Pace is one of the most important considerations for storytelling-oriented cinema, especially examples of the form created as the main studio fare. The first goal of these headlines is to excite, excite and amuse the audience without lingering too long. A film can do and be anything, including expansive. Works by directors such as BelaTarr And Ryusuke Hamaguchi masterfully weave yarn and comment on the human condition in their long cinematic tomes. However, for the average Will Ferrell comedy or Dwayne Johnson action movie, it’s usually better to be brief than to drag out unnecessarily.
Children’s films are particularly subject to concerns about pacing and length, given that young people are widely believed to have short attention spans. The idea is that kids won’t sit still for long, so your movie shouldn’t be longer than 100 or even 90 minutes. This explains why so many contemporary features aimed at younger viewers tend to be shorter, although many contemporary entries in the genre have chosen to avoid this trend. Headings like Mermaid And Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse cover long runs that last more than 130 minutes. With this trend apparently not going to stop any time soon and continues to be a giant problem for all of mainstream narrative cinema, it seems like a good time to ask… are kids’ films getting too long?
Classic examples of long children’s films
The idea of children’s films that run over two hours is not new. In fact, some of the most famous family-friendly movies are extremely long feature films. In the 1960s, musicals such as Mary Poppins, Sounds of musicAnd Chitty Chitty Bang Bang each was over 140 minutes long, but had no problem gaining a reputation as a must-see for young people. Their length was dictated by the norms of the extended musical films of the mid-20th century, which were perceived as requiring long running times to meet audience expectations for how musicals worked (live musicals typically run over two hours). The standards of musical storytelling have surpassed any concerns about how long children can sit and watch one movie.
However, as this musical film style died out by the early 1970s, so did the long family film. Some exceptions such as the 128 minute Pete’s Dragon, emerged as a by-product of the fact that these titles were so ingrained in the norms of children’s entertainment in the 1950s/1960s. However, in most cases, headers such as muppet movie ran 100 minutes or less. The Disney animated film renaissance of the early 1990s solidified new norms for how long children’s films “should” run. Something like The Lion King was only 88 minutes long, serving as a model for the pacing that subsequent children’s animated films would emulate. The studios weren’t going to complain, as shorter films usually resulted in cheaper features (less footage to shoot) and more screenings for individual films.
However, in the 2000s things began to revert to longer children’s films. Original PG rating Harry Potter films surpassed mainstream runtime trends with over 150-minute runtimes (so much the better to pack every detail from the source material!), while Incredible in 2004 it lasted 115 minutes. The lucrative box office performance of these projects, not to mention the fact that they are loved by family audiences, indicated that children’s films that run over 100 minutes were not going to die instantly at the box office. Since then, PG-rated children’s film screening time has begun to rise, especially for live-action films. Live remakes of classic Disney animated films such as The beauty and the Beastfor example, they typically run over 120 minutes to differentiate themselves from their predecessors.
It’s not bad for children’s films to be long
Our contemporary pop culture landscape, where something like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse At 144 minutes long (nearly double that of a classic Disney animated film) it might make you wonder if things are getting out of hand. Children’s films getting too long? Of course, the historical precedent of such projects as Mary Poppins such a long running time makes it clear that Miles Morales and his friends are not making unprecedented breakthroughs. There have always been extra-long children’s films, they just tend to ebb and flow in their popularity in pop culture.
The current craze for extended hours is a by-product of a broader trend of movie studios being more open to much longer periods of time for all kinds of motion pictures. Either Flower Moon Assassins or Avatar: Path of Water, studios are much more open than they were a decade ago and let features run for as long as they want. Executives and filmmakers alike want audiences to get paid when they go to the theatre. Instead of kicking people out of the theater because of shorter run times, longer run times could theoretically give people more bang for their buck.
Children’s films, which are often so long in today’s world, make perfect sense in today’s pop culture, and that can be a good thing too. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse makes excellent use of its 144-minute length, with a narrative canvas as vast as its visual imagination. Movies in any genre or medium, e.g. Dream Hoop or Yi Yiwho are more than earning, their extensive uptime is truly magnificent. Younger viewers also deserve that kind of cinematic experience and something like Through the universes of spiders believes that children can handle longer and more complex stories.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that every children’s film lives up to being over 120 minutes long. Disney’s live-action remakes tend to feel incredibly filled with their lengthy runtimes that attempt to stretch pleasantly short animated classics into much longer live-action blockbusters. However, the pacing problems that these overlong productions suffer from are not a by-product of their targeting a younger audience. These are the same problems that plague so many different films that forget that brevity is the soul of wit. No problem with long children’s films like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. As with any mainstream narrative movie, you just have to make sure you have a good reason for making things so long.
Source: Collider
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