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Last Saturday, Eileene and I attended the New York International Children’s Film Festival, an annual event that has to stretch over three weekends because there’s too much material to squeeze into one. We won’t be able to attend the whole thing (nor would I particularly want to), so we limited ourselves to two collections of short films, mostly animated, and a full-length Japanese animated feature titled Five Centimeters Per Second. Of the three, the morning collection of shorts was far and away the best.

This was somewhat surprising, given that each event comes with a recommendation for audience age, and our favorite had the lowest recommended age bracket of the three: ages 5 to 10. One might expect to find more sophisticated content in films for older kids, and with it material more likely to please adults, as well. But this was not at all the case. Why?

I don’t know. But that’s not going to stop me from offering two observations that bear on the answer.

First, the short films selected for the 8-14 bracket weren’t merely material that 8-14-year-olds could understand; it was material specifically aimed at pre-teens, with several shorts revolving around kids subverting authority (and not always in a healthy way, either). Teachers in particular were treated as villains and/or targets of ridicule. The shorts in this group were more likely to include morals, and when they did, presented them with a subtlety designed for early adolescents, and thus too preachy adult sensibilities. In contrast, the films selected for the 5-10 bracket were far more playful, and far more eager to do something that looked really cool, instead of getting The Message across. It was as though the films for 8-14-year-olds were, like their audience, so worried about looking uncool that they stuck with safer, but far less entertaining, moralizing cliché.

Second, many of the shorts for older kids fell into the trap of believing that films about teens and pre-teens are necessarily films for teens and pre-teens, and vice versa. This attitude is pervasive in our culture, and I’ve complained about its effect on books. Whoever selected Five Centimeters Per Second makes the same mistake; the movie revolves around a couple of high school students, who remain in love for years after circumstances separate them to remote homes in Japan. Although teens can certainly understand the theme of coming to terms with romantic loss on some level, the story is obviously presented from an adult’s perspective, someone who has experienced his own loss and seen the stages of grief we experience, and can examine them from a sufficiently mature distance to add perspectives the protagonists themselves could not possibly see. It’s a film about teens, but not for teens; it’s for adults who have gotten past a broken heart and can now look back on teen romance with sadder but wiser eyes. By contrast, the shorts selected for younger kids make no particular effort to portray kids: two are about small children, and two are about older ones, but the rest are about abstracted clay balls, an astronaut, a goat, microbes, Disney’s Goofy, video game icons, and a bee. Instead of trying to spin the story to a target audience, they just try to tell a story and see where it goes.

By stepping away from the audience and trying to do something cool, they end up doing something cool, and where inserting a moral would be easy, they turn aside to moral ambiguity, a situation that defuses the moral’s relevance, or simply end on a note of “Oh my god. What happens now?” These endings were far more satisfying to jaded adults. In both ways, self-conscious marketing produced an inferior product, while making art for everyone ended up producing an inferior product for everyone, including children.

I don’t know whether the shorts we saw will be available elsewhere any time soon. But you might want to look for some of our favorites online or, if you’re lucky, in an extraordinarily good video outlet:

Crank Balls:Three grouchy clay balls are infected with happiness, albeit a form of happiness which is somewhat disturbing in its own right.
X: An astronaut gets snatched up by an alien…something, and is dismayed to find it belching out copies of him and his ship, all of whom insist they are the original.
Zhiharka: A little girl, ignoring the warnings of her guardian cat and bird, plays with a fox intent on eating her. Note how Zhiharka is neither the hapless heroine of Grimm’s fairy tales nor the self-empowering heroine of modern rewrites, but simply an ebullient little girl with a short attention span.
Shhh…: A boy in a library learns a trick from his grandfather, irked at noise-makers. With a flick of his thumb, he can make people disappear. Sort of.