Cultural codes

• Character
• Story
• Setting
• Symbol
• Sequence
• Category

Character

There are considerable overlaps in the ways we can approach learning about character in books and on film. Picture books offer a bridge between the two media.  Children learn very early that 'not all characters are people, and not all people have to be characters'. They learn about character traits and behaviour, what we can expect of characters, and how to predict what they'll do; to infer feelings from facial expressions, gesture and dialogue, and how to 'triangulate' other characters' responses to them; that characters appearing in specific settings will behave in particular ways. And then one of the pleasures they learn to take from stories is that characters are capable of surprising us completely!

The characters we meet in a film are revealed to us via:

• What they look like, eg the differences in dress and demeanour between Lucas and the girl in Between Us;
• The settings they are presented to us in, eg the solitude of the monastery in Monk and Fish, or the squalid surroundings of the gin-drinking kidnapper in Rescued by Rover;
• How they behave in different situations, eg the change in Manuk in Birthday Boy, between his fantasy war game, and his sleepy self at the end of the film, or the Zen like journey that the monk in The Monk and the Fish goes through, from hyperactive fish hunter to passive accepter of his fate at the end;
• How they interact with other characters, eg the different responses, in Between Us, of Lucas to his parents and to the girl in the car alongside him, or for Giancarlo in Hidden between his fearful self at home in Peru, and his final coming out of the shadows at the end of the film;
• How they speak/what they say, eg Giancarlo's tentative mode of delivery in Hidden, and his 'foreign' voice and language - though of course the 'native' language of the film, being Swedish, is 'foreign' to most of us.  Also consider the modes of communication employed by all of those characters who don't actually speak - the typewritten dialogue in Flatlife, the wild gesticulations of the monk, and all of the non-verbal communicating in the silent films. 
• The sound and/or music associated with them, eg the drumming effects in Flatlife that characterise each of the inhabitants of the block in different ways, the music in The Monk and the Fish that accompanies his changes of mood.

Setting

The choice of setting to a large extent determines the narrative - what can happen in a story - and how characters behave. It can identify a mood or situation quickly, which is especially important in a brief film when there is such a short time to tell the story; and can support actors, helping the audience to understand the actions and emotional lives of the characters.

In live action films there are two kinds of settings:

• Interior, either an actual location, such as a house, or on a specially built set in a film studio;
• Exterior, either a film studio on a set made to look as if it is outside, or an actual location (which may be used exactly as it is found or adapted to look appropriate for the film).

In animated films, settings are created especially for the film:

• In 2D, eg the monastery and its environs in The Monk and the Fish;
• In 3D, eg the village and interiors of Birthday Boy.

Animation enables film-makers to explore spaces that would be unlikely or inaccessible in live action; for example, the inside of the plane wreckage in which Birthday Boy opens: the effect confounds the viewer - Where are we? What kind of space is this? Is it interior or exterior? 

Setting includes time, duration and period as well as space and place. The Tortoise's Idea is set in an unnamed place but a specific period ('before the beginning of Time'), and the finale of The Monk and the Fish could be any time, anywhere: both would be unfilmable in live action.

Film-makers can choose the perspective they give us on a place; for example, only one schematised room in each of the four flats in Flatlife, or the tight confines of the two cars in Between Us.

Story

Approaches to studying story in film ought to cover some sense of the ways in which events in a narrative are linked. Strictly speaking a plot is a nothing more than a sequence of story events (at least two) linked by cause and effect. The famously cited 'minimal plot' is 'The king died and then the queen died of grief.' The sequences of cause and effect in these films vary, from the 'copycat' structure of The Tortoises' Idea, to the almost primal sequence of Rescued by Rover, stripped down to 'Woman steals baby, dog finds baby, dog tells master, master finds baby.'

Some films, especially the early ones, don't follow a cause-effect structure at all. An Interesting Story just sets a situation going, and an arbitrarily sequenced series of events ensues. In Between Us, the characters and narrative are brought together, and driven by, that most uncontrollable of modern circumstances, traffic.

The non-fiction pieces here are structured in different ways. Hidden is still a story, but it has less of the artful structure of cause-effect fiction, and unfolds in a sequence of real-life events. The Mitchell and Kenyon pieces don't tell stories, but instead are closer to moving snapshots, in their fixed camera and short duration.

The fiction pieces, and Hidden, all unfold in a linear form, featuring beginning, middle and end, although in the case of The Monk and the Fish it is difficult to say clearly what has actually happened at the end!

Sequence

A helpful way of analyzing and discussing films, or any texts with a linear shape, is to break them down into sequences. The strict narrative form follows five phases - exposition, development, complication, crisis, denouement; films like Between Us, Nits and The Monk and Fish to some extent go through these stages. Some of the early films however are more episodic: An Interesting Story consists of a sequence of incidents, all stemming from the same cause, which get more and more dramatic in scale.

The Tortoises' Idea follows a fable structure, in a 'rule of three' form, more akin to a joke than a realistic narrative. The narrative is driven less by a desire for a developed and resolved action, than by a desire to teach a lesson.

Symbol

All the films in this compilation, to some extent, use symbolic resources or features.  In a sense, both The Tortoises' Idea and The Monk and the Fish function as symbolic narratives: the story is not strictly what they are 'about'. The former has an explicit lesson to teach us, a way of conceiving the origin of the world, while the latter has a more philosophical picture to present, as one child put it 'that sometimes if you stop looking for things you find them anyway.'

There is symbolic material on a micro-level too, even in the live action pieces. The nits in Nits represent far more than just themselves, and the respective cars in Between Us characterise the gulf in social background of the two children. Love on the Wing is conceived as entirely symbolic, in the drawings of hearts, parcels, rings, wings and letters.

Category

One of the understandings that children bring to school that they develop almost naturally, or intuitively, is that film - as well as other texts, in other media - can be categorised in a number of different ways.  By the age of three or four they can make distinctions between live action and animation, and know what to expect from each, and what kinds of people will choose to watch the news or Cartoon Network. They have come to understandings of categories of their own, and the features that define them.

The big distinction to be made in this compilation is between live action and animation, but after this, things get (rewardingly) slippery.  The CGI animation of Birthday Boy is closer to live action than the drawings of The Monk and the Fish, but the latter doesn't do many of the things we expect of 'cartoon' narratives, especially in its ending.

Hidden (Gömd) Hidden is an animation but, unusually, it is also a non-fiction text. The films of Mitchell and Kenyon serve as powerfully different versions of 'documentary', or 'actuality' film from those that children might be aware of. It is unedited, from a fixed camera position, without sound. The films were made for the audience who largely feature in the films: they were processed the same day and shown in booths or tents at local fairgrounds.

The Tell Me questions indicate ways of talking about categories of films and how this can help inform investigation of a text.

For children, there are a number of approaches that bring out the ways these films can be categorised, and what they can learn from this. One approach is to take a category or genre, like documentary and set it up as a Venn diagram, placing any of the films which children think are documentary in the circle. Films, like Hidden, which have features not associated with documentary (like the fact that it is animated), could be put towards the edge of the circle. Then other, overlapping, circles can be added to the first one, representing different categories. Children would be encouraged to learn that films can sit in more than one category (Love on the Wing is both animation and advertisement). It is important, as far as possible, to work with categories that children generate themselves, perhaps by starting with a discussion of 'all the different kinds of film and TV programmes there are', then looking for overlaps and relations.