Response 6: Alice

It’s often said that children tend to have good imaginations. My mom always told me, when I was younger, that she thought adults had better imaginations because they could picture things more clearly in their minds. I remember feeling offended that she would suggest such a thing. I still don’t agree with her on that point, but I think there is something to be said for the idea that adults and children have different kinds of imagination.

One logical purpose that I believe imagination serves is to keep us from walking into danger, while at the same time prompting us to explore. We come up with ideas about what we think something is going to be like. Our minds pose possibilities to us, either of what wonderful things could be just beyond our current view, or what horrifying dangers wait around the corner. Often times, the things that we are afraid of aren’t really that frightening, and once we learn that, we are able to form more accurate conclusions about them. I think that, because they haven’t had as much experience and because their brains haven’t developed as much, children tend to be afraid of a different set of dangers than the adults are.

 In the beginning of “Alice,” the narrator (Alice) poses the idea that this may or may not be a film for children. There were certainly a lot of disturbing things in the film, such as the sawdust constantly falling from holes in the white rabbit, the caterpillar’s eye getting sewn shut, and all of the actual decapitation toward the end of the film. But I’m not sure those things would have frightened or disturbed me when I was younger. At the same time, children are easily scared of things in movies that aren’t frightening to adults. I was always terrified of Ursula, in The Little Mermaid, though she’s not particularly frightening to me now.

Another thing I think imagination does is help us come to terms with and overcome our fears.  Many children’s stories and picture books have themes of being afraid of harmless things, and then overcoming that fear. An example is “The Monster at the end of This Book,” in which the whole plot of the book is that Grover, from Sesame Street, does everything in his power to prevent the audience from reaching the end of the book because he’s scared of the monster that is supposedly waiting there. In the end, he finds out that the supposed monster is actually just him. In one of the clips we watched before class, a girl in a wheelchair has an imagined adventure in which her shadow follows a butterfly around. There are dangers she invents for herself in the form of giant crows, but in her imaginary game, she overcomes her fear of them and conquers them. This may help her to overcome her fear of her real-life problems.