Since 1950s, watching cartoons in televisions has
started to become normal in the daily life of children. The great popularity of
cartoons made some scholars and other groups worry that the cartoon violence
would encourage more aggressive actions in children since they may simply imitate
what they see frequently in cartoons but not mature enough to distinguish the
rights and wrongs. To prevent the undistinguished imitation of cartoon violence,
some countries adopted various methods. But the most effective method, in my
mind, is to engage parents and educate children to treat cartoons correctly.
To reduce the negative effect of the cartoon
violence, prohibiting the broadcasting of animations which contain aggression
in televisions seems to be the simplest way. The solution requires the interruption
from administrative agencies. The government agency usually releases an announcement
to restrict television stations to broadcast the cartoons that do not pass the
censorship procedure. The censorship that aims at filtering out the unsuitable
cartoons is also held by the government. In the reality of 2008, the State Administration of Radio, Film and
Television of China released an announcement. According to the announcement,
a group of animations, including some of the very popular ones like Gundam and One Piece, would be prohibited from being broadcasted because of
their violent contents.
But the method of prohibiting the broadcasting of
violent cartoons can easily become invalid because of Internet. With no doubt,
Internet becomes a more and more important way for people to search for
information. Giant information can be stored on Internet permanently. Massive
amount and permanentness are the most outstanding advantages of Internet, which
make totally deleting the already uploaded but newly prohibited cartoons
difficult. The difficulty of the execution of the ban ensures that children can
still watch the violent animations on Internet. For example, the two cartoons, Gundam and One Piece, which were officially banned in the Mainland China, can
still be found in a lot of websites.
Moreover, simply using a ban may encourage the
copyright infringement. Piracy can happen as people are unable to watch the prohibited
cartoons in TV stations so Internet seems to be the only channel to watch them.
The great demand of available Internet resources may encourage some people to
upload the prohibited cartoons to the Internet illegally. The offence of
copyright not only damages the interest of animation producers, but also has a
bad influence on the enforcement of copyright laws.
Another solution is to use photoshop technique to
remove the scene of blood and weapons in cartoons in animations or replace weapons
with other harmless objects. For the solution, both the scene removal and
replacement are to prevent the violent elements from being watched by children.
Kids can only see the peaceful and bloodless scenes in cartoons. And only the
dealt cartoons that originally contain violence can be broadcasted in TV
stations. This standard is common in US and Thailand. In Thailand, the blood
and weapons appearing in cartoons are just blurred by mosaic. The mosaic makes
children only see the foggy scene when violent elements appear. But the similar
method is used more delicately in US. America once dealt with the cartoon, One Piece, through carefully removing
the blood and replacing guns and knifes with harmless toys.
But using photoshop skills to deal with the animations
which have violent contents is not quite effective since it is high-cost. Plenty
of resources are essential for the photoshop work since the work requires
employees who are familiar with the image processing skills to spend thousands
of hours dealing with animations. What’s more, some of the cartoons even have
several hundred episodes. The long length of them can greatly increase the
workload and cost more resources – including time, money and human resources. Obviously,
the extra input may give a heavier burden to the TV stations.
The experience of audience when they watch the dealt
cartoons can also influence the effectiveness of using photoshop skills. Once
the photoshop technique is used indelicately to deal with the cartoon, like simply
using mosaic to cover the blood and weapons, the scene in animations will look inharmonious
and ugly. The unpleasant scenes appearing in cartoons will definitely reduce
the quality of the cartoon. And the reduced quality makes the experience of
children of watching animations less delightful. The unpleasant experience of
audience is adverse to the business of the TV stations.
My suggestion to solve the cartoon violence problem
is to engage parents and educate children with the rights and wrongs in cartoons.
The former one needs the community to engage parents through posters, brochures
or other media, asking them to control the access of children to televisions
and Internet and help their kids to choose the suitable cartoons to watch. The
later method requires schools to spare some attention to which cartoons
children watch and how they see the behaviors in the cartoons, teaching them
the rights and wrongs of the behaviors and telling them not to imitate the
wrong actions which include the violence.
The final suggested method is made after considering some
of the shortage of the previous two solutions and that is why the method can be
more effective than the other two. The previous solutions either did not
consider the powerfulness of the Internet or would cost a lot. But the great
impact of Internet is limited since adults control the access to the Internet
at home. Moreover, the cost of community engagement with parents is low as the
main expenses are used in producing posters or brochures. And the cost of
school education can be ignored as teachers just need to spend some time talking
about the topic with children.
Educating children with the rights and wrongs of the
behaviors in cartoons, in another way, can be considered as active mediation. Active
mediation is generally defined as helping people to improve self-awareness. As what
was said before, the self-awareness of children is weak so they cannot judge
between right and wrong in cartoons effectively. But the effectiveness of
making those judgments can be improved so that even they have watched the
cartoon violence, the aggressive tendency of children can be removed. This
result has already been proved by researchers. They did experiments and found
that the children who received active mediation, at a certain level, did not
show the intention of aggression. (Nathanson and Cantor, 2010)
Generally speaking, educating children with the
rights and wrongs in cartoons and engaging parents are much more effective than
banning the cartoon which contains violence or using photoshop technique to
deal with cartoons. The ban cannot stop children from watching the violent
cartoons since they can switch from televisions to the Internet; the photoshop
technique may cost a lot and receive bad feedbacks from audience; only engaging
parents can ensure children to watch suitable animations and make them unable
to surf the Internet freely; school education to help children treat cartoons
correctly has been proved useful and moreover, it costs a little. So the
combination of engaging parents and school education can be an effective
solution to protect children from the cartoon violence.
Reference:
1.
Nathanson, Amy
I. and Cantor, Joanne. (2010, June 7th). Reducing the
Aggression-Promoting Effect of Violence Cartoons by Increasing Children’s
Fictional Involvement with the Victim: A Study of Active Mediation. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.
125 – 142.
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