labellementeuse | (no subject)

Hi y'all, I have a quick question.

We've been doing "Matilda" in English at the moment, which has been really fun. Some things people have suggested in terms of the kind of film/text it is is as a part of a kind of "children's noir" or "family black comedy", texts that are darker, more sophisticated, and much more intertextual than books or films for children are generally considered to be - children reading/watching these texts have some understanding of stereotype, parody, they understand the conventional storyline and they also understand when the conventional storyline is deliberately being twisted. A really good example of this is A Series of Unfortunate Events. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is another good one. I was wondering if anyone else had any examples? it's a really interesting idea and I'd like to look at it in more detail, maybe for an essay I'm writing.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The stories that come to mind for me probably fall less into the 'noir' category and more into the 'written earlier, so dark is more expected' category. They include E. Nesbit's The Railway Children and A Little Princess. Obviously they're also much more sentimental than Matilda and ASoUE.

I know they're not the light-hearted tales we see sometimes, but they're not really quite what I meant - I'm really thinking of a kind of developing genre, books and films for kids who have grown up watching The Simpsons, if you like.