4 hours ago
1
World Book Day dawns once more, with its morning chorus of swearing and sticky tape. This year, it falls shortly before we’re throwing a Harry Potter birthday party, so the living room has already surrendered to chocolate frogs and wand clay and preparations for the Dobby Sock Toss. Good timing, then. If you’ve already made a Nagini piñata, what’s one more hippogriff for the list?
Is competitive cosplay the best way to foster a love of literature in young people? That’s for finer minds than mine to debate, but with books like these, I’m surprised it’s required. What a time to have recently mastered phonics. What reluctant reader could fail to laugh at Mr Gum, or indeed anything by Andy Stanton? Who wouldn’t be thrilled by Louis Sachar or Lottie Brooks or Malorie Blackman?
My son is now on his 10th listen of the Potter audiobooks (the Stephen Fry ones). Those stories are – I’m sorry and elated and braced for impact to say – much better than those I was reading when I was eight. By which I mean Enid Blyton, but also perhaps Judy Blume and Anthony “Jennings” Buckeridge, and including – yikes – some of Roald Dahl and – double yikes – a lot of CS Lewis, even those Narnia cassettes read by Michael Hordern.
The characterisation in Potter! The world-building! The ethical complexity! The switchback storytelling when they visit the psychiatric ward at St Mungo’s and see first vain penseur Gilderoy Lockhart, now amnesiac but still rabbiting about autographs, then Alice Longbottom, a victim of the Cruciatus curse, shuffling along with a sweet wrapper for her son. It’s the best depiction of anguished dementia I’ve ever read.
And it’s not just books. Children’s culture more broadly seems a step above what it was 35 years ago, but also much of what is aimed at adults today. Don’t believe me? Binge-watch All Hail King Julien: Exiled, a spin-off of a spin-off from the Madagascar franchise – and a razor-sharp study of royal overreach. It’s up there with Wolf Hall. Plus: lemur burping.
I can’t speak to the theatre, save for reporting that colleagues rave about how all the really innovative stage work these days is for the under-12s. But I can testify to the ever-wider gap between what children and adults see at the cinema. While arthouse awards movies are applauded for the faintest squeak of radicalism, children’s blockbusters fizz with an ambition that feels light years ahead.
It’s not only Studio Ghibli and anime and Aardman Animations. Mainstream Hollywood family movies engage with the crises facing our world with a clarity and a playfulness that would be revolutionary in anything rated 15. The Mitchells vs the Machines – a 2021 cartoon about smart devices unleashed by a Zuckerberg-alike – walked so that Jesse Armstrong’s 2025 tech-bro satire Mountainhead could run. Same thing for The Lego Movie and No Other Choice (and Severance).
Last week saw the release of Hoppers, Pixar’s latest animated PhD in existentialism. It takes no prisoners in addressing our collective responsibility for ecological collapse. Standard practice in the genre, of course. Babe did it. So did The Wild Robot. And Wall-E. Bee Movie compared honey production to concentration camps.
Meanwhile, the acclaimed Oscar nominee Train Dreams, about a logger in the US at the start of industrialisation, contains a couple of vague meditations on whether humans will be the best custodians of forests. The Lost Bus, based on a real-life heroic school bus driver during the 2018 California wildfires, features one oblique nod to the climate crisis before the end credits blame a power company, then tell us the teacher celebrated surviving by going on lots of long-haul holidays.
Children’s movies show the world on fire, offer radical solutions and add jokes. The good news is that so many young people are watching them. The bad is that everyone else seems to run screaming. In his Baftas monologue, Alan Cumming likened the plot of Zootropolis 2 – now the highest-grossing US-made animation ever – to the modern US (“Lies, corrupt leaders, poisoning and persecution of a race”). But you would only know this if you were in the room. The N-word may have remained in the edited broadcast, but that bit came straight out.
