Children and cinema: The Prominence and Effectiveness of Cultural Values in Child Cinema

Abstract

Commonly held standards on which a complete community depends are named as cultural values. If further elaborated, cultural values are categorized into three main segments such as, customs (traditions and rituals), values (beliefs), culture (clothing, food, language etc.). It can be clearly seen that cultural values and the society are strongly connected with each other, as pre-mentioned, the community depends on cultural values. When discussing about the society, children are considered as the future generation of the community. Generally, a young human being below the age of puberty or below the age of majority of the community is considered as a child. However, as children are considered as the future generation of the society, it can be seen that, cultural values play an important role in their lives. This research paper examines the portrayal of the cultural values in children’s movies and its effect on lives of children. Children’s cinema is a medium of communication among adults and children. In addition, it is a sub-form of children’s literature and entertainment. However, these children’s movies are used as a subtle source of transmitting messages from adults to children. Cultural values play a major role in this medium as the future generation should have knowledge on their identical cultural values. This comparative study mainly focuses on how cultural values are portrayed in child cinema. Two culturally different children’s movies are selected to investigate the research problem; “How effectively cultural values are portrayed in the children’s movies and how portrayed cultural values in child cinema affect lives of children?” “Ho Ghana Pokuna” and “Les Vacances du petit Nicholas” are the movies selected as the research resources. These two movies represent Sri Lankan and French cultural values respectively. Moreover, as the chosen subject area is wide, few themes are selected to represent cultural values, namely; language, attire, beliefs and human bonds (family, friends etc.).The data analysis of the research study affirms that cultural values are important in building up society and humanity. Further it elaborates how effectively cultural values are portrayed in these two movies and the impact it causes in children’s lives. Moreover, this research study manages to evoke how the language, behaviour and believes of the focused audience; who are children, change after watching children’s movies for a period of time. Thus, it can be concluded that, the best children’s movies have attempted to introduce children to the real world of profound humanity and in this comparative research study it is proven that the importance and the effectiveness of cultural values in building up a better society