Start of essay

Abstract

Animation is everywhere these days even to the point of whole television channels being dedicated to showing children nothing but animation. This can be a perfect way for children to have something to do for a few hours but how is it affecting them? It is commonly suggested that when children watch animated violence they tend to become violent themselves (Wilson, 2002) and so in this document we hope to be able to find out whether this claim is right or wrong. We will be conducting primary research in the form of questionnaires and gaining secondary information through researching other peoples work to try and find a good answer to this.

Introduction

Animation has kept people entertained since back when the cavemen first tried to show movement of animals by superimposing multiple legs into their drawings but we really found ourselves enjoying animation since Walt Disney started to work with it. There has been many works done through the years not only by Disney but by many others too all dealing with problems and trying to teach viewers what is right and wrong. Through the years it has generally been seen that cartoon animation is for children, so why has animation taken a darker turn (Bazelon, 2008)? One of the main areas of complain within animation is violence and in this report we will find out “How violence in animation effects children”. We will do this to try and find out whether it is right or wrong to show this material to children and if it actually has any effect whatsoever.

Literature Review

The first thing that needs to be found out is how old do children need to be before they actually understand what is going on, on the screen. It is suggested by Josephson (1995) that Children up to 18 months can pay attention to the television but they do not know what is going on. It seems that they only see “fragmented displays of light and sound, which they are only intermittently able to group into meaningful combinations such as recognizable human or animal characters”. This suggests that showing violence to an infant is unlikely to affect them later in life. However, Bazelon (2008) states that her own son of 5 years watched a movie with violence in it with “a pained expression and his hands over his ears” as she explains how he was greatly affected by the content of the movie. So it seems that between 18 months and 5 years the child starts to recognise what violence is and will either shy away from it or emulate it (Schwartz 2008).