The Oxford Handbook of Children's Film

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Film is the most comprehensive study of international children's cinema published to date. Overturning common prejudices that films for children are unworthy of serious attention, it presents nuanced and wide-ranging discussions from senior and junior scholars alike of iconic and neglected productions from Hollywood, Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Iran, Kenya, and several other countries. Featuring contributions by leading scholars in the field, the volume considers a range of issues central to the study of children's film, including questions of form and definition; representations of childhood and growing up; music, stardom, and performance; how children's films reflect national identity or serve as vehicles of state ideology and propaganda; the phenomenon of Hollywood 'family entertainment', especially the role of the Disney company; and how children and young people (as well as older audiences) engage with children's film culture. As a whole, the volume makes a substantial contribution to the emerging field of children's film studies, and will be of great interest to scholars of children's media and culture more broadly.

Noel Brown is Senior Lecturer in Film at Liverpool Hope University. He has written several books on aspects of children's film, family entertainment, and animation, including Contemporary Hollywood Animation (2021), The Children's Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative (2017), British Children's Cinema
(2016), and The Hollywood Family Film (2012). He is also co-editor of Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature (2018) and Family Films in Global Cinema: The World Beyond Disney (2015).

Introduction
Noel Brown

Section 1: Genre and Form
1. The Case of Shrek, or the Impossibility of Children's Film
A. Waller Hastings

2. Exploring Cultural and Social Differences in Defining a Children's Film
Rebecca Parry

3. Children's Films and the Avant-garde
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

4. Classic Picture Books and Contemporary Children's Film
Michael Lawrence

5. Intertextuality and "Adult" Humour in Children's Film
Sam Summers

6. Endings in Children's Film
Noel Brown

Section 2: Children, Childhood and Performance
7. Screening Innocence in Children's Film
Debbie Olson

8. History, Forbidden Games, Children's Play, and Trauma Theory
Ian Wojcik-Andrews

9. Czech Films and Childhood Since 1945
Jack Zipes

10. Hayley Mills and the Disneyfication of Childhood
David Buckingham

11. Changing Conceptions of Childhood in the Work of The Children's Film Foundation
Robert Shail

12. Iranian Cinema and a World through the Eyes of a Child
John Stephens

13. Real Animals and the Problem of Anthropocentrism in Children's Film
Claudia Alonso-Recarte and Ignacio Ramos-Gay

Section 3: Propaganda and Beyond: Children's Cinema and Society
14. Children's Educational Films as a Means of International Understanding in the Interwar Years
Anne Bruch and Kaiyi Li

15. Nationalism in Swedish Children's Film and the Case of Astrid Lindgren
Anders Wilhelm Åberg

16. Nation, Identity, and the Making of Australian Children's Cinema
Adrian Schober

17. Ethnic and Racial Difference in the Hungarian Animated Features Macskafogó/Cat City and Macskafogó 2/Cat City 2
Gábor Gergely

18. Unreality, Fantasy, and the Anti-Fascist Politics of the Children's Films of Satyajit Ray
Koel Banerjee
19. Gender, Ideology, and Nationalism in Chinese Children's Cinema
Yuhan Huang

20. Negotiating East and West When Representing Childhood in Miyazaki's Spirited Away
Katherine Whitehurst

Section 4: Hollywood, Children and Family Audiences
21. The Orphan Girl Story in American Silent Film and the Emergence of Children's Cinema
Anke Brouwers

22. The Wizard of Oz on Screen
Ryan Bunch

23. Hollywood and the Baby Boom Audience in the 1950s and 1960s
James Russell

24. Reading Jason and the Argonauts as a Children's Film
Susan Smith

25. The Walt Disney Company, Family Entertainment, and Global Movie Hits
Peter Krämer

26. Don Bluth and the Disney Renaissance
Peter Kunze

27. On "Love Experts", Evil Princes, Gullible Princesses, and Frozen
Amy M. Davis

Section 5: Negotiating Change and Continuity
28. The American Tween and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
Timothy Shary

29. Children's Films in Germany after The Cold War
Benita Blessing

30. Growing up on Scandinavian Screens
Anders Lysne

31. Coming of Age in South Korean Cinema
Sung-Ae Lee

32. Horror, Fantasy, and Generic Hybridity in Children's Cinema
Catherine Lester

33. Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Family Action-Adventure Film after #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo
Joshua Gulam

Section 6: Reception and Engagement
34. How Children Learn to "Read" Movies
Cary Bazalgette

35. Children's Film Culture and Fan Paratexts
Lincoln Geraghty

36. Norwegian Tween Girls and Everyday Life through Disney Tween Franchises
Ingvild Kvale Sørenssen

37. Film Discourses and Practices of Contemporary Young Audiences in Flanders
Daniël Biltereyst, Philippe Meers, and Aleit Veenstra

38. An Empirical Report on Young People's Responses to Adult Fantasy Films
Martin Barker

39. Disney's Adult Audiences
James Mason