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Robert Walrod's avatar

Would you say, a la Coleridge, that children's movies have a tendency to be fanciful as opposed to truly imaginative?

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Virginia Neely's avatar

Disney movies seem to be syrrupy sweet and unrealistic in that sense, IMHO. But I can't agree totally with what you say. The cartoons I used to watch as a child (I'm over 70 now) were full of adult humour and violated basic laws of physics. Remember Wile E Coyote running off a cliff and standing in mid-air until he realized he was doing so, and only then falling? As for imaginary friends, one of my kids had a pet monster and later an imaginary dragon. It would be a terrible shame if imagination were fettered by physical laws as we know them. The stories we grew up on certainly weren't circumscribed that way (e.g. Alice in Wonderland, Ali Baba, the Grimm stories.) And we had enough scrubbing floors in real life. We didn't need it in entertainment. If you want children to understand you have to work to get what you want, make their allowance dependant on chores. Don't expect movies to give them their moral training. That's for parents to do. Don't fetter their imaginations. Without imagining what seems to violate the physical laws we know, we'd still be waiting for someone to invent a round thing that rotates so we don't have to drag heavy loads. Every forward leap we've made is because someone imagined something everyone else said was impossible.

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