Familiar aliens: Teletubbies and postmodern childhood

Bignell, Jonathan

doi:10.1093/screen/46.3.373

Cited by 36 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…As some academics (e.g. Bignell 2005) have noted, Ragdoll's productions do offer quite complex interpretive challenges. Howard and Roberts' observational study of children aged between 14 and 24 months watching Teletubbies (Howard, Roberts 2002) includes detailed analyses of the episode that they used, and confirms the cognitive challenges that required the children "to exercise developing theories of cause and effect, prediction and inference" (Howard, Roberts 2002: 334).…”

Section: Understanding the Nature Of The Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Even a two-year-old can do it! The early stages of learning to understand moving-image media

Bazalgette¹

2020

SSS

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Film scholarship has consistently avoided discussing how we learn to understand the complex, multimodal systems of communication that moving-image media (referred to here as ‘movies’) have evolved into over the last 125 years. This article offers some reasons for this neglect: in particular, the popular assumption that movies are extremely easy to understand, and the relative lack of research on two-year-olds – the crucial phase in which this learning must take place. Drawing on a 20-month study of a pair of dizygotic twins, a vignette of their early viewing behaviour illustrates the features of focused attention which characterized their investment of energy in trying to make sense of movies. An analysis of this phenomenon, using concepts from embodied cognition, shows how instinctive responses relate to thought and reflection. Setting two-year-olds’ movie-watching within the wider contexts of story-reading, play and the enjoyment of repetition, the article provides evidence that such learning does take place and can be seen as a significant aspect of two-year-olds’ “entry into culture”.

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Section: Understanding the Nature Of The Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Even a two-year-old can do it! The early stages of learning to understand moving-image media

Bazalgette¹

2020

SSS

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“…At the end of the 20th century, literary works like novels, films, and television series began to portray the idea of postmodern childhood, a term used by Bignell (2005), Chappell (2008), and Kincheloe (2018). The first example is the Home Alone series, which has five films from 1990 to 2012.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is about four creatures with short limbs, large heads, antennas, and colored skin. Bignell (2005) concluded that this program had demonstrated postmodern childhood's perspective through its ambiguous portrayal of the characters who appeared ambiguous with their childlike-adult aliens. The childhood that the child protagonists in these examples experience is different from the childhood portrayed in the modernist literary works, where children live in the world like machines with the straightforward notion of right and wrong or good and evil and have to conform to the existing structure (Chappell, 2008, p.282).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reimagining Peter Pan: The Postmodern Childhood Portrayal in Wendy (2020)

Hapsarani

Lutfiputri

2021

kata

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As a social construct, the view towards childhood remains to change over time. Literary works, such as films or novels from different periods of time which feature children's characters as the protagonists can be the right medium to identify those shifts. This article analyzes Wendy (2020) film as the latest adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s classic children's novel Peter Pan (1911). This film has made some transformations from the original novel to make the story more relevant in today’s context, including how it showcases childhood that is experienced by the children’s characters. Using textual and comparative analysis, this study attempts to see the transformations in the film adaptation and how it shows a different childhood construction from the one appearing in the source novel. Referring to the concept of postmodern childhood, Linda Hutcheon’s adaptation theory, and Bordwell and Thompson’s elements of film analysis, this study reveals how Wendy (2020) has exemplified the concept of postmodern childhood through the portrayal of children’s roles, children’s agency, and children-adults relationship.

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“…But this neglect also reflects the fact that a good deal of work on British children’s television adopts either an institutional or an audience focus, and Buckingham’s point that the texts aimed at children have been more neglected than the child audience (1995: 5), remains entirely pertinent where the study of television is concerned. Individual texts are rarely given serious consideration (and in relation to British preschool television, existing analyses have tended to converge on particular canonical examples, such as Teletubbies (1997–2001) (e.g Buckingham, 2002; Bignell, 2005)). This neglect has also meant that issues of representation in British children’s television – including those of family, gender, class and ethnicity – have been very infrequently analysed in the UK context.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Surely the most natural scenario in the world’

Godfrey

Holmes

2016

Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Te

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Historically, the majority of work on British children’s television has adopted either an institutional or an audience focus, with the texts themselves often overlooked. This neglect has meant that questions of representation in British children’s television – including issues such as family, gender, class or ethnicity – have been infrequently analysed in the UK context. In this article, we adopt a primarily qualitative methodology and analyse the various textual manifestations of ‘family’, group or community as represented in a selected number of BBC preschool programmes. In doing so, we question the (limited amount of) international work that has examined representations of the family in children’s television and argue that nuclear family structures do not predominate in this sphere.

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Familiar aliens: Teletubbies and postmodern childhood

Cited by 36 publications

References 3 publications

Even a two-year-old can do it! The early stages of learning to understand moving-image media

Even a two-year-old can do it! The early stages of learning to understand moving-image media

Reimagining Peter Pan: The Postmodern Childhood Portrayal in Wendy (2020)

‘Surely the most natural scenario in the world’

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