To say that children matter in Steven Spielberg's films is an understatement. Think of the possessed Stevie in Something Evil (TV), Baby Langston in The Sugarland Express, the alien-abducted Barry in Close Encounters,Elliott and his unearthly alter-ego in E.T, the war-damaged Jim in Empire of the Sun, the little girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List, the mecha child in A.I., the kidnapped boy in Minority Report, and the eponymous boy hero of The Adventures of Tintin. (There are many other instances across his oeuvre). Contradicting his reputation as a purveyor of ‘popcorn’ entertainment, Spielberg’s vision of children/childhood is complex. Discerning critics have begun to note its darker underpinnings, increasingly fraught with tensions, conflicts and anxieties. But, while childhood is Spielberg’s principal source of inspiration, the topic has never been the focus of a dedicated collection of essays. The essays in Children in the Films of Steven Spielberg therefore seek to address childhood in the full spectrum of Spielberg’s cinema. Fittingly, the scholars represented here draw on a range of theoretical frameworks and disciplines—cinema studies, literary studies, audience reception, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, sociology, and more. This is an important book for not only scholars but teachers and students of Spielberg's work, and for any serious fan of the director and his career.

This volume explores film and television for children and youth. While children’s film and television vary in form and content from country to country, their youth audience, ranging from infants to “screenagers”, is the defining feature of the genre and is written into the DNA of the medium itself. This collection offers a contemporary analysis of film and television designed for this important audience, with particular attention to new directions evident in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With examples drawn from Iran, China, Korea, India, Israel, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and France, as well as from the United States and the United Kingdom, contributors address a variety of issues ranging from content to production, distribution, marketing, and the use of film, both as object and medium, in education. Through a diverse consideration of media for young infants up to young adults, this volume reveals the newest trends in children’s film and television and its role as both a source of entertainment and pedagogy.

Films of the past 15 years have been released in a number of formats and reflect a reconceptualization of film genres, audiences and the impact of technology on adaptation. Focusing on multiple audiences, film adaptation, nationalism, globalism and consumer culture, this collection of new essays explores how children's film can be re-examined alongside recent developments in their production. These analyses consider the effect of multimedia strategies on the child audience, the opportunities for viewer participation and the pedagogical implications of films for children. The essays also address how childhood is embedded within films and linked to various consumer contexts.

From the 1950s to the 1980s the Children's Film Foundation made films for Saturday morning cinema clubs across the UK - entertaining and educating generations of British children. This first history of this much-loved organisation provides an overview of the CFF's films, interviews with key backstage personnel, and memories of audience members.

André F. Nebe uses his humour structure analysis to make viewers' preferences and corresponding audiovisual offerings in films visible. Complex and multi-layered audiovisual (hypotactic) humour is used in the more successful films, while less successful films make simple (paratactic) humour offerings. The humour structure analysis offers insights into promising humour offerings and can also be used in the story development phase for writers, directors, producers and dramaturges.

This work is a wide-ranging survey of American children's film that provides detailed analysis of the political implications of these films, as well as a discussion of how movies intended for children have come to be so persistently charged with meaning. Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films provides wide-ranging scrutiny of one of the most lucrative American entertainment genres. Beyond entertaining children—and parents—and ringing up merchandise sales, are these films attempting to shape the political views of young viewers? M. Keith Booker examines this question with a close reading of dozens of films from Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks, and other studios, debunking some out-there claims—The Ant Bully communist propaganda?—while seriously considering the political content of each film. Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films recaps the entire history of movies for young viewers—from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to this year's Up—then focuses on the extraordinary output of children's films in the last two decades. What Booker finds is that by and large, their lessons are decidedly, comfortably mainstream and any political subtext more often than not is inadvertent. Booker also offers some advice to parents for helping children read films in a more sophisticated way.

This collection seeks to broaden the discussion of the child image by close analysis of the child and childhood as depicted in non-Western cinemas. Each essay offers a counter-narrative to Western notions of childhood by looking critically at alternative visions of childhood that does not privilege a Western ideal. Rather, this collection seeks to broaden our ideas about children, childhood, and the child’s place in the global community. This collection features a wide variety of contributors from around the world who offer compelling analyses of non-Western, non-Hollywood films starring children.

This book draws on a longitudinal study which highlights the beneficial impact of film in the primary curriculum. It provides detailed accounts of both the reading process as understood within the field of literacy education, and of film theory as it relates to issues such as narration, genre and audience. The book focuses on a small cohort of children to explore how progression in reading film develops throughout a child’s time in Key Stage 2; it also examines how the skills and understanding required to read film can support the reading of print, and vice versa, in an ‘asset model’ approach. Since children’s progression in reading film is found to be not necessarily age-related, but rather built on a period of experience and opportunity to read and/or create moving image media, Bulman clearly illustrates the importance of the inclusion of film in the primary curriculum. The book provides an accessible study to a large audience of primary teachers and practitioners, and will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in the fields of education, English and media studies.

Disney and Pixar films are beloved by children and adults alike. However, what linguistic messages, both positive and negative, do these films send to children about gender roles? How do characters of different genders talk, and how are they talked about? And do patterns of representation change over time? Using an accessible mix of statistics and in-depth qualitative analysis, the authors bring their expertise to the study of this very popular media behemoth. Looking closely at five different language features – talkativeness, compliments, directives, insults, and apologies – the authors uncover the biases buried in scripted language, and explore how language is used to construct tropes of femininity, masculinity, and queerness. Working with a large body of films reveals wide-scale patterns that might fly under the radar when the films are viewed individually, as well as demonstrating how different linguistic tools and techniques can be used to better understand popular children's media.