Creative Response: Abandoned Original Concept Idea

So I had some difficulty initially figuring out what idea I wanted to go with for my Context of Practice Creative Response. Originally I had the idea to create an animation that centered on two different generations. It needed to relate to my choosing essay question which was How successfully is mental health represent in animation to children? So to go about this I was going to animate a scene where a child is seen sat in front of the television watching The Lion King.

An innocent site, the parent is someone who works in social services with people with mental health problems and at the end of a working day has know problem letting the child watch their favourite movies which happen to be Disney films over and over again. But what they do not realise is that the child is actually getting a negative portrayal of mental illness through this because the hyena characters in the film have traits that are associated with mental illness. But they are represented in a negative way as they are viewed as the antagonists of the film and are segregated from society. So this child watching this film starts to get the view that this is the 'correct' way to react to people with mental health problems which could lead to this child growing up having a negative view of people with mental health problems.

But then twenty years later I had the idea that the daughter or son of the child who watched The Lion King twenty years ago could be watching a recent Disney film such as Pixar's Inside Out and instead of developing a negative perception of mental illness, develops a far more understanding perception due to the way this film for example tackles the subject matter in a different way.

Unfortunately due to time constraints I had to abandon this idea as I simply would not have enough time to tell this story in the time I had and for this particular idea I feel it would have only worked if it had been made as an animation.