film Adaptation of James Barrie’s Story
Peter Pan (Edwin Mellen, 2016); and Filming the Children’s Book: Adapting
Metafiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). She co-edited with Janet
Zepernick Where is Adaptation? (John Benjamins, 2018). She has also pub-
lished more than twenty leveled fiction readers.
Madeleine Hunter is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge
(UK), where she studies twenty-first-century-adaptations of children’s texts in
the context of convergence culture. Her research elucidates and engages with
the temporal aspects of convergence in order to explore how convergence, as
a context of media production and consumption, is reshaping the boundaries
between adult and child cultures in the twenty-first century.
Sally King is a Ph.D. candidate at De Montfort University, Leicester (UK).
Her thesis examines the representation of the slipper in translations and adap-
tations of Cinderella to investigate how depictions of footwear in Cinderella
shape and reflect cultural representations of femininity. Her forthcoming pub-
lications include “Tailoring Cinderella: Perrault, Grimm and their Beautiful
Heritage” in Storytelling: Cultural and Creative Transformations of Cinderella
and “Tracking the Socio-Economics of Pantomime through Footwear in
Cinderella (2017–2018)” in Studies in Costume and Performance.
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer is a Professor in the German department
at the University of Tübingen (Germany). She has been a guest professor at
the Universities of Växjö (Sweden), and Vienna (Austria). Her recent publica-
tions include Canon Change and Canon Constitution in Children’s Literature
(Routledge, 2017) and Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature (John
Benjamins, 2017), and The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (Routledge,
2018). She has also edited a special issue on children’s films in the academic
journal JEMMS (Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society) in 2013.
Sung-Ae Lee is a Lecturer in Asian Studies in the Department of
International Studies at Macquarie University (Australia), where she studies
fiction, film, and television drama of East Asia, with particular attention to
Korea. Her research centers on relationships between cultural ideologies in

xviii   Notes on Contributors

Asian societies and representational strategies and cognitive and imagologi-
cal approaches to adaptation studies, Asian popular culture, Asian cinema, the
impact of colonization in Asia, trauma studies, fiction and film produced in
the aftermath of the Korean War, and the literature and popular media of the
Korean diaspora.
Dafna Lemish is a Professor and Associate Dean in the School of
Communication and Information at Rutgers University (USA), the founding
editor of the Journal of Children and Media, and a Fellow of the International
Communication Association. Her recent publications include Fear in Front of
the Screen: Children’s Fears, Nightmares, and Thrills (Rowman & Littlefield,
2019), Beyond the Stereotypes: Images of Boys and Girls and Their Consequences
(Nordicom, 2017), Children, Adolescents, and Media: The Future of Research
and Action (Routledge, 2017), Children and Media: A Global Perspective
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), and The Routledge International Handbook of
Children, Adolescents and Media (Routledge, 2013).
Katalin Lustyik is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the
Department of Media Arts, Sciences, and Studies in the Roy H. Park School
of Communications at Ithaca College (USA). Her publications include
the co-edited collection Popular Television in Eastern Europe During and
Since Socialism (Routledge, 2012) and numerous articles in journals such
as Media International Australia, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and
Television, Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture, Journal of
Digital Television, Journal of Children and Media, and in The International
Encyclopedia of Media Studies (Wiley, 2013) and The Routledge International
Handbook of Children, Adolescents and Media (Routledge, 2013).
Robyn McCallum is an independent scholar in children’s and youth literature,
film, and culture. She taught at Macquarie University (Australia) for twenty-five
years and is author of Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction (Routledge, 1999)
and co-author of Retelling Stories, Framing Culture (Routledge, 1998; with
John Stephens) and New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature
(Palgrave, 2008; with Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan, and John Stephens). Her
latest book is Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood: Transforming
Children’s Literature into Film (Palgrave, 2018).
Jamie McDaniel is an Associate Professor of English at Radford University
(USA), and the editor of The CEA Forum, an online, peer-reviewed jour-
nal devoted to pedagogy in English studies. Publishing in journals such
as Gender and History; The Midwest Quarterly; and Culture, Medicine, and
Psychiatry, he is the author of articles on disability and adaptation studies;
ableism in horror films; and legal, economic, and political theories of property
in contemporary British women’s writing. His current research seeks to cre-
ate adaptation-informed disability studies; his monograph in progress is under
contract with Edinburgh University Press.

Notes on Contributors      xix

Meghann Meeusen earned her Ph.D. from Illinois State University and
teaches children’s and adolescent literature at Western Michigan University
(USA), where she works to develop innovative pedagogical approaches cen-
tering around the contextual nature of literature and film and the use of read-
ing and research to develop critical thinking. Meeusen has published most
recently on agency in comics versus film adaptations, ideologies of race and
gender in Oz films, and aetonormative paradigms in picture books adapted
into feature-length movies. Her current research explores binary patterns in
film adaptations of children’s and young adult fiction.
Devika Mehra is a doctoral candidate at Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi (India),
where she is researching children’s literature, children’s cinema, construction
of childhoods, and popular culture. She has presented papers on construction
of childhood in Dalit literature, on children’s cinema, on children’s literature,
and on graphic novels. She has recently published a chapter, “Representing
Marginalised Childhoods in Contemporary Graphic Novels and Picture
Books in India,” in an edited collection Childhoods in India: Traditions,
Trends and Transformations (Routledge, 2017).
Maria-Josee Mendez Troutman is a doctoral candidate in Comparative
Literature in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the
University of South Carolina (USA). Her research spans English, Spanish, and
Portuguese literature and cinema, with a particular emphasis on Latin American
Magical Realism, European Modernism, and the films of Wes Anderson.
Amir Ali Nojoumian is an Associate Professor of English Literature and
Literary Theory at Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran (Iran), and is a mem-
ber of the research group “Tehran Semiotics Circle.” He has published
books and articles in Persian and English on literary theory and interdiscipli-
nary studies, including Signs at the Threshold: Essays in Semiotics (2016) and
Semiotics: A Reader (2017), as well as on Iranian filmmakers.
Siobhan O’Flynn teaches in the Canadian Studies Program, University of
Toronto (Canada) and consults on digital, interactive, participatory, trans-
media, and AR & VR storytelling via her company NarrativeNow. She is the
co-creator of the online site, TMCResourceKit.com, a resource for Canadian
producers moving into the digital sphere. Her augmented reality mobile app
Kensington Market: Hidden Histories, maps the layered history of key sites
and received the Lieutenant Governor’s Youth Achievement Award. She
served as transmedia consultant on the National Film Board of Canada inter-
active documentary, The Space We Hold (2017), and has published numerous
articles.
Becky Parry is a Lecturer in Digital Literacies at the University of Sheffield
(UK), where she is co-director of the Centre for the Study of Literacies. Her
research is underpinned by a commitment to the rights of children to access
media that represents their lives and interests as well as opportunities to use

xx   Notes on Contributors

media to represent themselves. Her doctoral research focused particularly
on children’s film and included the use of participatory and visual research
methods.
John Potter is a Reader in Media in Education at the University
College London Knowledge Lab, part of the Department of Culture,
Communication and Media, University College London. He is a founding
member of the Digital Arts Research in Education (DARE) Collaborative and
is an executive member and trustee of the Media Education Association. He
has published a number of books and journal articles in the field of media in
education, and technology in education.
Mark Reid is Head of UK Learning Programmes at the British Film
Institute (UK) and was one of the movers behind Reframing Literacy (BFI,
2008), which built film education infrastructure in primary schools in
England between 2003 and 2009. In 2012, he led the research consortium
behind Screening Literacy, a survey of film education in thirty-two European
countries, followed by the European Framework for Film Education (BFI,
2015). Since 2009, he has been the English partner lead for le Cinema cent
ans de jeunesse, an international film education program founded in 1995
and run by the Cinémathèque Française in Paris.
Robert Shail is a Professor of Film at the Northern Film School and
Director of Research for the School of Film, Music and Performing Arts,
both at Leeds Beckett University (UK). His earlier research focused on post-
war British cinema, stardom, and masculinity and includes his study of Welsh
actor/producer Stanley Baker for which he received an Arts and Humanities
Research Council fellowship. More recently, he has investigated children’s
popular culture including comic books, television, and cinema. His study
The Children’s Film Foundation: History and Legacy (Palgrave/British Film
Institute, 2016) was supported by an award from the Leverhulme Trust.
John Stephens is Emeritus Professor of English at Macquarie University
(Australia). His recent publications include New World Orders in Contemporary
Children’s Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Subjectivity in Asian Children’s
Literature and Film (Routledge, 2017), and The Routledge Companion to
International Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2017). He is a former President
of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature and founding
Editor of International Research in Children’s Literature (2008–2016), received
the 11th International Brothers Grimm Award, in recognition of his contribu-
tion to research in children’s literature, and has been elected a Life Fellow of the
International Research Society for Children’s Literature.
Fengxia Tan is a Professor of Literature in the Department of Chinese at
Nanjing Normal University (China). She has been a visiting scholar at
Cambridge University (UK) and Macquarie University (Australia) and a

Notes on Contributors       xxi

fellow of the International Youth Library in Munich (Germany). Her pub-
lications include Poetic Pursuit at the Margin: Writings on Childhood in
Modern Chinese Literature (2013), Carving a Childhood: A History of Chinese
Children’s Films (2018), Coordinate and Value: Study on Chinese and Western
Children’s Literature (2018), Region and Writing: Chinese Contemporary
Children’s Literature (forthcoming).
Lucy Taylor is a Lecturer in Primary English Education at the University
of Leeds (UK). Her doctoral research, funded by the Economic and Social
Research Council, focused on the relationship between children’s reading and
writing, as well as the social and cultural contexts in which children develop
literacy identities. She has taught English and Literacy Studies to trainee
primary school teachers and Children’s Literature at the Open University.
Recent publications include: Readers in The Round: A Holistic Approach to
Children’s Engagements with Texts (with Becky Parry) in Literacy (Special
Edition: Reading for Pleasure).
Megan Troutman earned her Ph.D. at University of Arkansas (USA) and
teaches English Literature and Composition at King’s High School in Seattle
(USA). Her research interests lie in the areas of gender studies and children’s
culture and film. She has presented at local and national conferences, includ-
ing the Popular Culture Association (PCA) and Pacific Ancient Modern
Language Association (PAMLA).
Evy Varsamopoulou is an Associate Professor in English and Comparative
Literature at the University of Cyprus (Cyprus). Her publications include
The Poetics of the Künstlerinroman and the Aesthetics of the Sublime (Ashgate,
2002, reissued by Routledge, 2018) and book chapters and articles on British
and European Romanticism, film, ethical and political thought, ecocriticism,
and twentieth-century literature. Her current work explores Romanticism and
aesthetics in narratives from the eighteenth century to the present.
Ian Wojcik-Andrews is a Professor of Children’s Literature at Eastern
Michigan University (USA). His publications include Children’s Films:
History, Ideology, Theory, and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2000) and chapters in
Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media (Bloomsbury Academic,
2014), Little Red Readings: Historical Materialist Perspectives on Children’s
Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2014), Children’s Play in Literature:
Investigating the Strengths and the Subversions of the Playing Child (Routledge,
2018), and Robin Hood and the Outlaw/Ed Literary Canon (Routledge,
2018). He has a forthcoming chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Children’s
Film (2020).
Lidong Xiang is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Childhood Studies at
Rutgers University-Camden (USA), with a focus on Chinese children’s lit-
erature, visual and material culture, and girlhood studies. Her publications
include articles concerning adaptation from folktales to picture books, and

xxii   Notes on Contributors

the power of poetics in textual representations with urban settings. She has
given conference presentations on children’s place-identity in children’s fic-
tions and how child citizenship is historically integrated into the national dis-
course in children’s periodicals.
Hyun-Joo Yoo has a Ph.D. in English Education from Columbia University
(USA) and is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at
Ewha Womans University (South Korea). Her recent publications in the field
of children’s literature include “Rewriting African American History in Roll
of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Metahistoricity, the Postcolonial Subject, and the
Return of the Repressed,” and “Imperialism and the Politics of Childhood
Innocence in Peter Pan and Wendy.”
Janet Zepernick is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the
Writing Center at Pittsburg State University (USA) and is co-editor of the
collections Women and Rhetoric Between the Wars (2013) and Where is
Adaptation? Mapping Cultures, Texts, and Contexts (2018).

Characters   and Symbols

é
è
ê
É
Á
ą
ø
ó
ā
ï
ç
ö
ő
Č
č
Ş
ş
Š
š
ä
ü
ű
Ú
ô
+
_
%
&
#

                               xxiii

xxiv   Characters and Symbols

@
™
th
nd
rd
$
€
®

=
<
The Flower Granny 꽃 할머니
Never Ending Winter 끝나지 않은 겨울
The Human Hourglass 모래시계가 된 위안부 할머니
The Season of Balsamina 봉선화가 필 무렵
Spirit’s Homecoming 귀향, 끝나지 않은 이야기
Herstory 그녀의 이야기
Never Ending Story 끝나지 않은 이야기
Imagery narration 意象叙事
Little Red Flowers 看上去很美
Mongolian Ping Pong 绿草地
Not One Less 一个都不能少
River Road. 家在水草丰茂的地方

List of Figures

Fig. 5.1  Young Myeung-Ja picking flowers blissfully (Never
          Ending Story)		98
Fig. 5.2  Two Japanese soldiers moving two comfort women’s dead
          bodies (Herstory, with English subtitles)		                        105
Fig. 6.1  Young Ella’s blue ballet pumps offer stability and consistency
          (Cinderella 2015)		                                                115
Fig. 6.2  Lady Tremaine’s immoderation is epitomized by her tall boots
          (Cinderella 2015)		                                                118
Fig. 6.3  Ella, not yet fully transformed, climbs the coach steps
          in her ballet pumps (Cinderella 2015)		                            124
Fig. 9.1  Avoidance of reciprocal gaze between character and viewer
          (The World of Us)		175
Fig. 9.2  Images of nurtured children increase Ren’s anxiety
          (The Boy and the Beast)		178
Fig. 9.3	Ren’s isolation in the anonymous crowd
          (The Boy and the Beast)		179
Fig. 9.4	Ren as an image of despair (The Boy and the Beast)		179
Fig. 9.5  Mother and mirror: Anxieties of loss in Oblivion Island.
          Top: “When will you come home?” Bottom:
          Dissolve/dissolution of the mother		                               181
Fig. 9.6  The ambiguous reciprocal gaze of Seon and Ji-A
          (The World of Us)		184
Fig. 10.1 Suzy with her binoculars (Moonrise Kingdom)		194
Fig. 11.1 The traditional model (figure by author)		                         207
Fig. 11.2 The progressive model (figure by author)		                         210
Fig. 16.1 Bilike in the table tennis hall (Mongolian Ping Pong)		306
Fig. 16.2 Adikeer and Bartel find their father and lose their last illusions
          (River Road)		311
Fig. 17.1 The pig being carried past the school walls painted
          with Ambedkar’s photos (Fandry)		326

                                                                             xxv

xxvi   List of Figures

Fig. 21.1   Scott Pilgrim’s heroic status is reinforced by film and video
            game conventions (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World)		386
Fig. 21.2   The Vigan fantasy-scape (RPG Metanoia)		388
Fig. 21.3   Cassandra wears a modern version of the terno top
            (RPG Metanoia)		389
Fig. 21.4   Saving Sally: living in a blended cityscape		                 390
Fig. 21.5   Patintero: Anime effects convey the importance of the game
            to a child		                                                  392
Fig. 21.6   Nico’s relationship with his father is mediated through
            globalizing technologies (RPG Metanoia)		393
Fig. 21.7   Meng is framed as the underdog hero (Patintero)		394
Fig. 25.1   James and Kendri (with permission)		                          461
Fig. 27.1   Gendered appearances Pim & Pimba, BabyTV		491

List of Tables

Table 9.1    Manifestations of an anxiety script		                       169
Table 9.2    Anxiety and eudaimonia		                                    171
Table 22.1   Children’s channels available in Hungary (March, 2011)		    404
Table 27.1   Gender identification of characters by visual and vocal
             features (%)		                                              496
Table 27.2   Gender distribution of speaking roles, voiceover,
             and voiceless characters (%)		                              496
Table 27.3   Distribution of characters by gender, type, and age (%)		   497
Table 27.4   Distribution of roles and activities by gender (%)		        498
Table 27.5   Distribution of characters who deliver an episode’s main
             message by gender (%)		                                     500

                                                                         xxvii