I have been performing as a puppeteer and storyteller on a regular basis for about six years. I love children’s stories and spend a lot of time think about them and adapting them into puppet scripts for our shows. I am concerned about the stories we, as a society, are telling our children and I want to make some observations about content.
We once performed an adaptation of a traditional children’s song about monkeys who taunt and are subsequently eaten by an alligator. It goes like this:
Three little monkeys swingin’ in a tree
Teasing Mr. Alligator:”You can’t catch me!””You can’t catch me!”
Along comes Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
And snaps that monkey right out of that tree.
This lyric is repeated with decrementing numbers of monkeys until all of the monkeys have been eaten.
Puppetry is a very visual medium and the alligator puppet snapped the monkey puppets in his jaws one by one and swallowed them down as the monkeys cried out in distress. After the performance we had a few audience members express concern about the violence of this particular part of the show. Since then I have thought a lot about violence in children’s entertainment. I can understand being concerned about senseless violence, but the trend I see among parents is that they are now opposed to all violence. Violence has a place and important function in stories.
I remember when I first read the original Grimm’s tales and discovered the violence that has since been excised. The frog prince is changed back into human form by being thrown against the wall, not kissed. Snow White is awakened not by a kiss, but because they accidentally drop her glass coffin and the impact causes the enchanted apple to become dislodged from her throat. They punish the wicked queen who gave her the apple by making her dance in red-hot iron shoes until she dies. The stories were horrifying, but enchanting and powerful.
I have become an opponent of traditional and fairy tale “sanitation.” Sanitized tales, to me, come across as impotent and sterile in comparison to the originals. When we modify the original tales for the sake of making them less violent, something is lost–and often it is the Moral of the Story.
Modern sanitized tales often present a falsehood. Animals that are naturally enemies, or have a natural predator-prey relationship are presented as being able to get along. While in an anthropomorphic sense it may encourage people to reconcile differences and live peacefully, as an analogy it is wrong because the alligator is not merely a perceived danger that upon the closer inspection turns out to be just another misunderstood social outcast in need of love-the alligator really is dangerous to smaller animals; one party’s objective is really incompatible with the other’s; the alligator will eat animals like monkeys because that is what alligator really do.
The danger of sanitation in this sense is that children are taught a false view of reality that may affect their decision making process. If we were to sanitize our rendition of the Alligator and Monkey song so that, in the end, despite appearances, the monkeys escape, or the alligator ends up being friendly, we would be teaching a false moral. The Alligator & Monkeys song teaches an important lesson: that flirting with danger is (gasp!) dangerous. It also teaches that some actions have undesirable consequences. For the message to be effective, the danger must be real.
When the Disney machine changed the end of The Little Mermaid so that the movie could have a happy ending, I considered it a moral travesty. Disney changed the moral dynamics of the story. Their version suggests that that you can disobey your parents (and by analogy God) and make a deal with a witch (the devil or power of evil) and in the end you can win, gaining the benefits of the deal with the devil while escaping the consequences and retaining the approbation of parents or God. It teaches the falsehood that you can break the moral law and avoid the consequences; that you can rebel against God, deal with the devil, and still come out on top.
I also disliked the message of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. All of the male characters were portrayed as bad, as bumbling idiots, or both. There was not a single praiseworthy male in the whole film. When the beast ceases to practice beastly behavior and wins the love of Belle, he ceases not only to be a beast, but masculine. The prince at the end is emasculated and silent. The film was well done, but, to me, the content seemed to be little more than a feminist diatribe.
Now I’m not as extreme as all this makes me sound. I am not completely against modifying or even “sanitizing” traditional tales or rhymes. I just think that we should be very cautious of how our modifications influence or change the message of the story, and what undesirable messages we may be introducing through our changes. If we do change the message, we should be concerned that the new message is true.
One traditional tale that we have “sanitized” as we adapted it for our puppetry is Kipling’s “The Elephant’s Child” about how the elephant got his trunk. In the original, the young elephant asks his mother what crocodiles–there is that danger symbol again–eat. His mother scolds him for his curiosity and doesn’t tell him. He then asks his animal friends, all of whom give incorrect and ignorant answers. Finally he goes to ask the crocodile himself, and when he approaches, the crocodile feigns partial deafness. The elephant is tricked into approaching closer so that the crocodile can hear the question. Once he is close, the crocodile answers “I eat curious baby elephants” and snaps onto his nose and tries to drag him into the water to eat him. The elephant escapes, barely, but his nose has become all stretched out. He then goes home and uses his new trunk to beat up his family.
We replaced the end where he beats up his family with the elephant turning his misfortune into an asset by starting a band with his trunk as an instrument. We thought the original end would be perceived as too objectionable by the parents. In the process we destroyed the tale’s important symbolism and moral.
The original tale is a warning to parents. If the parents do not teach their children about moral dangers about which they are naturally curious (the nature of crocodiles-i.e. drugs, extra marital sexual activity, sin) their children will first try to learn about it from their equally curious and inexperienced friends, and then turn to experimentation with the danger itself. The consequences of their experimentation will not only change them, those changes will harm the whole family.
While our new message does teach the valuable moral of “making lemonade from lemons” and learning to overcome the consequences of our sins and mistakes, I still like the original moral best and can’t help but feel like we’ve caved into the pressures of a questionable social fad.
Great post, Jon. I wish we lived closer — I’m sure my kids (and I) would love seeing one of your shows.
I often take the time at dinner to point out where the meat we are eating comes from (if we’re eating meat). My wife dislikes it when I remind them that bacon comes from pigs like Wilbur and Babe, and admittedly I do it partly to get a rise out of my kids, but I also feel it’s important to recognize that meat comes from animals, and not out of a plastic wrapped package. Somehow the blood and death common on a farm have disappeared from our suburban lives. I don’t want my kids to be vegetarians necessarily, but I want them to recognize the consequences of their choices.
At reading time I dread the times when my girls pick their books designed to teach self-esteem or fair play or being nice. They’re utterly boring, predictable, uninteresting, and unmemorable. They’re also impossible to avoid in our culture. Pretty much any book with a licensed character will have one of these plotlines — Disney, Barbie, Care Bears, you name it.
A while back someone made a bit of money selling a book titled Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. They were fairy tales told satirically in the most extreme politically correct language. Pretty funny stuff, but sadly prophetic.
Amen to your Beauty and the Beast critique. If I had known that the Beast would turn into a prima ballerina at the end, I would have been cheering for Gaston all along!
What about the Disney movies where a subordinant (but willing) accomplice in evil is unpunished in the end? The Emperor’s New Groove, A Bug’s Life, and Monsters Inc. all have this element. I suppose it teaches forgiveness and the ability to change, but the lesson of accountability is somewhat diminished.
I’m going to third your critique of Beauty and the Beast. By the end, I wish she hadn’t changed him back into a human — he was so much cooler as a beast.
It seems to me that most parents who want sanatized children’s stories want them so that the kids won’t mimic the action. When I was a kid, it was very popular to sing the “5 little monkeys” song that goes:
Five little monkeys jumping in the bed
One fell off and broke his head
Took him to the doctor and the doctor said,
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed!”
The moral of the story? That you should listen to your doctor (or your parents; or God, if you like) when he advises you not to do things that are harmful to yourself.
The result of the story? All of my friends and siblings jumping on every bed we could get our feet on.
So I wonder if you feel there’s a tradeoff. By keeping the violence in these stories for the sake of the moral, do kids pick up on and engage in behavior that could be dangerous to themselves or others? Is it worth keeping that in these stories if kids might mimic it? Or, by making the moral clear, do you also clarify that the behavior of the animals/people/whatever isn’t something they should try at home?
Because, really, the prospect of coming home and seeing my wall splettered with frog guts because my kids were trying to see if they could turn the frog prince back into a prince is not a pleasant one.
There’s a thought-provoking book called Killing Monsters by Gerard Jones which argues that violent stories and fantasy-play are a normal and desireable facet of childhood; they help children deal with situations of powerlessness and come to terms with fears.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465036961/
LOLOLOL, Bryce. That’s funny about the bacon thing.
I agree with Jon’s post, It really is disappointing when stories are changed and “sanitized”. It’s the reason I usually don’t like to see the movie versions of books that I’ve already read. They’re just too far off from the actual story.
Another example of sanitation is the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Quasimodo is supposed to be deaf and very mean, Frollo starts out as a nice guy who adopts Quasimodo out of the goodness of his heart. Frollo just goes bad later in the book. Quasimodo tries to kidnap Esmerelda when Frollo commands him to, and that’s why he got whipped in front of everyone and had tomatoes thrown at him. Not because Frollo caught him outside of Notre Dame. The real ending is nowhere near as happy.
Jon, I want to thank you for commenting on my blog and posting it on your site. I’m very new in the world of blogging, so thanks for the advice. Talk to you later.
Ah man, I thought this was going to be a post about Team America: World Police.
Oh, and Jared — yes, I suppose Kronk and Molt should’ve been killed at the end of their respective movies, like in the Odyssey. Just what children’s movies need — summary executions! Though, frankly, I thought the guy in Monsters was punished enough, having been hooked up to the scream extractor. The one bad guy who gets off, where I really think he should have gotten it, is Iago from the Aladdin series. Man, if ever a summary execution was called for in a children’s movie, it was for that parrot.
It’s interesting to me that the “conservative” blog in the bloggernacle calls for more violence in the media. Um, guys, maybe Disney went too far, granted. But are you denying that violence in the media is a problem at all? I would hope not. See Team America, above. Sure, I liked the Incredibles, but I’m upset with myself that I took my 3-year-old to see it. He didn’t like it, and that was because of the violence. The real problem to me is finding a happy medium.
Brad,
It doesn’t seem to me like anyone is calling for “more violence in the media.” Rather, the outcry at the “sanitized version” of things is directed at the fact that these characters don’t ever face the consequences of their actions. That teaches kids that no matter how bad they screw up, there will always be a happy ending.
I don’t think anyone here really wants more violence. What they want is more responsibility- more characters who actually have to own up to their mistakes. And that can be done without greater violence portrayed. Violence in the media is a real problem, in my opinion, but not one that this particular post seems to demand more of.
Another problem with sanitizing children’s stories is that we deprive our children of a way to make sense of their fears and the darker side of their fantasies. Children are not entirely the innocent, tender creatures invented by the Victorians (though they are also not the mess of sexual and violent urges of the Freudians) and sometimes marketed in the pages of the Ensign and the Friend. They understand intuitively that there is evil in the world, and they need a way to make sense of that. If we give them stories in which there is no real “opposition in all things,” they’re handicapped in their growth toward goodness. My kids get the real Grimm’s, although I choose pretty carefully based on their ages and temperaments.
I think it’s important also to think carefully about the medium–visually presented violence is harder for kids to process than violence merely described by a story. If you read or tell a child a story, he’s likely to visualize the monster or the villain as precisely as scary as he can manage. If the visual image of the bad guy is ready made, it may be too scary or, for an older child, not scary enough to do the moral work of the story. A puppet show, while it contains visual imagery, still allows a great deal of imaginative input from the child. Movies, where a whole world is ready-made, are perhaps the hardest medium for young children to take in and learn from because they don’t require the child’s imagination (which is closely tied to moral sensibility in little kids) to be actively engaged. I don’t think this means we shouldn’t let kids watch movies or TV, only that we need to think even more carefully about content there than we would in stories we tell at home.
Thanks for your excellent thoughts Kristine. I think your comments about visual media and imagination are right on.
Jonathan,
I wanted to thank you for the kind email you sent me, and for telling me your real name! 😉 I also wanted to say that I couldn’t agree with you more about how important the stories that we tell to children are, and that sanitizing them to the point where the moral is lost is tragic.
Our bishop’s young son is 5 years old, and quite gifted. I have had the privilege of babysitting him several times, and once made the mistake of asking him if he wanted to see a Disney film I’d just bought…Alladin.
He said (mind you, this is a very polite and well-behaved kid), “I don’t like that movie.” I said, “not even the tiger?” He said, emphatically, “I don’t like anything at all about that movie!
Now, I have nothing but extreme respect for our good bishop and his wife, and this kiddo is brilliant in the extreme, so I got to thinking about his statement. And I realized, he is right. There isn’t much to like about it.
The main character says he steals only what he can’t afford, and that’s everything…. So, if you are poor, it is okay to steal, even if that’s everything. Wow. It really opened my eyes to how children’s entertainment really does send terrible messages to kids. And this kiddo, even at 5, got that.
I loved books when I was a kid. Voracious reader (Dragged 6 of the thickest books I could find home every day and devoured them each evening, trying to hide out from my scary homelife) then, but grown-up books never appealed to me. I thought I didn’t like to read anymore. Then I finally realized that I just don’t like grown-up fiction much…ok, except sci-fi/fantasy, which is like children’s stories anyway, and Anne Tyler, who just writes straight from the heart.
And I figured out why. There isn’t much truth in most adult fiction. And we are losing much of what was in children’s fiction. There is much darkness in the world, and those of us who carry light within us must share it, particularly with children. I think that the work you do is one of the finest anyone can do. Bravo!