ABSTRACT
The above quote about the idea of children’s cinema and film comes from a 1995 essay entitled “Unshrinking the Kids: Children’s Cinema and the Family Film.” The essay is in an anthology called In Front of the Children: Screen Entertainment and Young Audiences. The quote prompted me to explore the “idea of cinema for children” from several perspectives. Accordingly, the following six areas of discussion-personal, pedagogical, critical, textual, institutional, and cultural-are intended merely as forays into the “idea of cinema for children,” signposts indicating the direction in which future research might travel.
