From Issue 11, July 2003:

Family Movies

by Philip Palmer

(Complete Article: From time to time we will publish full articles on our website, particularly when connected to an event, promotion or scheme.)

The UK Film Council’s third group of ’25 Words or Less’ genres includes the Family film. Like the Teen movie, this is one of the few genres defined by the audience it attracts, not by the content of its story.   But the term ‘family’ movie begs a large and fundamental question.  Which family? It’s a fair bet that the Walton Family will watch very different movies from, say, the Addams family.  Philip Palmer explains.

It is a vexed question among film theorists as to whether Family films can be treated as a genuine genre.  In his May article in ScriptWriter Nic Ransome argued that ‘science fiction’ is a ‘film genre’ but not a ‘story genre’. In other words, it is the setting for stories that belong to a variety of genres – i.e. comedy stories (Galaxy Quest) or horror stories (Alien) and so forth.   But with Family films such fine distinctions melt away because a Family film can be comedy, it can be drama, it can be set in space, or in the past, or the future, it can be a cartoon, it can feature a boy wizard, it can be about a dog. But as long as it’s a movie that is intended to appeal to both kids and adults alike, it’s a Family film.

It is also hard to define the genre requirements because the films vary so greatly.  A child protagonist? Not always.  No sex and violence? Well, yes, but that’s hardly a genre requirement; it’s more on a par with not swearing in front of the kids.  Feelgood? Certainly. But perhaps the primary genre requirement of the Family film is that the film-maker is required to start by thinking about what his/her audience will want.  With other movie genres, you write the movie for yourself: if you love Westerns you write a Western, if you love film noir, you write a film noir.  But with a Family film, the writer or film-maker is not the target audience and this imposes its own particular discipline.

The Family film has long been a staple of Hollywood but historically there has always been a divide between the Kids film and the Family film.  Kids films were often shown in matinee performances for an audience of voluble monsters; Family films were the grown ups’ treat. National Velvet was a Family film as was The Sound of Music, but the endless short movies featuring the Little Rascals or Mickey Rooney or the adventures of the Pony Express were Kids films.

For most of the century, the Family film genre has been dominated by one man, Walt Disney. His first full-length animated feature Snow White took the cartoon into the realm of cinematic art and made animation respectable.  In the course of his prodigious career he was the producer of 663 movies, acted in 129 movies and directed 112 movies. Many of these are shorts, but it’s still a body of work that makes everyone else in the industry look like lazy underachievers.

In Japan the prolific and acclaimed director and animator Hayao Miyazaki is known as the ‘Japanese Walt Disney’.  His animated film Sen To Chihiro No Kamikakushi was a major international hit in 2001.   The other giant in this sphere is John Lasseter who has a credit as ‘executive producer, US’ on Sen To Chihiro No Kamikakushi , and was writer-director of Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2, and executive producer on Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo.

The classic Disney movies – including Cinderella, Dumbo, Fantasia, Winnie the Pooh, Sword in the Stone, Bambi, Lady and the Tramp, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and May Poppins – are a staple feature in the video collection of every seven year old child whom I know.  Other films that were huge hits in their time – remember Old Yeller who was a dog and was ‘yeller’? – have faded from popular view.  But the classic Disneys still dominate for the simple reason that they look beautiful, tell classic stories in an entertaining way and alternate funny bits with soppy bits.  It’s the killer formula.

Disney took many of his movie stories from the great fairytales.  Christopher Vogler has argued that the story archetype Disney found in these tales can be used as a model for all films with a ‘hero’s journey’ structure. Vogler wrote a memo about this while working as a story analyst for Disney. (I’ve read the memo; it’s fascinating stuff.) The ‘hero’s journey’ theory is expounded by Vogler in his book The Writer’s Journey (see ScriptWriter issue 10). It’s a powerful argument and a valuable tool for writers working on epic or mythic stories.  The only counter-argument that I would put forward is that all the films by Disney and his successors change more than they copy; where is the singing teapot in the original legend of Beauty and the Beast?

Other classics of the Family film genre include Spielberg’s E.T., which uses the clever trick of shooting adults from a child’s point of view in its early sections, creating the wonderful illusion that the viewer of the film is a child even if he or she happens to have a large tummy and a midlife crisis.  The Princess Bride is a more post-modern take on the Family film genre.  The Adventures of Robin Hood is the kind of action romp that all the family can enjoy and The Wizard of Oz is a perennial favourite that for years has been adored by children, parents and friends of Dorothy.

Other supposed Family films are more open to debate. The Film Council in their promotional material for ’25 Words or Less’ cite It’s a Wonderful Life as a Family film, which has attracted questioning in some quarters.  The Film Council’s argument – a persuasive one – is that this is a film with a clear moral (No Man Is Poor Who Has Friends), which appeals to all, or at least most, ages. But is it likely that Capra and his co-writers ever saw this, a story about a man on the verge of suicide reassessing his life, as a Family film?

However, the fact that It’s a Wonderful Life finds itself in the top 10 in the Top Family Movies list on the popular International Movie DataBase (IMDB) has to mean something because, like it or not, at one level it is the audience who decide what genre a film is in. (For instance, if they don’t laugh, it isn’t a Comedy!)

As so often with genre debates, one man’s fish is another man’s fowl. For instance, The Gold Rush, Duck Soup and Bringing up Baby are also in the IMDB Top Family Movies list but these to me are classic Comedies, not Family movies!  Perhaps it’s down to the fact that these are exactly the kind of movies that are shown on television at peak family viewing times at Christmas and other holiday periods. This is the moment when genre theorists reach for the sleeping pills.  How can you define a movie as belonging to a particular genre just because it happens to be on the television when everyone is snoozing after lunch on Christmas Day?

After a period in the 1970s when rubbish pseudo-porn dominated the local fleapits (did anyone actually see Confessions of a Window Cleaner?) and when the Family film virtually went out of vogue, we are now well and truly in the Golden Age of Family films.  This isn’t just a question of huge box office numbers; there are, without doubt, some great movies being made in this genre. When Sue Clayton did her analysis of the perfect film (30% action, 17% comedy, 13% good and evil, and so on) she concluded that the digitally animated Toy Story 2 is a film that perfectly observes this formula. It is certainly a perfectly constructed film. The pacing is superb, we feel for the characters’ jeopardy, it has jokes for all age ranges, and it has a cracking action finale.

I recently did a rough analysis of the IMDB list of the 250 Most Grossing Movies, breaking them down according to genre. The results were, at one level, obvious; the Science Fiction Action Genre (including The Matrix and comic book movies like X-Men) was predominant.  (Though the Most Grossing Movie of all time is Titanic, which belongs to the somewhat out of fashion genre of Disaster Movie, see pages 28 and 29.)

But second to the spectacular Action genre comes the Family Movie.  The following are the Family movies which are among the 100 Top Most Grossing Movies:  Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone (2) grossed $651,100,000 worldwide, Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets (6) The Lion King (11) Home Alone (22) Monsters Inc. (23), Aladdin (26) Toy Story 2 (29), Shrek (34), Tarzan (39), Ice Age (55), Beauty and the Beast (56), The Flintstones (66), Toy Story (67), Dinosaur (79), Pocahontas (80), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (84) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (94).

Other Family movies which didn’t do quite as well (but still made truckloads of money) are: 101 Dalmatians (live action version) (108), Mulan (109), Hook (110), Stuart Little (115), Look Who’s Talking (116), Casper (130), Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (131), Bambi (138), Scooby Doo (139) Jumanji (142), Sen To Chihiro No Kamikakushi (147), Lilo and Stitch (154), Hercules (157), Babe (159), 101 Dalmatians (cartoon version) (190), The Little Mermaid (193), Prince of Egypt (197), The Jungle Book (215), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (222). Many of these are genuinely fine movies (though I haven’t seen Scooby Doo.)

The quality of recent Family films is only part of the story. It seems to me that there has also been a huge cultural shift, namely, the disappearance of the Saturday matinee cinema experience and the greater protectiveness of parents.  Children who, in days gone by, would have walked to school and gone to the cinema on their own are now taken on the school run and accompanied to the cinema by adults.  Hence, the demand for films which also appeal to adults.  Movies like Shrek and Aladdin cleverly play a double game, emphasising sight gags for the kids and mildly risqué jokes for the adults in the audience.  (When planning to rescue his friend the donkey, voiced by Eddie Murphy, Shrek exclaims, ‘Well I have to save my ass…’)  Going to the movies has become, for parents of younger children, a family experience.

There are other films, such as Lord of the Rings, which have become Family films by default for the slightly older age group (say, twelve upwards).  These are essentially adult films that also appeal to pre-teen and teenage children and the marketing ruthlessly targets them with Lord of the Rings board games and mugs and computer games to follow up on the original ‘sell’.

Most of the movies on the list above are also animated movies.  This is in part another example of the Blockbuster Syndrome. So much money, effort and marketing is now poured into the big Disney/Pixar animations that it seems almost churlish for the public not to go and see them.  While E.T. stands as the pre-eminent example of a Family movie for the 1980s, and Home Alone dominated the early 1990s, Monsters Inc. and Shrek are clearly the way for the new millennium.

This doesn’t mean that successful Family movies nowadays have to be animated. One recent successful Family movie was Thunderpants, written by Phil Hughes who has a distinguished history as an administrator of the European Script Fund and who dealt on a regular basis with auteurs and was steeped in European, cineastic tradition. However, he is also, as a family man, exposed to small children with a passion for talking about farts, burps and poo and it was this influence that guided him in the writing of Thunderpants (a series of fart jokes loosely linked together).

The greatest hit Family movie event of the last few years – possibly of all time – is the Harry Potter franchise.  Despite the merits of the two Potter films I’ve seen so far, I do hanker after a subtler, smaller-scale approach. Matilda, for instance, based on the novel by Roald Dahl, is one of the best directed (by Danny DeVito) and sweetest movies you’ll ever see.  It’s live action; it’s small scale; it’s about people. It’s delightful and droll, with a superbly sharp, happy ending. Young Matilda’s parents are evil, heartless monsters and so in the closing scenes Matilda begs them to give her up for adoption. She shows them the adoption papers that she’s had prepared and snarls: “I’ve had them since I was big enough to Xerox!” (Interestingly, in an early draft of Dahl’s novel, Matilda dies, a story choice which, in my view, would have soured the whole experience of the book.)

Video is also part of the equation since this current generation of children are able to re-watch endlessly their favourite movies. As the father of a seven year old, I probably see more Family films in a given week than any other genre and I’m constantly struck by the subversive intelligence in mainstream Family films, Cats and Dogs being a particular recent favourite.  There’s dross too like the endless sequels, The Little Mermaid II and III, Jungle Book II, Lion King II, 101 Dalmations II: Patch’s London Adventure and so forth. Many of these sequels belong to a whole generation of Family movies that are never given a theatrical release but are sold in supermarkets to harassed parents.  Films like Barbie as Nutcracker and Barbie as Rapunzel may never have passed into your sphere of awareness; they are done on a tight animation budget and feature, er, Barbie as the lead character.  But all true cineastes should seek out these films because they feature the dramaturgical talents of Robert McKee as ‘Story Consultant’.  The mind boggles at the thought of the script conferences…

In conclusion: what is the secret of a successful Family film?  The Disney formula still rules supreme, in my view. Many recent successful Family films copy Walt’s formula and even the Pixar movies obey the classic Disney model but with a dash more grown-up wit.  The formula seems to boil down to this:

1)   Wish fulfilment.  To be a princess; to be the cleverest ant; to save a dolphin; to be the bravest toy; to be loved by a cuddly green monster; to be a wizard; to wish upon a star.

2)   Friends. Children love their friends and if (heaven forbid) they haven’t any friends, they want some.  So Cinderella has her birds and her mice; Beauty has her teapot, clock and candle; Ariel has her crab and her fish; Shrek has his pain-in-the-arse ass; Harry Potter has Hermione and Ron; Woody has Buzz.

3)   Family. Same argument; many classic Family films revolve around a family or a pseudo-family.  In 101 Dalmatians Roger and Anita are de facto Mummy and Daddy to all 101 Dalmatians. In Snow White the dwarfs act like children looked after by their mummy, Aurora/Rose.  Flik the ant is a member of a huge ant family; he falls out with them and has to leave home; he makes friends with the circus insects; and by the end his family come to love him once again.  Matilda is adopted by her teacher, Miss Honey, who becomes the lovely Mummy that Matilda always deserved.

4)   Comedy characterisation.  All the characters in Disney are ‘types’. There are the hero/heroine types – wishy-washy heroic (the Prince) or wishy-washy beautiful (the Princess). There are the comedy types who, like the Seven Dwarfs, can be easily summarised with a single adjective:  wisecracking (the mouse in Dumbo); evil (Captain Hook); servile (Mr Smee in the eponymous film); exuberant (Tigger); wisecracking (Timon in The Lion King); farty (Pumbaa in The Lion King), and so on.   This is a classic comedy approach; the difference is that in Disney, the comedy relief character types are usually animals.

5)   Slapstick humour.  The clever verbal stuff is for the adults; little children like people falling flat on their faces.

6)   Brevity.  Family films do not drag on; they observe a classic movie structure, reach the finale and stop.

7)   Happy endings.  Teenagers may be cynical but children, even those who know better, in their heart of hearts would like to believe in the tooth fairy. So a spirit of optimism has to dominate in order to capture the child audience. Matilda doesn’t die; Snow White does wake up; Shrek does not boil and eat the donkey.

It is debatable whether the above are genre requirements of the Family film or whether they are just tricks of the trade that have been proved to work. But it is, nonetheless, an extremely good formula.  These are the things that our children and we want to see: wish-fulfilling, feel-good with a sense of humour.  That’s family.

Philip Palmer is a film and television writer and producer who also writes for radio and theatre. He teaches screenwriting at Leeds Metropolitan University and runs a television drama series course in Brighton for Lighthouse.

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