Word: childrene
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Kells, which is quite delectable in its esoteric way, was shown at children's film festivals in Providence and New York before it was seen in theaters. After the New York screening, there was a question-and-answer session with the director for all the petite Pauline Kaels. Do kids care about asking directors questions? Unlikely, especially since Kells' target audience is around 6 years...
...organizers of the New York International Children's Film Festival (NYICFF), which runs through March 21, understand that their target is not really children. This year's special attraction, for example, is a retrospective of 50 years of French animation. For those who find that too trifling a diversion, there's In the Attic, touted as a "Soviet-era allegory" by "legendary Czech stop-motion animation master Jiri Barta." No? How about the U.S. premiere of the German Expressionist film Little White Lies, which foreshadows the arrival of fascism through the microcosm of one school...
Heavy subject matter isn't the only thing that sets children's-film-festival offerings apart from their commercial cousins at the multiplex. NYICFF is also showing Fantastic Planet, which comes with a classic caveat for parents about "non-explicit alien nuptials." Mai Mai Miracle depicts third-graders and a toddler getting wasted on liqueur-filled chocolates. In The Old Lady and the Pigeons, there's an attempt at cannibalism. These are films for parents who prefer to expose their children to dystopia, dysfunction and dissolution rather than to Disney. (See pictures of animated movies...
What the festivals occasionally lack in fun - the six children I gathered wouldn't sit through more than 15 minutes of Mai Mai Miracle, and one of them is so alternative, she has a single letter for a first name - they make up for in novelty. Almost nowhere else can adults, let alone kids, see such a collection of genuinely innovative and visually arresting short films. (See the best movies of the decade...
Amuse-Bouche, the risibly titled animated French short-films program at the NYICFF, ran the gamut from an ingenious retelling of the fable of the lion and the mouse to Masques, a confrontation between two masks floating over a desert landscape. And if it's hard to imagine any children enjoying Black Tea, about a man's complicated feelings for a hot beverage, expressed in such terms as "microbes in the dental pulp," it's equally hard to imagine them not loving Oktapodi, a romantic comedy about octopuses. Mostly, however, the kids in the audience seemed nonplussed...