Award-winning film director Gurinder Chadha is calling for more films to be made specifically for children, claiming that blockbusters made by companies such as Disney have lost a sense of ”innocence and wonderment” because they are filled with ”in-jokes” aimed at adults.
Chadha, who directed Bend It Like Beckham, believes that not enough classic adventure films of the sort that she enjoyed as a child are being made.
”One of the head guys at Disney categorically said to me, ‘We don’t want to make children’s films any more. We want to make films that are going to appeal to all quadrants,”’ said Chadha. ”Hence you have films like Shrek and all the Pixar stuff, which is designed to suit everybody.”
The trend has an unacknowledged downside, she added. ”They probably lose the innocence and the wonderment. Because, for adults, the gags have to be knowing. Children kind of get them because they live in this celebrity world, but there is a lost sense of innocence.”
Chadha (47) cited her memories of a childhood favourite of her own, a little-known Disney film called Pablo and the Dancing Chihuahua, about a Mexican boy travelling with his dog.
”I was transported to Mexico and to the desert, to this happy little dog and to this boy trying to go on an adventure,” she said. ”Now that was a proper kids’ film. Unfortunately I don’t think people want to make those kinds of films any more — which is why I’m going to do one next. I want to make a proper kids’ adventure film.”
Speaking in the run-up to the release of her latest film, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, on July 25, Chadha said that her next project will be about a British child on an adventure in India, with lots of animals involved along the way. She hopes it will be the first of a series.
The director’s first two hit films, Bhaji on the Beach in 1993 and Bend It Like Beckham in 2002, both focused on a child’s perspective on events and won her immediate recognition as a British talent. Her 2004 Bollywood-style retelling of a Jane Austen classic, Bride and Prejudice, has now become a cult film in the United States, scoring as one of the top DVDs rented by teenage girls who are hosting a ”slumber party”.
Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is based on a popular teen novel by Louise Rennison and tells of the trials of adolescence through the eyes of Georgia Nicolson, unofficial leader of the Ace Gang.
Chadha also argued that Britain is in danger of losing its film culture because too many children are missing out on the magic of cinema. She made a plea for cinemas to drop their prices to pull in more family groups. She said her desire to see more children experiencing cinema was the reason she had chosen to become patron of the National Schools Film Week, which will see 300 000 children going to the pictures for free in October.
”Some of those kids will be coming into a cinema for the first time in their lives,” she said, ”because it is expensive. DVDs have their place, but the cinema is a tangible, emotional experience that I would hate my children not to have.”
She fears that the habit is not as strong as when she was a child. ”For British cinema to survive you really need a British film culture and it’s got to start down there, with young kids watching films in the cinema — so they can be transported to a different world.” — guardian.co.uk