I have, on a number of occasions, talked with my girls about the necessity of some tragedy in fiction and how without it many, many stories would be much less interesting. They are both reasonably comfortable with the idea of death in fiction within certain parameters, usually either it's a 'baddie' (their word) who dies or a character that they're not emotionally invested in (my words not theirs), preferably before the start of the story. Examples that haven't caused any upset despite containing death and, in some cases, violence include The Secret Garden and The Little Princess (both by Frances Hodgeson Burnett) and some of C S Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia We had a conversation this evening when K informed me that her new favourite film is The Lion King and M agreed that she liked it very much too. Given their reaction when we first watched it together (M in floods of tears asking me 'Mummy, why did you get this film?' and K with her eyes closed at a particularly sad and scary part), this is something of a surprise. We're still nowhere near considering Hamlet or Macbeth (both of which were inspiration for The Lion King), but I'm hopeful that it won't be too long before I can share one of my favourite's with them: Anne of Green Gables. In the meantime, we're still going with Just William, where death and violence really aren't an issue!
In other news, we also talked about anthropomorphism regarding The Lion King, when K correctly deduced the meaning, despite saying she didn't know the word, and on that topic, we've started watching The Aristocats that K & M bought earlier this week. Both K & M have been making more Christmas cards and are planning on continuing with them tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment