Drama and Trauma at the Cinema

Recently, we took our nieces to see Barnyard. I'd seen a trailer and looked like a fun, goofy computer-animated film. I was a bit confused by the fact that most of the cows seemed to have male voices, but I sort of wrote that off, figuring that perhaps they just had male voices but they were still female cows. After all, cows are female. Bulls are male. Very clear and prominent physiology can tell you at a glance whether you're dealing with a Ferdinand or a Bessie.

I was willing to suspend disbelief and so we packed off the girls for what I expected would be a couple of entertaining hours at the cinema. As often is the case, I was wrong. First of all, the male cows were presented as male cows. All the people who read that script, you'd think someone would have said “Uh, there's no such thing as a male cow.”

I don't know if it's just that since the cows spent most of their time as bipedal creatures that the artists thought it was funnier to give every bovine character an udder. Maybe udders were deemed more visually appealing or less threatening than balls. Whatever the rationale, it was a disturbing distraction. Not to mention that the movie is going to produce a generation of urban and suburban children who think that there are male cows and they have udders. Woe unto the city slicker who tries to milk a bull, that's all I'm going to say.

The movie started out rough and got worse. Otis is a wild boy of a cow and his dad wants him to be more responsible. It's coyote season and the barn animals must protect each other. The hit-you-over-the-head-life-lessons were starting early. The animation wasn't great. Besides the udders, I was also suffering from an annoying inability to identify what, exactly, this creature was supposed to be. (I thought maybe a cat. Peter thought it was a weasel. IMDB says it's a ferret. You decide.)

The highpoint of the film comes when those wild and crazy barnyard animals turn the barn into a dance hall and then order pizza. But it's a law of life that as surely as night follows day, a low point must follow a highpoint. Sure enough – there's a confrontation with the coyotes and Otis' dad died defending the hens, the job Otis himself was meant to do except he talked his dad into taking the shift so he could party.

It's a mark of how bad this film was that I, the girl who cries at Kodak commercials, was not emotionally affected by this fight-to-the-death scene. In fact, the only reason it registered with me at all was because the 6 year old niece climbed into my lap and even in the darkness (of the matinée), I could see that the 3 year old looked confused, upset, and afraid.

I felt bad, at this point, terrified that not only was I subjecting the girls to a crap film, said crap film was going to scar them for life. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that I was overreacting. After all, my generation learned about sudden, unfair death of parent figures in screenings of Bambi. We weren't scarred for life. Much.

I think I was just surprised by the major trauma in the middle of what I thought was a children's comedy cartoon and the girls had such strong reactions to this trauma. I've always sort of known that children, with the limited ability to distinguish real from make-believe, take in movies and television shows in a different way than adults do. I'd just never seen this principle in action.

It brings a whole new level to my biggest cinema pet peeve – parents who take their children to age-inappropriate films. This can be as innocuous as bringing a four year old to You've Got Mail or as egregious as bringing barely school-aged kids to see Hannibal. I know, it's easy to judge when you don't have kids, but really. If you can't afford a babysitter and you can't stomach any more saccharine-sweet, moral-laden cartoons, then have the forbearance to wait until the movie comes out on DVD.

When we left the cinema, the girls seemed okay. Of course, it's easy with nieces (and nephews) since you're not going to be the one woken up at 2 am if there's a nightmare. In any case, I'm sure the girls were much better off than the two kids of similar ages whom I saw leaving World Trade Center with their dad that afternoon.