ANIMATION

ANIMATION

Animation  derived from the latin verb, animare, which means ‘to give life to’ and  it means  that  “within the context of the animated film, this largely means the artificial creation of the illusion of movement in inanimate lines and forms.”. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most animations are made with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Computer animation can be very detailed 3D animation, while 2D computer animation can be used for stylistic reasons, low bandwidth or faster real-time renderings. Other common animation methods apply a stop motion technique to two and three-dimensional objects like paper cutouts, puppets or clay figures.

 In the world of child development we follow “critical thinking skills” and “creative problem-solving abilities” when referring to our goals for  child’s cognitive development. What we are really talking about is imagination. The way to create human beings with imagination is to provide them with opportunities to develop it for themselves when they are very young. These opportunities are found in one place and that is play. Playing with paints, playing with play dough, with costumes, with glue and with crayons. Making a mess. Exploring the woods. Splashing in a puddle, Pretending to be a bird, gliding through the sky.

Are we providing  our children enough opportunities for this type of play? If they are spending hours sitting at a computer, watching television or playing video games, they are passive participants being fed someone else’s stories instead of having the time and space to dream up their own. If they are enrolled in soccer, ballet, T-ball, karate and gymnastics all in the same week, they are receiving wonderful opportunities to develop their skills. But they have little to no opportunity to use their creativity and imagination to decide how to use their free time, what fantasy to explore or what part of their world they’d like to discover more about at their own pace, in their own way.

Often parents today think that if they give their children too much free time they are wasting opportunities for learning and preparing children for their futures. But these types of parental choices, though done with love and the best of intentions, are not a gift to children, according to current child development theory and research. Children today desperately need time and space to develop their creative imaginations free from adult agendas. Even if our children complain, “I’m bored!  There’s nothing to do!” please, please, please trust that if we force them to figure out for themselves how to fill their time, their innate creativity will kick in and their imaginations will soar!

In today advancement of technology, television is a big part in the role of delivering information to the society. The influence of this form of media has no exception to children. Nowadays, children are growing up with television. They learn from television and trying to make sense of this system of communication. To understand what they are learning from it, the use of television and how they absorb the information are important areas to learn further about this issue. Animation as a part of television programs plays an important role to children development since animation often related to children as its target audiences. The use of cognitive skills and how they relate to many aspects inside the animation such as narrative, character, and many more influence what knowledge and skills that they acquire from watching animation. It influences their cognitive and social development with things that they are not obtained from their parents and teachers at school. This issue raises questions such as what can children learn from watching animation, or how children with different ages and cultures make sense of it in their development process.

Children Cognitive Development:

 Jean Piaget theory about cognitive development is a good first step to understand how children get their knowledge, construct it and use it.

According to Piaget, a newborn baby enters the world without basic cognitive skills and through the development as a child, he consistently trying to adapt the world around him. Constructing such an understanding is basically what cognitive development is all about. Piaget defines it as the properties of intelligence that explains why certain behaviours happened. According to Piaget there are three components that exist in cognitive development, which are function, content, and structure. Function in this case refers to broad characteristics of intellectual activity; on the other hand, content refers to what do children know, which is about raw behavioural data that is observable. In between function and content, Piaget mentioned about the existence of cognitive structure, which is the properties of intelligence that causing particular behaviours to occurs.

When a child watching animation, they use their existing knowledge to make sense of the animation that they are watching, they are trying to understand what is happening in front of their eyes at the moment. Different age group has different way of seeing and perceived things because cognitive structure keep evolving as a human grow up and obtaining information through their experiences.

What Can Children Learn from Animation:

In their first year, a child is unable to grasp the concept and narrative of the animation that he watches. According to Jean Ann Wright in her book Animation Writing and Development, while an infant still unable to sits by themselves, they enjoying watching television just by paying attention to the changing patterns of light colours and sounds. Therefore, at this sensory-motor stage, animation for them is just the same as other forms of entertainment as they just paying attention to the basic forms, movement and colours. Their lacking of object permanence ability not allows them to understand the existence of a character in the movie. As they move to different stages, they start to explore the world around them. They begin to learn about language and symbols as a representation of actions. They will start to interact with things that they watch until finally they are able to grasp the content of the animation that they watch.

As they enter the pre-operational stage, narratives and characters in animation start to have influences on their development. Although they still see things very literally, they start to pay attention at the setting of the event, and as they developing language ability, they will start to imitate the movement and dialog of the character in the animation, although they still unaware of the traits that the particular character possess. They are still relating the character in the animation to them limited to what is literally shown in the movie. Their egocentric thought allows them to relate at the character in the animation in a very narrow point of view.

During the Concrete operational stage, a child is now able to relate the characteristic of the character to him to an extent of what a character is being portrayed in the animation. Without his egocentric thought he is able to see the character from other point of view. For example if he watches a Aladdin, he is not only seeing Jasmine as a beautiful princess but also taking the point of view of Aladdin as a princess that want to be free and his lover. But he still need a concrete situation in the movie to help him understand the character from other point of view. And lastly during the formal operational stage, a child is now able to fully relate himself to the character in the animation. He also begins to grasp the concept and morale behind it rather than using an image representation to relate to the character. He is now able to relate himself to the character abstractly using his logic. He is now able to think what possibilities that the character might behave in the movie even if it is not shown in any scene. Animation has the most impact at this stage, where a child can relate himself to many things from the character other than what the animation showed in the narrative. He will memorize lots of symbols regarding his surroundings.

Let’s take an example of how a child in formal-operational period can relate himself to violence aspect in animation. Does watching too much violence in animation will leads a child into a violent teenager? For example, a child at this stage will see a gun as a symbol of killing. But at the same time it does not necessarily cause a child to act more violently. As a gun can also symbolize justice where in the movie a hero use it to shoot the villain. It can promote a view that violence is common in everyday life, which will make them think that the world around them is a mean and dangerous place. Therefore it will create fears in their minds. Or it can create the opposite effect that having a gun will make a child feel safe. The ability of abstract thinking that a child at formal-operational period possessed will make a child have a different point of view compared to others.

Animation affects children differently according to their cognitive development level. At pre-operational and concrete-operational period, a child started to relate himself to the character in the animation limited to what is being showed in the animation. At formal-operational period, a child is no longer use image representation as much as before and able to fully relate himself to the character in the animation.