TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=89TT2465> <title> Sep. 18, 1989: Saturday-Matinee Menagerie </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989 Sep. 18, 1989 Torching The Amazon </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> CINEMA, Page 93 Saturday-Matinee Menagerie </hdr><body> Cats and dogs and elephants for the last few unjaded children By Richard Corliss One dictionary definition of culture is "the propagation of bacteria and other microorganisms in artificial media." For perplexed parents, that comes close to defining today's pop culture -- creepy little things that can give their kids the fever and make adults sick. Go figure: as scientists and sociologists toil to prove that just about everything is harmful, pop culture stridently insists that everything is O.K., as long as it's loud, rude or brutal. This makes for a poignant dilemma, especially when a child of four or eight or twelve wants to go to the movies. In the first few minutes of the PG-rated Uncle Buck, a six-year-old blithely discusses the propriety of a four-letter word whose use got a movie banned in New York State in 1962. And this is the mildest of provocations facing parents who want to be cautious without being tyrants. Raise kids today? Naaah, cage 'em. In the '50s, children hid their pop culture under the mattress. Horror comics, B movies and rhythm and blues offered kids safe passage to subversion, while parents dozed off to the official kitsch of crooners and Bible epics. Today, though, mid-cult gentility has been ghettoized in a terrain liberated by the Pied Pipers of rock and schlock. Kid culture is the culture. Comic-book films (Batman) and TV shows (ALF), heavy-metal music clangorous enough to drive parents and dogs wild, all merit solemn consideration in the critical and financial pages. Works that were once intended for grownups and maybe children are now intended for kids and the occasional hip adult. What used to be forbidden to the young is now required watching, listening and reading for all ages. And parents are left fretting that American mass art has become one big piece of Boogers candy. So if they have toddlers, parents retreat to their local cinema day-care center for the trite and true: nature fables, comic fantasies and Disneyesque cartoons. At the moment, a slew of such pictures beckons to desperate moms and dads. Disney, Hollywood's most reliable baby-sitter, has grossed more than $100 million this summer with Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, a lame jape that blends the old Flubber formula (Dad as a ditsy scientist) with the ageless theme of children lost in a dark adventure world (in this case, their backyard). Disney is also issuing a return ticket to Never Land with its rerelease of the 1953 cartoon Peter Pan. This is a trip that still soars like Darling dreams over the London skyline. Another 20th century children's classic in cartoon form, Babar: The Movie, sets the boy king of Elephantland on a journey to protect his sweet Celeste. Though this Canadian cartoon borrows some gentle wit from Jean de Brunhoff's tales, it lacks Disney's full-bodied animation and narrative gusto. There are endangered pachyderms, a child separated from her mother, comic supporting animals -- all the makings of cartoon magic -- but unlike Dumbo, Babar doesn't fly. At the head of the kindergarten class is The Adventures of Milo and Otis, a 1986 hit in Japan, concocted by author Masanori Hata and director Kon Ichikawa (Tokyo Olympiad) and Westernized by screenwriter Mark Saltzman. Filmed in a four-year period on Hata's farm, this live-action feature tells of Milo, a barnyard kitten who is forever getting into trouble -- tangling with ornery bears and lobsters, losing his way in a stream or a swamp -- and, thanks to his dogged puppy pal Otis, wriggling out of it. Milo and Otis requires no Mr. Ed mouth movements, no aerobatic special effects -- no human characters either -- to fill children and adults with the giddy sense of discovering an innocent new world. Though the beguilements threaten to fray toward the end, the film is constantly buoyed by Dudley Moore, who narrates the story and plays all the voices: a pompous frog, a friendly fox, a Margaret Rutherfordian sea turtle. Without pushing, the film also teaches lessons in sociability. "Otis thought of a word everyone knew: `Please.'" To those responsible for Milo and Otis, a movie fan with preschool children can only say, "Thank you." But what is a parent to say to the people in charge of entertaining kids in the years between Pampers and puberty? Perhaps "Help!" These days children get zapped by the raucous vitality of pop culture before they hit double digits. Too old for cuddly kittens, too young for caped crusaders, elementary-schoolers find few movies that offer the modern equivalent of a Hardy Boys or a Nancy Drew book. Steven Spielberg tries hard, but young teens are the more appropriate target for his Indiana Jones, Innerspace and Goonies yarns. So it's back to Disney, whose latest G-rated safari, Cheetah, was produced by Walt's nephew Roy. Blending Born Free and 3 Men and a Baby, the film sends teenage siblings Ted (Keith Coogan) and Susan (Lucy Deakins) off to Kenya to befriend a tribal boy (Collin Mothupi) and become surrogate parents of an orphan cub. It's all pretty tame. When Ted declares his yen for jungle adventure, Susan observes, "I think you've been watching too many PBS specials." So has Cheetah's director, Jeff Blyth; he may offer his moviegoing students a trip to the wildlife sanctuary, but it still feels like school. Like school, these films may be valuable in keeping kids off the streets and away from threatening images, both cultural and societal. But soon enough, parents realize that their children cannot be isolated in the plastic bubble of G-rated entertainment. Other, more hazardous wildlife awaits them. If fiendish Freddy or pretty Poison doesn't get to them, the atrocities on the nightly news will. It's an R-rated world out there. And the ultimate danger is not that they will be driven by aggressive movies or music to commit violent acts, but that they will turn emotionally jaded, unable to react to a personal or national tragedy with anything but studied irony. These days, virtually nothing seems sacred, or even serious, to adults. Children can't help getting that message. And Disney can't help them unlearn it. </body></article> </text>