Adults flock to cinemas as children's films come of age

JAKARTA (JP): A special mention goes to children's cinema this year. Jumanji (directed by Joe Johnston, a special effects specialist, with previous features including Rocketeer and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids!) was the third most popular film in Indonesia in 1996, certainly deservedly pipping Andrew Sipes' Fair Game and Jan de Bont's Twister.

Jumanji is about a board game that magically whisks its players off to the jungle (one character mentions Indonesia) or brings tropical mayhem back home. It gives Robin Williams another opportunity to act like a loon, this time he has been released from the jungle after 26 years. Covered in large leaves and skins, overgrown with beard, he bursts out of the undergrowth looking for mum and dad, as though time had stopped still. Thankfully he comes abruptly to his senses, shaves, puts on decent clothes, and tries to manage the situation.

Chances of doing this are slim, even for Robin Williams. He has a lot on his hands: stampeding herds of rhinos and elephants, a nasty Great White Hunter, giant mosquitoes, monkeys that terrorize the neighborhood and a rather languid lion that doesn't seem to have its mind on the job. Like the 1991 movie Hook that had Williams as a workaholic dad compelled to connect with his childhood again, Jumanji is another Williams vehicle with the subtext to tune into kids.

But it was Toy Story and Babe that were the best films to come to Jakarta this year. Both received recognition internationally well beyond their category, and if you didn't see them, you missed out. Babe, awarded a Golden Globe for best comedy, was one of the five nominees (against Braveheart) for the Oscar award for Best Picture and Best Director. It won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects while Toy Story won an Oscar for Special Achievement.

John Lasseter's Toy Story represented a milestone in cinema history as the first entirely computer generated film ever made and Chris Noonan's Babe involved a seamless combination of computer animation, puppetry and animatronics. But cinema audiences gather for story-narrative and spectacle, not just for virtuoso technological achievement. In the first place these two films work on the former level.

Babe was audacious in its simplicity, proposing a story about a pig that understandably wants to be different and manages it, to public acclaim. To make such an innocent film in times such as these, that is to find the financial backing and the market for such a concept, and then to succeed -- well, that's something.

In Babe the plot rested on the rivalries within the animal community down at Hoggett farm, while in John Lasseter's Toy Story we were engaged in the rivalries among the toy collection owned by young Andy. Woody the cowboy, who has been Andy's favorite toy to date, is displaced one birthday by a new toy, Buzz Lightyear the astronaut, who has a few more tricks up his spacesuit than his buck-skinned predecessor. They have to work it out of course, beyond the safe world of Andy's room. On one level, Toy Story is analogous with the bonding buddy movie, on other levels, it suggests something about the challenge of new technologies.

The year saw more quality children's cinema in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Indian in the Cupboard. Hunchback may have seemed on the face of it a difficult choice of subject for Disney, but children's film excels (by definition) at rendering the grotesque appealing after all. So why should we be surprised? Simulated swooping camera movements around the venerable Notre Dame cathedral and a barrel-chested protagonist who could swing from gargoyle to gargoyle brought dynamic action and even levity to the Victor Hugo classic lurking in the shadows.

Indian

The Indian in the Cupboard was very touching, and in difficult terrain. In representing indigenous people it nimbly avoided the pitfall of the turning itself into a lecture on political correctness. The story is about a young boy who builds an imaginative world around an Iroquois brave figurine that comes to life after being locked in a magical cupboard. In this film, the magic has another dimension to it which is hard to discern in the frenetic Jumanji. As a device it evokes a sense of history and a powerful sense of loss, theirs (the Indians) and ours, while in the Robin Williams' film the magic is mechanical rather than metaphysical.

The Adventures of Pinocchio rates at least a mention for being good entertainment, and Little Indian Big City, something different, rates at least as a good try. Not yet released as we go to print, Disney's upcoming 101 Dalmatians augurs well with Glenn Close in it as the villainous Cruella de Vil.

The other day while browsing through the titles in the children's section of a local laser disc rental outlet, I came across the cherubic features of Macauley Culkin. So what's new? Culkin's well-known face was gazing out sulkily from the cover of The Good Son, a violent drama that was withdrawn from theatrical release in the United Kingdom when it coincided with news of a horrific murder case involving youngsters. The same film received an 18 (years) certificate in Spain. This is no kid's movie, and neither is the Larry Clark film Kids, but that at least was in the adults' section.

How to judge a "quality" children's film is no easy task outside personal and subjective criteria, and is under- researched. With the transformations in programming threatening to open up access to every kind of program to every kind of audience, young or old, and with the seepage of violence and sex from adult cinema into the children's arena, anxieties about what is good for children are very real. Careless filing in the laser disc shop demonstrate how easy it is to slip-up.

-- Jane Freebury