Word: films
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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Into this breach has stepped the children's film festival. Like Sundance for squirts, they exist to promote and cultivate the entertainment version of beets: vitamin-rich sustenance kids are not quite sure they want to consume, no matter how delicious their parents say it is. Hipster-parent haven New York City supports a children's film festival (Brooklyn has its own), and they're popping up in other places as well. You'll mostly find them in big cities, but Asheville, N.C., had its first kids' film festival last year, as did Nantucket, Mass., and San Joaquin, Calif. Providence...
...Oscar nominee for Best Animated Feature, tells the story of medieval monks who painstakingly create and shelter an illuminated manuscript in the face of invading barbarian hordes. It has a delicate visual charm; a mystical, meandering story; and no zingers. In other words, it's a children's film that very few children would harbor any desire to watch...
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...