Childhood in Animation: Navigating a Secret World explores how children are viewed in cinema and television and examines the screen spaces that they occupy.
The image of the child is often a site of conflict, one that has been captured, preserved and recollected on screen; but what do these representations tell us about the animated child and how it compares to its live action counterpart? Is childhood simply a metaphor for innocence, or something far more complex that embraces agency, performance and othering? Childhood in Animation focuses on key child characters and how they are represented within fantasy, separation, horror, politics and satire, as well as viewing childhood itself through a philosophical, sociological, and global lens. Ultimately, this book navigates that rabbit hole to reveal the secret space of childhood, where anything and everything is possible.
This volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of childhood studies, animation, film and television studies, psychology and sociology.
Introduction
Chapter 1: Childhood, Through a Looking Glass
Chapter 2: Separation: All the Lost Boys
Chapter 3: Fantasy and the Quest
Chapter 4: Horror and the Child: Agency, Fear and Secret Spaces
Chapter 5: The Child’s Gaze: Archives, Audience and the New Media Makers
Chapter 6: 21st Century Kids – Voice, Violence and Disney Pixar
Chapter 7: Locating the Child: The Political, Global and Local
Chapter 8: “Either it’s all ok or none of it is”: Satire and the Weaponized Child
Biography
Jane Batkin is Associate Professor in the School of Film, Media and Journalism at the University of Lincoln, where she teaches animation, film and media studies. She is the author of Identity in Animation (2017) and has had chapters published in several edited collections, including Animated Mischief: Essays on Subversiveness in Cartoons since 1987 (Duchaney and Silverman, 2023), Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Mihaelova , 2021) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (Pallant and Holliday, 2021).
