I took my daughter to see Dog Man. Now she’s hooked, and I’m spooked

Last school holidays, I took my six-year-old to see the film adaptation of Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man. It would be fun! Mummy-daughter time! Gourmet choc-tops! Popcorn! Although scoffing our choc-tops and popcorn during the trailers was fun, Dog Man exploded onto the screen with such feverish madness, a wall of colour and noise that, in my stupefied delirium, I wondered if the projectionist had accidentally switched the film’s speed to 1.5x.

We left the cinema, and I Googled “if you could acquire an attention-deficiency disorder in 90 minutes”; my brain and dopamine were electrified, blinking like malfunctioning pokies. Dog Man was like a collection of TikToks stitched together at breakneck speed. While it might be faithful to the comic series and reflect author Dav Pilkey’s ADHD “superpower”, it was no different to so many recent kids’ films that have zero tolerance for slow pacing. So when Dog Man dropped on Amazon Prime Video and my daughter demanded daily encores, I started to think more critically about what films I would let her watch.

“How about you choose between The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast or The Little Mermaid?” I said the other day, once an agreement of UN-level proportions to watch a film had been reached.

“They’re so boring,” she moaned. “How about The Lego Movie?” “What about The Wild Robot?” I responded. Another groan, followed by a counteroffer of The SpongeBob SquarePants Film.” Can’t they come up with a rating for how frenetic a kid’s film is?” I said to my husband, who glanced up from YouTube. “Like, Cocomelon is 10, and the Chromecast screensaver is 1.”

I got my four-year-old to sit through last year’s beautiful Latvian animation, Flow, which NPR described as “the most breathtaking cat video in history” . He was intoxicated on children’s cough medicine, which may or may not have been a contributing factor. He’s usually partial to Twirlywoos, a bonkers British TV show about alien chickens who act in deeply anti-social ways to “learn about the world”, so it was well out of his genre, but it gave me a glimmer of hope.

Parents are about as fun as a bunch of politicians posing for a photo op at the pub, or at least their kids think so. But there comes a time when, as a parent, you feel morally obliged to lurk in Reddit forums titled “Slow Kids Films”. Which I did. There’s a sprinkling of recent films, Paddington, The Wild Robot, Magic Beach, a generous lug of Ghibli’s back catalogue, and of course, the golden era of Disney, the late 80s to mid-90s. In other words, my era.

The biggest difference I notice is that kids’ films had a story once upon a time, not some jumbled garble of Internet-speak vomited out the mouth of an alien/chicken/poo emoji with some vaguely definable goal (save the world/find out who they really are) when they’re not making wisecracks every 0.5 seconds.

It’s hard to put the attentional genie back in the bottle, and it feels like our kids are the unwitting guinea pigs in a large-scale experiment. “The ability to handle boredom, not surprisingly, is correlated with the ability to focus and to self-regulate,” Pamela Paul wrote. When it comes to their films, it’s a chicken-and-egg situation; are films getting more frenetic because kids’ attention spans are lacking or are their attention spans lacking because films are so crazy?

There’s a consensus that when it comes to kids, not all screen time is the same. There’s a qualitative difference between Play School and Pokémon. But it feels as though new-release, low-stimulating kids’ films are few and far between, especially when it’s time for a trip to the cinema. “Let’s put on the cat film,” I said to my daughter. She groaned. “I’ll watch it with you,” I said, and she reluctantly agreed. We sat on the couch and I wrapped my arms around her. She snuggled up, and in that moment it felt like that time together was more important than whatever was on the idiot box.

Cherie Gilmour is a freelance writer.

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