Normative Attitudes: A Convention in Two Indonesian Children’s Films

This article offers a critical reading of normative attitudes presented in two Indonesian children’s films, Serdadu Kumbang (2008) and Langit Biru (2012). As a genre, children’s film aims to promote values of family and immediate community which are inevitably social and culturally constructed. Nevertheless, little is known about how this feature is constructed in Indonesian context. Employing film genre analysis and disciplinary power theory from Foucault (1995), this study finds that the two films expose normative attitudes through the cinematic representations of child characters and their social interactions. In the forms of respectful and submissive characters, they indicate culturally specific attitudes in these two films. Further analysis reveals strong disciplinary power in the power relations between the protagonists and the adult characters. However, the normative attitudes dissuade the child characters from being independent and critical in many situations. As such, this construction implies the adult power and children’s position in Indonesian society. The adults dominate children by imposing their wishes to have ‘good children’ while denying the children’s capacity to think and act for themselves.