Fairy Tale Spotlight: Neoteny

By definition, the word "neoteny" means in basic terms that the juvenile features of someone, usually an animal, remains present as they become an adult. The term does really apply to animals, but it has since become something universal to all living forms, humans especially. And why not? It is something that can happen to humans.

Anybody remember the actor Buddy Hackett? [I'm a big fan, by the way.] Buddy Hackett is a benefactor of the concept known as neoteny. When he was born, he had a baby type face like we all did. Only he never lost it. Throughout his life, he looked like a baby, and that gave him his charm. When he makes a goofy face, it tends to be extra funny because of his own personal neoteny.

In this way, neoteny is a very good thing that worked well in the case of Buddy Hackett. But I do have a problem with it in modern animated films. This criticism goes especially well towards modern presentations of fairy tales such as Frozen and Brave. A lot of animation studios have been using forced neoteny to give grown adult characters baby faces as an artificial means to make them interesting, when in reality they may be far less interesting as you think.

The human mind is wired in such a way to care for things that are cute. We tend to treat adorable things with kid gloves, because to hurt them would hurt us. To see them hurt would hurt us as well. We are coded to protect these adorable, little creatures, and we just can't help ourselves. Without our specialized response to neoteny, we would probably end up dropping babies a lot more or leave them out in hot cars. No, instead, we go out of our way to protect children... and puppies... kittens... you get the idea.

Nearly every single animation studio out there are adding neoteny to their characters to assist you in caring about them. and my problem with this is that it was never needed before. I cared about Cinderella in Disney's original film, and she was almost flawless in human realism. Today, the idea is we can just give them baby faces and not worry too much about working on them as people. The plot can be a lot lighter. People see the big eyes and all the colors and hardly notice that there isn't really that much plot happening. I mean the plot can still be there and be important in some way, but nobody is really relating to any of it on a deep level.

Neoteny is presently being used to just artificially make characters endearing. It does work, but that doesn't make it right. At the end of the day, we will never really relate to any of these weird big-eyed creatures. It just comes across as a lazy way to string along viewers who aren't really there for substance anyways.

Can you imagine if you were reading a fairy tale and all the main characters were described as having huge eyes and tiny mouths? I'd question from what alien planet these humans were from. It isn't normal and it isn't necessary. Forced neoteny is a disaster. It's lazy as hell. Please stop this. Please just make humans look human again. That's all I ask. Maybe then your writing will actually be worth a damn because you won't have to fall back on all those big-eyed baby faces,

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