A Difference of Kind: Species and Social Difference in Children's Films

Abstract

Children's films are often considered as having the 'social responsibility' of educating their audience, infusing ideology with pedagogy to interpellate social norms to children. One of the effects of this responsibility is that children's films supposedly interpolate for their audience's learning the different social roles that individuals play, and how such roles relate to others as a means of preparing these young viewers for socialization. There is currently a growing body of academic interest in recognizing children's films as more than pieces of ephemeral entertainment, but as culturally significant texts which have the capacity to propagate, reinforce, and revolutionize stereotypes of social identities and social difference. This project intends to focus on the representation of social difference through one specific subsection of the children's films, the films which include anthropomorphized animals. Anthropomorphism is the projection of human qualities, traits, languages, and personalities onto nonhuman subjects in order to differentiate certain nonhuman subjects into a human framework; these projections of human aspects re-contextualize nonhuman animals away from their species' traditional stereotypes and into symbolic human identities. Anthropomorphized animals are commonly associated with both the children's film and cartoons, being seen as trivial forms of media, but this reputation for triviality masks the potential for embedded subversive ideological content. The use of nonhuman animals in fiction can be both influential and of important ideological value by having these nonhuman characters take up a diverse range of representational positions while remaining superficially distanced from any concrete societal or political agenda. The predominant original contribution of this research is to consider how the representational positions of anthropomorphized animals is informed by their phenomenological proximity to humans. In this thesis, I divide the varying phenomenological proximities of anthropomorphism into five categories (Lost in Translation, First Contact, the Tourist, Postcolonial, and the Sentinel) and argue that each of these five categories are more attuned to a specific symbolic form of social difference, each of which carries the social responsibility of infusing ideology with pedagogy in a unique fashion.