196 - The Monster Under The Bed

I was thinking today about what age group my favourite animation brands are aimed at. According to Gemini, Peanuts is intergenerational:

"The original comic strip and animated specials are designed to appeal to a broad, intergenerational audience, providing timeless humour and relatable situations for everyone."

But the Peanuts characters themselves, have been used to produce publications aimed separately at different age groups. Being simpler for younger children.

Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away is aimed at 9 years and over as it has some emotionally intense and nightmarish parts (such as the parents turning into pigs). And the heroine is very much alone, wandering into a frightening adult world and trying to make sense of it.

This is the kind of theme I'm interested in - also seen in Alice in Wonderland. A child's view of the adult world. In the child's eyes the adult world is all at once wonderful, awesome, monstrous and surreal. Perhaps the world is always like that but adults project a structure onto it.

Apparently there's a stage called the Concrete Operational Stage where children start to grasp complex ideas and understand different points of view.