Loss of Gravitas

Gravitas, simply put, is inlaid substance of a somber and experienced person covered with humility and a deep understand of the layers of reality. Ok, so not simply put. Get a dictionary. Regardless, gravitas is the single worst causality of the modern age. It has been lost most everywhere but today I deal with my field, children’s stories.

 

I make a point to go to any large name children movie and to minimally keep up with preteen and below culture. This means that I had to sit through a recent movie that has gain great popularity about singing princesses who need to wear warmer clothes. I did not like the film. I did not like it for a number of less important reasons, but mostly I disliked the casualness of it. Casually fell in love, casually ran away, casually locked up, casually broke out, casually hurt, casually healed, casually found, casually lost, casually resolved. Many of these things were treated as being serious but they had only the pretense of a somber issue- lacking any true gravitas.

 

I think the last time I saw gravitas in a kid’s flick was oddly Kung Fu Panda, which I liked. The wise old turtle did not take himself nearly as seriously as his student but none the less there was a quiet levelness to him. He was not naive or proud. Reality was real to him. Reality seems to be secondary in most other works.

 

There seems to be a belief that children are unaware of reality- I don’t see that as truth. The truth is that most children do not grow up in happy homes anymore.  Families that are not divided by divorce tend to be on the edge of it. Dad hides, mother cries, the dog dies. This is made light of in our sitcoms and poked at in our pop culture but it is the hard reality. For an industry and culture with a loss of gravitas, it is amusing.  For a child longing for little more than to know they are valued, it is devastating. Yet, those that have set their lives to do nothing but speak to children through their work seem most unaware of these facts and they make a mockery of situation. They are casual.