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FORMULATIONS & FINDINGS
Cowboy Mutant Golfers and Dreamcatcher Dogs: Making Space
for Popular Culture in Animation Production with Children
IJLM
Becky Parry
University of Leeds
r.l.parry@leeds.ac.uk
Keywords
literacy
narrative
story
film
animation
production
popular culture
Visit IJLM.net
doi:10.1162/IJLM_a_00074
c2012 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Published under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No
Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license
Volume 3, Number 3
Abstract
Animation is a significant form in children’s
lives. Animated films and television programs
make up a substantial part of their experience of
narratives and as such are an important resource
in their talk and play. Making space in schools for
this aspect of children’s repertoires of narrative,
even in the context of animated film production,
can be challenging. In this article I explore some
of the barriers to incorporating children’s expe-
riences of animation and then offer an account
of an activity in which six fifth-year children
were encouraged to draw on their popular culture
experiences of animation in their text produc-
tions. These data demonstrate the way the chil-
dren were able to create meaning using the affor-
dances of all the modes of animation, revealing
their implicit understandings of narrative con-
ventions. The data raise questions regarding what
constitutes good and acceptable storytelling in
animated films in school and how to accommo-
date collaborative, hybrid, and transgressive texts
and text production in the primary classroom.
Finally, I examine the way in which the currency
of popular culture affects the hierarchy of learn-
ers and the necessity of finding new ways to en-
able children to share their funds of knowledge
about animation in the classroom.
Parry / Making Space for Popular Culture in Animation Production with Children 43
FORMULATIONS & FINDINGS
Introduction
Animation is a highly significant form for children.
Often at the heart of a narrative web (Marsh 2005),
it is in particular encountered in television programs
and films but is also found in comics, video games,
toys, clothes, and cards. Children’s experiences of an-
imation contribute to their imaginative play (G¨
otz
et al. 2005) and their understandings of narrative
(Parry 2010). Children have funds of knowledge (Moll
et al. 1992) of narrative based on their experiences
of popular animation, and making connections be-
tween these home experiences and classroom literacy
activity, especially through animation production, is
important.
Data presented in this article were drawn from a
one-year doctoral study of children’s engagements
with children’s film and the impact of these engage-
ments on their emerging repertoires of experience of
narrative. The children in the study attended a state
primary school in the north of England that was cho-
sen because of the head teacher’s existing interest in
film education. The Office for Standards in Education,
Children’s Services and Skills (the UK body respon-
sible for inspecting schools) describes the number of
children at the school receiving free school meals and
the number of children with special educational needs
as slightly above the national average. The fifth-year
class was selected because children at ages nine and
ten still have close proximity to their engagements
with film as younger children and therefore can reflect
usefully on them. Following a presentation about the
research, the children were asked to register their in-
terest in being involved, and a group representing a
range of film experiences was selected.
Using a creative research methodology and draw-
ing on a participatory approach, I invited six children
to create stories in a variety of forms, including short
films. I examined the children’s understandings
of narrative as expressed in these multimodal pro-
ductions. I also analyzed data from interviews, the
children’s drawings and photography, and a ques-
tionnaire in order to identify and understand media
traces (G¨
otz et al. 2005) and how they were being
used. My analysis of the children’s texts incorporated
a consideration of both the process of production and
the finished texts, and these data are drawn from one
of several activities. I adopted the role of an “unusual
but interested” adult: “Adults doing childhood
research should present and perform themselves as an
unusual type of adult, one who is seriously interested
in understanding how the social world looks from
children’s perspectives but without making a dubious
attempt at being a child” (Christensen 2004, p. 174).
However, during the production phase I was also at
times a facilitator and trainer; that is, I taught some
aspects of the production process before encouraging
the children to undertake their own work.
Greater access to technology and software make
it increasingly possible to teach children how to cre-
ate animated films in schools, but the context of the
classroom often places constraints on the content of
the children’s productions. As Burn and Durran (2007)
demonstrate, in animation work in schools the em-
phasis is often on the exploration of curriculum areas
such as science or history. Where animation is taught
as an aspect of literacy, it is often used as a device for
the adaptation of traditional literacy texts (Parker
1999). The boundaries set in animation production
tasks can have a limiting effect on the texts children
produce; however, these boundaries or constraints can
also usefully promote creativity.
Burn and Durran demonstrate in their anima-
tion activities with young people the way in which
“purposeful, practical, aesthetic and imaginative con-
straints can fuel learning, rather than inhibit it” (Burn
and Durran 2007, p. 50). The point at which children
push at boundaries or question constraints becomes a
point of interest. The children with whom Burn and
Durran worked responded imaginatively to the con-
straints imposed on them by the curriculum-linked
theme of aviation by choosing instead to devise an
alien invasion that reflected many popular culture
influences. Animation was the children’s mode of
expression, and it did not suggest to them that they
should undertake a historical study of aviation. The
medium through which students are asked to ap-
proach a task will inherently provide some of the
framing for that task, and this can be at odds with at-
tempts to make links to the curriculum.
Evidence is emerging that the process of learning
how to animate has identifiable stages and that chil-
dren need to have iterative opportunities to develop
their ability to use the medium effectively (Bazalgette,
Parry, and Potter 2011). For many of the children who
only ever have one experience of animation produc-
tion, the experience becomes an important opportu-
nity to learn about the technical process of animation,
and this sets boundaries around the sorts of ideas chil-
dren are able to explore. Children need to develop
44 International Journal of Learning and Media / Volume 3 / Number 3
FORMULATIONS & FINDINGS
some of the skills of animation before they can begin
to tell the stories they might imagine in that medium.
With this dilemma in mind I devised an activity that
aimed to enable children to share their popular cul-
ture experiences of animation in a short space of time.
The main aim of this activity was to observe the chil-
dren’s ideas in relation to narrative elements such as
characters, settings, and plot in an animation context.
Rather than using stop-motion animation, the
students used an animation process that results in
the puppet-like movement of two-dimensional fig-
ures. The children worked in pairs on a story with
two characters and three settings. I asked each pair
to create two characters on paper and showed them
how to give their characters moving joints, although
these were not required. As the students developed the
characters on paper, I set them the task of thinking of
ideas for stories and backgrounds or settings that they
then created on paper. The children moved the figures
while simultaneously recording dialogue and sound
effects (rather than editing these in later). Rather than
devise stories that were then filmed, they played out
their stories in a way that resembled the sociodramatic
play of much younger children—even though they
were effectively puppeteers and could not be seen. The
children were immersed in play even during filming.
The filmmaking method they used—not animation
but close to it—allowed them the affordances of the
modes of animation while involving them in a process
that resembled playground fantasy play more than
animation production. As Burn and Durran’s (2007)
work demonstrates, a more sophisticated approach to
animation production would enable a more in-depth
exploration of the affordances of the medium.
Character
Meek’s (1988) suggestion that “given the opportunity”
children will draw on all their cultural resources to
help them tell stories was in evidence in the children’s
drawings of characters. At times the children became
overwhelmed with the number of ideas they gener-
ated. These included a cowboy, a “Frankenstein” mon-
ster, a superhero, a mutant, golfers, a pigeon, a cloud,
a dream catcher, a girl, a dog, maggots, a bully, a nerd,
a lion, and a vampire hamster. In drawing on a shared
set of ideas from popular culture, including films, the
children were able to position themselves in famil-
iar discourses (Bromley 1996) and schemas (Marsh
2005) in relation to elements of narrative. However,
none of the children simply reproduced characters
from familiar texts, instead drawing on them as from
a generic pool, using them as a resource (Buckingham
and Sefton-Green 1994) while adapting them to their
own tastes and preferences. The social, playful, and
open-ended approach the children took to the activity
also resulted in characters that were more playful, hy-
brid, and transgressive, as this dialogue between Aaron
and Connor demonstrates:
Aaron: You draw . . . like a human with bat
wings.
Connor: No you draw a mutant. Cos we’ll
both have a human and we’ll both have a
mutant. Yeah?
Connor was keen to have a superhero but also wanted
to do something both funny and action oriented.
As they worked, the boys explicitly discussed super-
hero, cowboy, and horror films in a way that enabled
them to share and extend the expertise they had de-
veloped in relation to these genres. They engaged
with the rules of the texts to which they referred,
and like the children Mackey (2002) observed read-
ing and Jenkins’s (1992) textual poachers (fig. 1) they
also understood how these rules could be provisional
and might need to be adjusted in order to create new
texts.
Burn and Parker (2003) refer to the improvised
elements of creativity and communication that are
part of the messy reality of filmmaking. Elements of
the children’s drawing were planned, but just as many
drawings “just turned out that way.” In creating his
first character, Aaron, for example, was able to tol-
erate the fact that even as the co-creator he did not
fully know what was going to happen in his story.
The Frankenstein monster head he drew took him in
a particular direction. His work, with its cross-shaped
daggers, bat wings, dripping blood, and stitched scars,
showed clear influences from horror, a genre he said
he did not like. However, he eventually rejected this
character, redesigning it as the hybrid of an Indian
and a superhero who could fly. With the redesign, his
character became more closely related to Connor’s
character, the cowboy’s traditional nemesis, the
Indian. These characteristics were important to
Connor’s sense of the emerging story, but Aaron re-
tained some elements of horror from his previous
draft because he liked how his drawing turned out.
Parry / Making Space for Popular Culture in Animation Production with Children 45
FORMULATIONS & FINDINGS
Fig. 1 Connor and Aaron: Textual poachers.
Thus, the ideas for the story were part of a process of
social negotiation that included sharing of the chil-
dren’s previous experience of animation.
The process of adapting characters was influenced
by the improvisatory nature of drawing in this con-
text. Kenner (2005) describes children negotiating the
different social contexts of home and school by cre-
ating cultural links through the production of hybrid
texts. Although Kenner’s work focuses on bilingual
children, a similar process of adaptation and produc-
tion was taking place here. Given the opportunity to
draw on what they knew about characters from ani-
mation, the children became motivated learners and
accessed a rich seam of cultural resources. As Kenner
(2005) also argues, confronted by a monocultural cur-
riculum, without opportunities to make textual con-
nections between stories in distinct media, children
become alienated and disengaged.
Connor and Aaron used their drawings like pup-
pets through which they “played” their ideas for sto-
ries while continuing to negotiate. They redrafted
their drawings and developed and adapted their play
as new ideas for a story line emerged. Throughout this
process I regularly heard comments such as,
Connor: And then the cowboy says, “Get out
of my home.”
Aaron: No then I say . . .
These negotiations were evidence that both boys were
easily stepping in and out of the diegetic world of the
story they had invented. Their blurring of themselves
and their characters mirrored their playground play,
where they would also put themselves into the roles of
their characters.
Eve and Matilda began with characters who were
more benign: a “dream catcher” and a girl with a dog.
The two girls were confident in their artistic abilities
and invested a great deal of effort in their drawings.
Matilda’s dream catcher was a creature that resem-
bled not only an alien but also a mythical creature
or monster from the Pok´
emon video game series. The
tiny stars with which its wings and tail were decorated
helped to convey the girls’ idea that this creature came
to children at night and tampered with their dreams.
46 International Journal of Learning and Media / Volume 3 / Number 3
FORMULATIONS & FINDINGS
Roald Dahl (1982) explores this idea in The BFG (the
story’s eponymous Big Friendly Giant collects chil-
dren’s dreams, redistributing the good and destroying
the bad), but Matilda decided early on that her charac-
ter would give children bad dreams.
Just as the boys did, Eve and Matilda incorporated
sounds and physical gestures in their production of
elaborate fight scenes. They argued about what was
going to happen next, stepping in and out of the
diegetic world. Eve, in particular, appeared to gain
pleasure in enacting roles that took her outside the
usual “nice” persona she played in playground games.
“Playing” (i.e., producing) this text (Mackey 2002) ap-
peared to offer an opportunity to perform identities
outside the girls’ conventional childhood identities
and outside what would be considered appropriate
in school stories. Playing popular culture is impor-
tant to identity exploration not just in the early years
(Marsh 2005; Pahl 2006). Such play is equally impor-
tant to older children who are beginning to construct
and “curate” (Potter 2009) new representations of
themselves.
The final pair of children, Abbey and Liam, lacked
a social connection and thus did not play their story
in the same way the other children did. Their idea was
strongly grounded in school and “everyday” stories
about bullying. They set a bully against a nerd and
then added attributes to each. Abbey described the
bully eating crisps and chocolate, a characteristic she
labeled negative and greedy. Abbey was successful in
terms of school-based literacy and was also the child
in the study who watched the least television and ac-
cessed popular culture largely through school interac-
tion. Liam accessed many popular culture texts and,
because of his older siblings, had often accessed pop-
ular culture that other children and teachers deemed
inappropriate. The pairing of Liam with Abbey was
thus potentially problematic. Placing together two
children of different genders and at different ends
of the social and cultural spectrum might have led
them quickly into difficulties. Throughout the process
of discussion Liam suggested more transgressive ele-
ments than did Abbey, but Abbey managed and even
limited his input by controlling the process of draw-
ing and filming. Meanwhile, Liam watched as Aaron
and Connor pushed at the textual boundaries, as they
outdid each other with increasingly rule-breaking, hy-
brid characters.
Abbey wanted to be part of this play, and the key
to joining in seemed to be knowledge of popular
culture and transgressive humor. As someone with
much less experience of popular culture, Abbey had
not developed her own enjoyment of the sorts of
stories those in the other groups enjoyed. All the
same, she did attempt to adopt some of their ideas.
This demonstrates the significance of popular culture
as a shared or “collective memory” (Bromley 1996)
that can exclude some children whose home experi-
ences are perhaps closer to those of the formal school
curriculum, which values books and emphasizes a
particular set of mores. When incorporating children’s
popular culture in school, educators ought to remem-
ber that children’s experiences are not homogeneous.
However, those children whose main experience of
narrative is drawn from their experiences of popular
culture may feel just as excluded if they cannot draw
on these experiences in the classroom.
Settings/Visual Design
Connor and Aaron paid little attention to their
drawings of settings, especially when compared to
their drawings of characters. They did, however,
choose distinct and deliberately random settings—for
example, a cityscape, the Wild West, and a golf course.
This perhaps reflects the way in which settings in
some animations sometimes change in a rather surreal
manner. Connor and Aaron also included objects
such as a golf flag, a telegraph pole they designed
to function as a high structure in which the pigeon
could escape his enemies, and a tent with an opening
door that enabled the cowboy to hide. As Kress (2000)
observes in relation to play, children use the materials
to hand, cultural and material, to help them tell
stories. The boys’ inventive use of paper is an example
of the affordances of particular materials adding to
the range of ideas they could attempt to express, and
these aspects of setting clearly had a function in the
narrative structure they devised. Although the paper
devices they created were simple and unadorned,
they allowed the boys to hide characters and create an
element of surprise.
In Eve and Matilda’s film, the dream catcher,
girl, and dog have extremely large eyes (see fig. 2).
This signature aspect of Matilda’s drawing, one the
other girls in the study emulated, effectively draws on
comic strip and animation conventions, including the
Japanese animation style in which features such as the
eyes are exaggerated to make characters seem “cute”
or kawai-sa (see Tobin 2003).
Parry / Making Space for Popular Culture in Animation Production with Children 47
FORMULATIONS & FINDINGS
Fig. 2 Eve’s girl with dog.
Eve and Matilda created bedroom settings for their
characters, using the conventions of comic strips to
highlight particular items. In this way they demon-
strated an awareness of audience, using size and color
to make certain elements appear to have greater sig-
nificance. For example, the large font used in the ti-
tle of the book placed on the armchair in Matilda’s
dream catcher illustration (see fig. 3) makes the words
“Dream Catcher” clearly visible. Matilda deliber-
ately distorted the scale of the font in relation to the
book, chair, and room to help readers quickly un-
derstand the function of the character. This sense
of the audience was quickly abandoned once the
two girls start playing out their story, however. But
the drawn form afforded the pair the opportunity to
share their experiences of comic strips, illustrations,
and cartoons—experiences that enriched their use of
color and details such as weather and facial expres-
sions. Furthermore, a distinct and collective drawing
style was emerging. Hilton (2001) suggests that chil-
dren need opportunities to find their own voice in
their writing. Perhaps they also need opportunities
to acquire and develop a style in other forms of
storytelling.
Liam and Abbey spent a great deal of time on their
school setting, calling it “Skull School” and adding
details such as cobwebs and bats in conventional hor-
ror colors (red and black). They drew bars in the win-
dows and sought to make their school seem scary and
spooky (fig. 4). However, they stuck to recognizable
generic conventions rather than trying out hybrid or
transgressive ideas.
Plot and Structure
Some aspects of the narrative structure of Aaron
and Connor’s text and Eve and Matilda’s texts were
planned and performed, and other aspects they
worked out as they went along. This playful response
enables us to glance at the children’s “dialogic imagi-
nation externalised” (Meek 2003, p. 547). Even when
their performance was being filmed, they were still
inventing rather than reenacting a planned idea. The
ideas built on one another, sometimes contradictorily,
and coherence was given little consideration. How-
ever, an underlying linear structure of conflict and res-
olution can be traced. Aaron and Connor might have
drawn on their experiences of animations that link
together one violent interlude after another, such as
Tom and Jerry. Their story line was based on direct con-
flict between two of the characters and a pigeon. For
the audience, perhaps especially an adult audience,
48 International Journal of Learning and Media / Volume 3 / Number 3
FORMULATIONS & FINDINGS
Fig. 3 Matilda’s dream catcher.
Fig. 4 Liam and Abbey’s characters and setting.
their story line might seem repetitive, with its various
scenes of one character trying to kill the other; how-
ever, this mirrors texts in which the cultural contract
(Barker 1989) between author and reader focuses not
on whether the conflict in the narrative will be re-
solved but on the ingenuity of each resolution. That is
to say, Tom always outwits Jerry, but how he does so
is what entertains and engages us. Arguably, though,
Parry / Making Space for Popular Culture in Animation Production with Children 49
FORMULATIONS & FINDINGS
this sort of narrative structure is not compatible with
school notions of a story that requires solutions to a
problem.
Eve and Matilda’s story lasts for over six minutes
and centers on conflict between two characters: a girl
and the dream catcher who gives her bad dreams.
Their process was marked by hysterical laughter, overt
self-direction, and little sense of a predetermined story
line. The girls became exhilarated by their own hu-
mor, which was often created by elements of surprise
or disgust. They also began to experiment with the
comic effect of unexpectedly violent behavior from
such “cute” characters. At one point they started to
scribble out the drawn posters on the wall of their
setting, something they found hugely funny. On an-
other occasion they drew maggots, which they consid-
ered gross, while saying “maggots on your head.” The
black-and-white clarity of conventionally moral chil-
dren’s stories was replaced in these texts not by shades
of gray or greater complexity but by an irreverent par-
ody of the rules and conventions of such stories.
Grace and Tobin liken children’s approach to
video production to the use of “fun house mirrors”
to “exaggerate[e] and [distort the human body] for
comic effect” (Grace and Tobin 1998, p. 53). Although
the girls started with benign characters and an every-
day bedroom setting, their playful approach to the
activity led to the plot of their story being driven by
conflict and physical action between the two char-
acters. Although the girl in their story was planned
as the “nice” character who would have her dreams
“tampered” with, these ideas evolved, becoming in-
creasingly anarchic. The resolution to the story is
temporary, and the characters quickly revert back to
trying to outdo and annoy each other. This is resonant
of many children’s cartoons where resolution between
the two main protagonists can only ever be temporary
if the serialized narrative is to be sustained.
Because Liam and Abbey did not play their story
but preplanned it, their final text has a clear, linear
narrative with a strong closure, although its extreme
ending does subvert the conventional ending of a bul-
lying story. In their story the nerd was going to over-
come the bully. Abbey took on the role of bully and
Liam the role of nerd. He wanted an interesting and
surprising way for the nerd to beat the bully, so he re-
jected the idea of telling a friend, parent, or teacher
and instead came up with the idea of the nerd buy-
ing a lion from a pet shop. The lion would not only
frighten the bully but would eat him. Liam intuitively
knew this idea would be funny and unexpected and
that it challenged what a school narrative about deal-
ing with bullies might suggest.
Sound
The children voiced their characters using intonation
and language from their experiences of film:
Connor (Cowboy): I’m gonna kill this pigeon.
Exterminate...andyou’renotgettinginmy
way.
Aaron (Bat Mutant): I’m on the same team as
you, you doofus.
Connor: I’m gonna end up killing that skinny,
little bagga bones.
Aaron: Well I wanna kill the pigeon.
Connor: For some reason that skinny, little
bagga bones is my best friend.
Throughout their story, Aaron and Connor made
use of voices, physical action, and sound effects, in-
cluding singing a sound track. They displayed exten-
sive knowledge of the sorts of sounds an animation
would use to establish mood, to reveal plot, and (in
particular) to create humor. Matilda and Eve used
comic-style language in their play, such as “Di dum,
di dum” (waiting for something to happen) or “Ha
ha” (at having “got” the other person) or interjections
such as Arrgh or Ow (in response to violent action),
borrowing ideas from texts such as The Beano.Con-
nor and Aaron also used comic-book vocabulary such
as splat but supplemented with ideas from a range of
sources; for example, they borrowed exterminate from
the Daleks on Doctor Who and doofus, a common word
meaning “idiot,” from American children’s drama.
In the course of devising their ideas and in per-
forming their story, Abbey did not trust Liam to tell
the story effectively. Twice she talked over him when
I asked about their ideas, and twice she succeeded in
making him stop speaking. When this happened, he
began to realign himself with the boys, with whom
he would have preferred to have been working. He
laughed knowingly when Abbey used the word nerd,
trying to make clear that he was working with her re-
luctantly. Later when they were filming their story,
Abbey (in character as the bully) could not resist nar-
rating the plot, positioning herself as the more pow-
erful of the two storytellers rather than allowing the
50 International Journal of Learning and Media / Volume 3 / Number 3
FORMULATIONS & FINDINGS
story to unfold evenly between them. Abbey even
mentioned the idea of the lion from the pet shop, thus
giving away Liam’s punch line. Having found herself
at a disadvantage in terms of her knowledge of popu-
lar culture, Abbey attempted to appropriate the task of
narration, to assert her status by verbally dominating
the process. However, she was also aware of the social
value of popular culture and was torn between enact-
ing her familiar literacy identity and her desire to join
in with her peers’ enjoyment of popular culture. Liam
found being on the receiving end of Abbey’s assertions
to be uncomfortable, and this was a barrier to full par-
ticipation for him. The stakes are high when children
negotiate status based on experiences of popular cul-
ture and school-based literacy.
Pleasure at Play
The opportunity to play imaginatively enables chil-
dren to explore aspects of narrative with which they
are familiar and in which they can take pleasure. In
their use of hybrid characters, Aaron and Connor
engaged with familiar rules. They understood that a
cowboy and a Frankenstein monster do not conven-
tionally appear in a story together. The boys were also
responding playfully, “fooling around” (Mackey 2002)
with ideas to see what would happen. Before long
they wanted to push the boundaries of the task I had
set them. Grace and Tobin (1998) draw on Barthes’s
(1975) notion of jouissance, pleasure taken in the eva-
sion of social order, to explain the similar response
they found in children’s video production. Aaron and
Connor, as well as Eve and Matilda, gained an exhil-
arated pleasure, perhaps jouissance, from being able
to break textual rules (by mixing up genres), behav-
ior rules (by responding spontaneously and noisily),
and task rules (by changing the guidelines of the task
they had been given). Initially, they sought my per-
mission to do so. Both boys wanted a main character
and another character. Aaron asked me, “Miss, can we
have two characters each, like a mutant for both of us
and a human for both of us?” I agreed to this because
I had set the criteria of two characters only as a way of
keeping the task focused and manageable in the time
available and because I was keen to see where their
idea would take them. This would be the last time in
the process the boys sought clarification or my opin-
ion. For the remainder of the afternoon they worked
entirely independently, completely absorbed for more
than two hours (they would have gone longer if we
had had more time). The boys’ playful approach to the
task could have been construed as chaotic and unfo-
cused but was actually a display of intense immersion
in the fictional world of their story.
Grace and Tobin use Bakhtin’s (1968) notions of
the carnivalesque and carnival laughter to understand
the way in which young children use video produc-
tion to mock and “invert the usual hierarchies” and
take on new roles that allow them to explore “par-
ody, fantasy, horror, the grotesque and the forbid-
den” (Grace and Tobin 1998, p. 48). I, too, found
evidence of the fantastic and the horrific in the chil-
dren’s films; however, these were sources of humor
and thus evidence of two distinct pleasures. First, the
children’s work reflects the pleasure one can take in
displaying knowledge about the texts from which one
has derived pleasure and of which one has expertise
(see Pompe 1992). Second is the pleasure one derives
from the process of laughing at or placing at a distance
ideas that are difficult and uncomfortable. The chil-
dren in my study, like those in Willett’s (2005) study
of popular culture in children’s writing, enjoyed vi-
olence and had sophisticated understandings of the
textual rules governing the inclusion of violence. They
were also placing violence, death, nighttime visitors,
and bad dreams at a distance from which they could
laugh at them.
Grace and Tobin (1998) suggest that the carniva-
lesque approach children take to telling stories that
draw on popular culture enables them to explore com-
plex and contentious issues not easily dealt with in
school. Many texts written for children also contain
elements of the carnivalesque; for example, authority
figures who need to be “taken down a peg or two” reg-
ularly feature in children’s narratives. Thus, while the
children might be enjoying their own uses of the car-
nivalesque in their stories, they are, in so doing, also
following well-established conventions of children’s
literature. As Luke and Carrington (2002) argue, texts
used in classrooms often exclude difficult issues. Even
some television programs for children are conservative
(Lemish 2011). However, many texts for children—
including such cartoons as Tom and Jerry and The
Simpsons—do feature transgressive or carnivalesque
elements, albeit in exaggerated and fantasy form:
“Something about children’s delight in mock violence
threatens adult authority and disrupts culturally con-
structed notions about childhood innocence” (Grace
and Tobin 1998, p. 51). Conflict and subsequent res-
olution are key aspects of narrative structure and in
Parry / Making Space for Popular Culture in Animation Production with Children 51
FORMULATIONS & FINDINGS
animated form regularly include mock violence and a
disruption of hierarchy so the “big guy” or “bad guy”
gets his comeuppance. By inviting into the classroom
children’s home engagements with texts, we also in-
vite these transgressive characteristics. But to what ex-
tent would stories like “Mutant Cowboy Golfers” and
“Dreamcatcher Dogs” be valued in school, especially
as written stories? We may have to make some adjust-
ments to pedagogic practices, including reevaluating
what we value in storytelling. Children need help nav-
igating this textual landscape, and schools need to
provide spaces in which the texts children encounter
at home are valued, enjoyed, and created in school. In
doing so we ensure that “children’s existing capital is
not squandered” (Bearne 2004, p. 102). Furthermore,
we must prepare for possible temporary disruptions of
the classroom social order brought about by a shift to-
ward a context in which knowledge of popular culture
is more highly valued than that of the school-based
literacy curriculum.
Conclusion
This study, as well as studies by Burn and Durran
(2007) and Pompe (1992), shows that the medium of
animation, even in a basic form, can serve as a space
in which children’s repertoires of popular culture texts
are of value. The task I assigned six children in the
north of England afforded them the opportunity to
draw enthusiastically on a range of cultural resources
and to create whole narratives collaboratively. Creating
a space in which the children could play with ideas
rather than having to commit to and produce just
one idea affected the nature of the texts the children
produced, making the process playful and openended.
Children as young as four can learn to produce
animated film sequences to tell stories (Marsh 2006);
however, the role of animation in education goes
beyond the acquisition of a set of skills and practices.
Opening up a playful space in which children’s
experiences of popular animation are valued enables
them to draw on and explore their media experiences
and therefore their own rich repertoires of narrative.
However, creating spaces for expanded repertoires
of experience, rather than limiting children to reper-
toires based solely on print texts, might also require
adjustments to our expectations of the stories children
might want to tell. Making these adjustments—
recognizing that the stories might be violent, funny,
outrageous, repetitive, or cyclical and that children
might collapse in laughter at their stories—might be
challenging, but by doing so we can make important
connections between children’s “lived culture” (Good-
wyn 2004, p. 22) and their experiences at school.
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