Ugh… here we go

“BWAAK MOVIES DON’T GET MADE LIKE THEY USED TO!! BWAAK! A MOVIE LIKE THIS OLD ONE COULD NEVER BE MADE TODAY!! BWAAK!!”

In some form or another we’ve all heard this obnoxious mantra. It’s especially relevant today because it often comes from a political place – a perceived censorship of fiction pushed by people I can only describe as anti-culture pundits. They are often people who don’t create culture but somehow tout themselves as someone attempting to conserve it – despite it almost always getting deployed as an attack. It is never in service to the general public in any way other than to take down what they deem unworthy of some way they want to steer the zeitgeist of the world.

And it’s genuinely harmful to creative visions. When you foster a culture of hating culture you don’t do anything for it. But they make a monetary gain from it, drawing in more and more people into this anti-fandom world. They reap benefit from the destruction of culture under the guise of wanting to improve it.

But I’ve stepped beyond myself into the realm of politics, which I promised myself I’d never do. So what is this article about? Well…… it’s about how movies don’t get made like they used to…

God Damn-it

You are your own enemy

Yeah. I know. Here we are. But I promise I’m not like them! God, maybe I am.

This all stemmed from one of my most recent procrastination tactics – my psychiatrist tells me it’s called productive procrastination. I have recently become fairly obsessed with organizing and tagging all of the media files on my computer. I have been using a program called tinymm – or Tiny Media Manager – to create .NFO files that include things like Genres, User Reviews (my own), IMDB ratings, etc etc etc. It even comes with a scraper that pulls information for the movie from websites like TMDB (The Movie Database), IMDB, and more.

Anyway, as I was sorting these files and attempting to give single-digit scores from one to ten for, I came across The Adventures of Mark Twain. A movie I’ve talked about on many occasions. It’s no secret I absolutely adore this movie. It’s weird in all the right ways and has a tone of darkness you don’t often see. It helps that it’s also in Claymation, a fundamentally undervalued medium for storytelling which is understandably underutilized because the staggering amount of work rarely produces a comparable financial return.

My immediate thought went to the scene that depicts Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger story. The child protagonists have a conversation with Satan about how nothing exists except yourself, and how you may only be a thought in the imagination of something grander than you. I watched this movie when I was six. My brain couldn’t comprehend such complicated emotions as cosmic inadequacy, but it can still feel the dread of its implications.

So what was my reaction? “They couldn’t get away with making that movie today”. Of course that thought immediately came with a slight mental regurgitation. Who am I to say that; and what does that even mean?

Well then what do you mean?

The part where he walks back things and starts praising modern children movies.

Nobody has outlawed cosmic dread in children’s movies. There is no governing body standing outside Pixar with a checklist, making certain every confrontation with morality is accompanied by a marketable sidekick and three assuring conversations about emotional wellness. I’ve seen Soul. I know modern children’s movies still confront sadness, death, and the fear that a life was lived inadequately – or at least failed to meet the standards someone created for themselves. Pixar specifically has explored some remarkably heavy subjects: loss, love, and the emotional complexity of being a person. Inside Out built an entire movie around the necessity of sadness, while its sequel introduced anxiety and the way it can overwhelm someone’s developing sense of self.

And it isn’t just Pixar. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish dealt surprisingly well with the fear of death, even depicting what amounts to a panic attack. Kubo and the Two Strings (another great use of Claymation), centered itself around grief, memory, and accepting that the people we love cannot remain with us forever. Pinocchio (not Claymation but Stop-Motion all-the-same) by Guillermo del Toro handled fascism, war, and mortality as well.

But my immediate disgust with the phrase didn’t entirely erase the feeling underneath.

Walking Back the Walk-Back…

Modern children’s movies are still willing to approach darkness, of that I have no doubt. But mainstream movies often seem compelled to explain it before the credits roll. The darkness must be identified, given a name, a purpose and it must preferably be given a colorful physical embodiment that can be set up for branding. It can frighten a child for a little while, but eventually someone has to turn on the lights and explain exactly what they were afraid of.

I find that disconcerting on a fundamental level, and maybe that’s a problem with me.

Pixar is the most obvious example. Inside Out literally color-codes and personifies complicated emotions, turning sadness and anxiety into characters who can explain their functions within a person’s mind. Soul transforms death into a brightly colored metaphysical bureaucracy and ultimately turns its existential crisis into an understandable lesson about confusing purpose with the value of living. These movies approach heavy ideas, but they also make those ideas legible. They identify the problem, explain what it means, and offer a route through it.

Puss in Boots comes even closer to the kind of discomfort I’m talking about. Death isn’t an idea in the movie; he’s an actual wolf who stalks the lead and makes him experience genuine terror. The panic attack is handled with surprising sincerity. But even there, the fear becomes part of a clean emotional progression. Puss admits that he is frightened, recognizes the value of the life he already has, and emerges changed by the experience.

Kubo turns grief into a mythic adventure about memory and storytelling. Its darkness is real, but it ultimately gives loss a shape and a purpose. The people we love disappear, but the stories we carry allow some version of them to remain.

Pinocchio is the only one among them which shirks the critique. It does not make fascism, war, or mortality especially comfortable, nor does it resolve everything into a reassuring lesson. Its ending is beautiful, but is also deeply melancholy. Pinocchio survives while the people and creatures he loves eventually die, and the movie doesn’t pretend that learning to appreciate life removes the pain of that reality. Maybe movies like this can still be made, but they feel like exceptions rather than dominant.

So movies like that can be made, dipshit

I guess. But I’m still not satisfied. While Pinocchio eschews the trappings of modern children’s cinema, it’s still not as satisfying as something like The Adventures of Mark Twain, or The Never-ending Story. But death, war, and grief are issues we can name. I’ve yet to see a modern children’s movie build its central threat around the very concept of nothingness.

See what I mean? The NeverEnding Story’s big bad was a fucking concept. Not a villain with a laser beam or an evil wizard trying to conquer a kingdom. Nothing. Erasure. Entropy. The death of imagination.

Gmork – a terrifying wolf in his own right – doesn’t just threaten Atreyu. He explains that Fantasia is made from the hopes and dreams of humanity, that the Nothing grows as those hopes disappear, and that people without hope are easier to control. The movie does not reduce that idea into a child-sized language or rush to assure the viewer that everything will be okay.

Artax sinking into the Swamps of Sadness externalized despair as an actual landscape – and managed to implant cinematic PTSD into an entire generation of kids as a result.

That may be the quality I’m circling. These movies did not merely introduce children to painful subjects. They introduced us to ideas we were not yet capable of understanding. They let us feel the shape of existential dread, hopelessness, death, and oblivion years before we had the vocabulary to explain any of it.

The scene between Satan and the Aeronauts in Mark Twain is not even central to the movie’s story. It almost serves as an interruption – the opposite of a reprieve. So its inclusion felt like a sudden gut-punch of cosmic horror in a movie that already has plenty of darkness on its own. Nothing in the plot requires Satan to calmly explain the insignificance of human existence to a group of children. The filmmakers simply decided that children could sit with the idea.

Do you even have a thesis?

As usual, I’m likely just rambling. But there’s something here. Something to complain about, right? Yes. There has to be.

It’s not darkness we’re missing in children’s movies of late. Darkness is cheap by itself. Any movie can kill a parent, introduce a frightening monster, or make a child cry. What feels increasingly rare is the willingness to leave a child unsettled – to show them something enormous, frightening, and barely comprehensible, then trust the image to remain with them. So the missing ingredient isn’t darkness. It’s trust.

I recall one of my stepfathers imposing the rule that I couldn’t show his daughter, my step-sister, the movie 12 Monkeys when she was about twelve or thirteen because the movie was supposedly beyond her ability to understand. Well, I was twelve when I first watched it, and it rapidly became one of my favorite movies despite – or potentially because of – that confusion and discomfort it caused me. 12 Monkeys isn’t a children’s movie, but my experience with it reinforced something I think adults regularly forget: not understanding every part of a story doesn’t prevent a child from finding meaning in it. Assuming otherwise demonstrates the very thing I think is disappearing from children’s media: trust.

So what do you want?

I want filmmakers to trust children again. I want children’s movies willing to feel as ancient, diseased, and spiritually wrong as The Dark Crystal. As nightmarish and acid-soaked as Return to Oz. As genuinely terrifying as The Witches. As willing to confront experimentation, death, and sacrifice as The Secret of NIMH. As direct about mortality as My Girl. As steeped in despair as The NeverEnding Story. As existential and densely literary as The Adventures of Mark Twain.

I don’t want every children’s movie to become a ninety-minute assault of dead horses, detachable heads, and clay Satan telling the camera screen everyone watching is small and useless – though I have to be honest I might actually want to see that just as a strange pendulum swing for my own schadenfreude, but that’s neither here nor there. I don’t want Inside Out to stop giving children language for emotions they might otherwise struggle to understand. There is a heaping amount of value in that.

I want range.

There should be room for movies that help children name their sadness and movies that leave them with a sadness they cannot name yet. Movies that provide a route through the darkness and movies that merely acknowledge that the darkness exists. Children deserve reassurance, but they also deserve art that does not assume reassurance is the only thing they can handle.