It is one of the most anticipated films of the year. It opens right at the beginning of the winter awards season. It has taken nearly a decade of development to reach the screen, including nearly four years of production. It is written by a best-selling author and directed by one of the brightest talents in Hollywood. And yet, stripped to its essence, Where the Wild Things Are is a movie about a boy running around in the woods with men in giant costumes.
The lionisation of Where the Wild Things Are as the best of contemporary Hollywood is not an anomaly. The film, adapted from Maurice Sendak's short children's classic about a boy who nips out of his bedroom window to a land of crazy, zany, hairy creatures (played by the aforementioned men in costumes, but voiced by the likes of James Gandolfini and Forest Whitaker), is being powered by the combined talents of the screenwriter and literary figure Dave Eggers and the director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich).
It is just one of several so-called children's films that have slipped the traditional summer blockbuster net only to reappear in the far richer waters of the serious movie calendar. Preceding Where the Wild Things Are is the latest offering from the American hipster auteur Wes Anderson - a big-screen adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox. The movie stars the voice talents of heavyweight Oscar winners such George Clooney (as Mr Fox) and Meryl Streep (as Mrs Fox) in the story of an ongoing battle between the eponymous vulpine hero and a crotchety farmer called Boggis (Brian Cox). Rejecting the slick stylings of today's de rigueur computer-generated effects, it has been assembled through the simple but painstaking process of stop-motion animation. Complete with conspicuously jerky, faux-naif physical movements, the film is designed to remind the viewer of a simpler, less sophisticated cinematic time.
Similarly, Pixar's Up, after a duly teary reaction from normally hard-hearted Cannes Film Festival critics, plus a stellar performance at the American box office ($290 million [Dh1 billion] and counting), has been pulled into the autumnal adult release schedules of Japan and much of Europe. The film, which follows the last-ditch attempt of an ageing retiree to find adventure by floating his house into the sky, has been deemed a worthy competitor for this year's Oscar gold. It will find itself going head to head with the gloomy apocalyptic thriller The Road, with Rob Marshall's musical Nine, and with the new Coen brothers film A Serious Man.
And it doesn't stop there. The A-list filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton are both set to return next year with the high-profile children's movies Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn and Alice in Wonderland, respectively. Other major studio works on the way include big-screen versions of Yogi Bear and The Smurfs, plus adaptations of RL Stine's Goosebumps and Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
Of course, a preponderance of children's movies on the upcoming schedule is nothing new in an industry when the top 10 commercially successful films each year are mostly dominated by pre-teen titles - as they were last year with Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar 2 and Horton Hears a Who! However, what is new is the slow creep of children's films from traditional holiday release slots (ie, summer and Christmas holidays) into a year-round phenomenon. As is their attendant elevation to a category of serious filmmaking, one worthy of the highest critical honours, including Golden Globes and Oscars. Children's films such as Wall-E are increasingly being nominated for Oscars in categories (such as screenplay and editing) outside of their traditional Best Animated Film ghetto, as if to prove this point.
This new type of catch-all movie is a hybrid film - part-children's film, part-grown-up entertainment. It was identified recently in the Los Angeles Times as a movie genre that became a "shared experience" between parents and children and was exemplified by movies from Pixar, or the Harry Potter films because they were aimed at children "without being too soft or unsophisticated for parents". There is a strange circularity to this particular evolution of cinema. It seems to bring the medium back to its origins, and to a time when the distinction between a film for children and one for adults was bogus. When Mickey Mouse, for instance, first appeared in Steamboat Willie in 1928, or when the Disney brand was cemented in 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, nobody spoke of children's films. They were simply part of an art form that was growing and continually discovering itself, refining and diversifying its formats as a storytelling medium. Similarly, children watched the mainstream comedies of Buster Keaton and, later, Laurel and Hardy just as they watched Universal horror films and the' cheap serial westerns and shoot-'em-ups of early John Wayne.
Meanwhile, the industry, under pressure from wide-ranging moral guardians (chief among these the Catholic League of Decency), was gradually and rigorously self-regulated by the Motion Picture Production Code, which aimed to purify Hollywood product from deviance. Thus, right through the 1940s, 1950s and even some of the 1960s, Hollywood films were unrated, deemed by their makers, by the moral guardians, and by businessmen keen to maximise returns, as suitable for all audiences. During this period, Dumbo (1941) was rubbing shoulders with The Maltese Falcon (1941), and Lady and the Tramp (1955) with To Catch a Thief (1955).
When the code collapsed in the mid-1960s in the face of new social and cultural mores, the studio ratings system began. By 1968, films were either suitable for all ages (a G rating), suitable for adults (M), not suitable for anyone under 17 (X) or suitable for anyone under 16 as long as they were accompanied by a parent or guardian (R). It was under this system, and within the G rating, that the children's film would come of age.
It is, of course, legitimate to argue that the ratings system promoted the wholesale infantilisation of film culture. From the phenomenal international success of Star Wars (1977) onwards, the ultimate studio model for success became the blockbusting children's film. Through Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, The Lord of the Rings, X-Men and Harry Potter, the studios continued to perfect a franchise product that would be released during the school summer holidays, would beguile children for years and would build up a loyal brand following that, in turn, would fuel a merchandising bonanza through toys, accessories and video games.
Nonetheless, the wider and more aggressive second-wave phenomenon of today's new hybrid film is different again, and perhaps even more sinister. We are now witnessing not just the creation of a product that will travel to children around the globe, but one that is being deliberately engineered, Frankenstein-style, as an ungainly mix of adult and childish sensibilities. A film such as Shark Tale, for instance, about a mischievous young shark (voiced by Will Smith) who must learn the value of honesty from within an underwater mobster milieu, is built entirely around a wealth of gangster film references to classics such as Goodfellas, The Godfather and Scarface - none of which are deemed suitable for the film's ostensible target audience.
Similarly, the hugely successful Madagascar films are simply loose narrative skeletons upon which is hung a never-ending plethora of comedy skits, most of which wouldn't be out of place in the stand-up routines of the actor-comedian Chris Rock, who plays the franchise's fast-talking zebra, Marty. Here the jokes come thick and fast, and refer to subjects including depression (David Schwimmer's giraffe, Melman, is bipolar) and include nods to films as theoretically unsuitable as The Silence of the Lambs.
Here, on a purely formal level, the Pixar movies - from Toy Story, through to Finding Nemo and Ratatouille - are mostly to blame for this shift in tone. When Toy Story appeared in 1995, it was celebrated for its seemingly unique ability to appeal to adults. From almost the first act, when the toys in Andy's room reveal wisecracking personalities more akin to the protagonists of TV sitcoms than the world of children's movies, the film was announcing itself as something different. Adult audiences knew immediately they were in the hands of filmmakers who were speaking directly to them, and not just to their children. Indeed, even the Pixar chief John Lasseter (the chief creative officer at both Pixar and Disney) regularly admits that the Pixar working method involves brainstorming sessions among their teams of writers (mostly in their 30s and 40s) and crafting scripts and storylines that would appeal specifically to them (as opposed to their children).
On a commercial level, there is another driver behind the hybrid film craze, and it is called the global recession. In the face of wide-scale purse-tightening, a trip to the cinema remains a relatively cheap night out. And whereas once parents and children might have gone to separate films throughout the month, these days things have changed. In a recent interview with a trade newspaper, the Hollywood studio head Elizabeth Gabler (the president of Fox 2000) announced: "Audiences today are looking for family experiences. With the market and world condition, going to the movies is a much easier form of entertainment for the whole family to do together. It's almost like a sporting event."
Naturally, Hollywood has answered this call for family-friendly entertainment with gusto, lathering the release calendar with franchise-friendly children's films, where once they would have dominated only the summer months. And yet, serious questions remain as to the fundamental logic of this policy. How long, for instance, will adult audiences tolerate a genre that, although littered with winks and nods to their sensibilities, is still essentially infantile? How long can filmmakers of the calibre of Jonze and Anderson be satisfied by the deliberate denial of their darker creative impulses? And, most importantly, when the recession eventually cedes away, how long before we get our serious, mature and provocative mainstream movie culture back again?
In the meantime, of course, there's always a great new film coming up about a boy running around in the woods with some men in giant fuzzy costumes.
