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

Yeah, HDM is much older than I was thinking, but it's also not really satirical, in fact I think it takes itself terribly seriously :P I mean, I love it, but. Coraline is a good example - I'd have to re-read The Phantom Tollbooth to really be sure, but I'm not sure if it's quite what I mean - it needs to be dark, but also a bit sort of... self-aware?

In re: sophistication, I don't mean sophisticated like the writng, I mean sophisticated in the sense that in some ways - especially the movie - depends on a knowledge of other texts. Like the movie has an additional subplot about the FBI, which is a total send-up - but it just wouldn't be funny if there wasn't the awareness of, like, cop shows.

Peter Pan, Pooh corner - um, probably not. :P