What's the Waybuloo got to do with it? - Magical realism expresses the child's mind

Dawn approaches. As the sun’s rays reach the crystals hanging from the intricate sundial and the sound of chimes resound, the children run to begin their yoga practice. They happily chant as the indigenous creatures leading them levitate in prayer position.

This isn’t a documentary revealing a lost tribe dedicated to nature, astrology and cosmology. This is Waybuloo on ABC Kids right before Playschool.

Over on the newly launched ABC3, the station for the (pre) pubescent, magical thinking is apparent in even greater abundance. Freaky, a New Zealand kids show, explores random happenings that unleash the bizarre and even frightening on everyday teens. In a recent episode, a girl suddenly appears, quite magically, on the cover of every magazine. Fame is not quite what she imagined. Travelling further into the weird and wonderful is Figaro Pho, an Australian animation appearing in 90 second episodes. He is beset by every kind of phobia going (including the fear of being spotty), and speaks volumes to the most fearful of all ages, adolescence, perhaps offering some solace for those suffering for being different when that is just not ok.

Whilst fantasy has always been employed in children’s television, it seems the trend today is bringing together the mundane with the very strange. The ordinary is made magical.

The advent of ABC3 says a lot about the dominance of an age group that did not even exist as its own category until last century. The reality bending programming also says much about the way this age group is being encouraged to engage with the world. It has long been a given that before kids start school there is a certain amount of freedom in the way they learn and grow. Imagination is king. But formal education has largely been about reigning in the fantastical exploration of the world for a concrete curriculum based on sitting up straight and learning through books.

Now, though, if ABC3 is anything to go by the imagination is no longer being left at the class room door. Many of the programs suggest a permeable membrane between the imagination and reality. In the adolescent ecology, in which a Vampire beloved is the only kind to have, perhaps it doesn’t seem so unlikely that life might be more like the space between dreaming and waking.



Rather than creating an excess of the imaginary, a world in which kids lose the ability to engage with the real, this kind of predominance in programming suggests a wonderful dawn of hybrid thinkers: one in which harnessing the power of the imagination brings about a more balanced reality.

What it comes down to is that these television shows make visual the excessive, hormonal, intense, dramatic emotional states of teens (and even kids). They make the metaphors real. Lizzie McGuire, whilst not new, still gets high rotation on ABC3. Lizzie expresses best through an animated alter-ego, who says and does what she

cannot. Lizzie has the ability to see as an entity separate from herself her foibles, errors and greatest embarrassments.

These TV shows capture the unspeakable about the states of being of children and teens, stuck as they are in an age when being heard and more importantly understood can be nigh on impossible. They expand the expression of the emotions to the visual, better rendering the complexity of feelings and desires than straight up reality ever could. And this is as a valid for pre-teens as for teenagers (the tantrum of the toddler is said to release the same hormones as the adolescent after all).

Back to the mesmerising Waybuloo. The Piplings (the locals) experience a state of happiness called Buloo, a feeling so intense they float off the ground. Isn’t this just the kind of magic seen on kid’s faces? A bubble maker is enough to send children into a wondrous rapture of Buloo.

These enormous feelings of teens and kids, both joyous and terrifying, are failed by language, just as kids themselves so often feel at a loss to communicate through words what is really going on for them. But expanding the limits of realism expresses the unmeasurable interior world of the young person’s imaginarium, and in witnessing these stories there is a chance to find a context for their own experience and to imagine new worlds into being.