Int J Semiot Law https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9553-1
Peppa Pig and Friends Semiotic Remarks Over Meaning-Making of Some Cartoons Targeted to the Early-Childhood in the Italian Television Francesco Mangiapane1
Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract This paper presents the first results of an ongoing semiotic research over TV series targeted to early childhood in Italy. In particular, it focuses on discussing and explaining the great success of the animated series Peppa Pig aired in Italy on the thematic channel Rai YoYo, by comparing it with other series available in the same channel, in the period of its first launch (years 2014–2015). Most of the programs taken into account refers to animals with the purpose of using them as a mean to speak about manhood, in a simplified and appealing way. Nothing new. Fairy tales have always been filled with animals to mean vices and virtues of the humans. Aim of the paper is to reveal the complexity of such reference to animals in Peppa Pig’s stories. This goal will be achieved by comparing it to another series which references to pigs (Olivia the piglet) aired simultaneously in the same Italian network. Moreover, this paper will consider other animals embodying the bouquet of meaning proposals offered by Rai YoYo: a dog (La Pimpa) and some shapeless creatures known as Barbapapas. As a conclusion of such enquire a synthetic model which positions each of the series analyzed will be presented. Keywords Semiotics Media education Peppa Pig Barbapapa La Pimpa Olivia
1 Introduction Most of the tv-series targeted to early-childhood refer to animals with the purpose of using such reference as a mean to speak about manhood, in a simplified and appealing way. Nothing new. Fairy tales have always been filled with animals to & Francesco Mangiapane
[email protected] 1
University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy
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mean vices and virtues of the humans. The programs targeted to early-childhood are, hence, not just ‘‘entertainment’’ [29], they keep an in nuce meaning proposal which semiotic analysis is able to disclose for the sake of a critical approach to educational texts. This contribution looks at revealing and discussing the complexity of such reference to animals in Peppa Pig’s animated stories and, secondly, at positioning Peppa Pig in a wider context of tv-series proposed to preschool viewers. According to the idea that meaning emerges from comparing competing texts, that is to say by difference [see. 12, 24], Peppa Pig’s case has been confronted with other series aired by Rai YoYo, an Italian television network for programs targeted to preschool children. In particular, with other three examples: Olivia the Piglet, Barbapapa and La Pimpa. These serials refer to very different periods and contexts of production. They have nothing in common but the eventuality of having been aired in a certain period (the one in which the enquire took place) on the same channel as challenging proposals. This is a key issue for the construction of the corpus here proposed: the adopted criterion refers to the ‘‘activation’’ [see 8] of the stories as it is operated by a network which chooses to launch or relaunch some serials—no matter how distant may they seem—in its schedule. Such move gets the result of activating their message for the audience. In view of this, the actual meaning of any serial reveals to be determined by the offer of competing texts considered relevant in a social group. Being Ray YoYo the most important Italian network for a target of preschool children, its choices of programming reveal significant for a large number of viewers, which are called to take position over them. The serials, this way identified, will, hence, work as proper ‘‘thought experiments’’ [7, 13, 21, 22], constituting themselves as fictional explorations of problematic issues, over which offering their point of view and any eventual solution. It is the case of Peppa Pig whose ‘‘mythical’’ message is inserted on a programming schedule which juxtaposes more options (each represented by a serial) to address the same general issue. Animal belonging, as stressed, carries the core of the meaning proposals brought by these programs and will prove fundamental for their success. Such reference to animality brings up the problem of how to balance corporal needs and moral mindset, body and soul. It’s no surprise that the analyzed series try to answer to these questions in fairly different ways, each offered to the public as a viable solution. This is why, as a conclusion of such enquire, a synthetic model which positions each of the series analyzed will be presented: the four cartoons turns out to embody four competing ways of interacting, simultaneously offered to the audience of families as thought experiments. By choosing what to watch on tv, children and parents end up positioning themselves. Precisely the detection of this deep logic undergoing the most various arrangements and settings of very different serials will allow to explain the success of Peppa Pig, letting emerge its proposal to the audience: recovering that much of animality whose anyone is carrier, denegated by far too rigid educational models.
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2 Peppa Pig, TV Series Peppa Pig is the title of a British renowned TV series addressed to early childhood, originally aired on 31 May 2004 by Nick Jr. and still in production. The first season1 has been an extraordinary success opening up a business destined to reach a whole 180 countries in the world, creating a turnover estimated on many millions pounds as well as a merchandising as much diffused and millionaire. Peppa, lead character of series, is an anthropomorphic piglet dressed in red who lives, with her family, in a world inhabited by anthropomorphic mammals. We see her churning in the events of everyday life within the domestic scenario and outside of it. During each of the very short episodes (5 min) of the series, she faces little problems, which will be promptly resolved through the interaction with the other members of the family (dad, mom, brother, grandparents) and with the subjects that, from time to time, she meets. This basic idea, that is showing a family struggling with the small trials of everyday life, is staged by espousing the point of view of children. The young Peppa will be the unit of measurement of the whole format and of the stories told: nonneutral choice, harbinger of some consequences. The mere fact of adopting the outlook of a little girl/piglet on the everyday life brings important results: the world becomes a two-dimensional scenario made of flat colours, the houses gets distributed, as in a drawing, on isolated green peaks, while the problems treated are selected on the basis of an entirely childish logic that does not necessarily, indeed almost never, coincide with that of the adults. For this reason, situations, at first sight, insignificant as the search for a lost toy at home and its contextual finding are dramatized, by testing the whole family, until resolved with a reassuring happy end marked by a liberating laughter.
3 Peppa’s World The world of Peppa is inhabited by anthropomorphic mammals. Each species (pigs, bulls, sheep, rabbits etc.) represents, more or less, a family. These characters, belonging to the most diverse species, are interacting in the same urban space. Described in outlines, Peppa’s world seems very conservative, modeled on a sort of 50 s’ vintage. The town of Peppa resembles a garden city, dotted with decent single-family houses in which the grass outside stands as an external projection of the household dynamics (‘‘Let’s go out in the garden to play!’’) but almost never as a space to cross to reach another place. This kind of shifts implies, as a rule, taking the car or any other means (the school bus, for instance). The idea that comes out of such scenario is that of an extended town, nostalgic for a pretty bourgeois aurea mediocritas, made of cozy sedans moving far and wide to mark the exchanges between fellow citizens. The same feeling of ‘‘aged’’ can be noticed once in. The furniture of Peppa’s house is full of good old things of bad taste, silly paintings, corny armchairs, windows with tailored curtains and an 1
For a reconstruction of the first years of the production, see [26].
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inevitable cathode-ray tube television with giant round knobs as controls. The distribution of the spaces is strongly parceled out. There are not open spaces. On the contrary kitchen, living room, children’s room, courtyard are set as areas of action connected to each other but separate, each of them destined to specific activities and operations. Moreover, the characters are featured according to scripts and sequences that are perfectly functional to a mechanical and Fordist organization of life: mother-housewife, father-clerical and overweight, the two children, Peppa and George, moderately romp and sufficiently capricious. At this stage, it would be easy game to recognize an elective domestic space for each of the characters, in the trite stereotype of the ‘‘traditional’’ family: mother in the kitchen, father absent (in the living room reading a newspaper), little ones in their own room. But it is only after having built this crescendo of expectations that the series reveals its most innovative side. In short, it happens that a traditional configuration such as the one just described is put in crisis by the way in which it is put into motion in the situations that animate the episodes, undergoing an innumerable series of reversals.
4 Family Ties Within such an ideological framework, Peppa’s family lives, facing the problems in agenda in very interesting ways. The characters in the series act, so to say, positioning themselves on the ‘‘faults of the system’’ with the result of highlighting its limits while tracing itineraries to overcome them creatively. On the one hand, the series proposes a traditional framework, which mostly attracts adult viewers who show to appreciate the nostalgic mood of Peppa’s world. On the other, by alluding to the actual daily life of contemporary families, it plays out a subversion of this same framework. The stereotypical middle-class family picture includes mother (housewife) and father (clerical), where the first one is usually represented as an ‘‘angel of the hearth’’ and the other as an external figure invested with the responsibility of finding, with his work, the money necessary for the family’s economic subsistence. This cliche´, in the series, is not explicitly denied, but as the adventures of the family unravel, it is progressively put into crisis, not without some logical stretch. For example, we know that Daddy Pig works away from home, in his office, and, little by little, we learn that his work rather resembles that of a planner (structural engineer?). Despite having a job, in the episodes of the series, he is almost always at home with a lot of spare time. In the family dynamics, he embodies the figure of the inept. Even though he tries hard, he is not able to fulfil any practical work in the house without failing miserably. On the other hand, we see Mummy Pig struggling between pots and stoves but almost immediately we learn that she also works, from home, using the home PC workstation. While Daddy Pig ends up being unable to affirm his inherited role of ‘‘alpha male’’ in the house, Mummy always succeeds in any task she gets committed with. The intrusion of grandparents (the parents of Mummy Pig) in such already precarious family equilibrium makes matters even worse. Grandpa Pig, for example, excels exactly where his poor sonin-law fails. Grandpa is a ‘‘sea wolf’’, always wearing a sailor’s cap. He knows to work with keys and bolts, builds trains, understands astronomy and deals with of the
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garden but, above all, he is able to fix anything (toys for the kids and even a computer). Grandpa Pig represents a proper reserve of symbolic and practical skills, absent in the father but needed in the daily life of the Pig family. This is why the presence of grandparents is indispensable for the construction of a new stability, which has the effect of transforming the shape itself of the nuclear family, by enlarging it up to include grandparents. Needless to say that, from this legitimacy, they will consider themselves allowed to intrude, undisturbed, in the daily life of Peppa’s household. By stressing this conduct of the grandparents, Peppa Pig ends up perfectly putting on stage a situation that many families are currently experiencing, that is the silent restoration of dependence—often economic but, as we have seen, above all, symbolic—from the families of origin: after years of exile, grandparents return to play a crucial role in the life of families and find themselves again at the center of the domestic horizon. Everybody, young and old, can recognize, behind the apparent immobility of Peppa’s world, the representation of an environment and family ties which look more responsive to the one actually experienced by newly established families all over the world. This shift doesn’t necessarily mean the crisis of the family as institution. On the contrary, it can be taken into account as a sign of its evolution, still untold by the other tv-series targeted to children, to all effects benefitting Peppa Pig more than other similar products. It goes without saying that this renovated scenario depicted by Peppa Pig represents a proposal for a local solution, a proper ‘‘happy ending’’ to very stringent general problems: job insecurity, emancipation, generational conflicts, stereotypes and gender identity, end of the work, massification of cultural consumptions, manual culture, family models, are all issues of great relevance in the contemporary scenario [16] to solve which, creatively, the series proposes its own recipe.
5 Animal Citizens The characters of Peppa Pig behave in all respects as human beings, perfectly inserted in the contemporary scenario of any provincial town, except for some ancestral characteristics, connected to their deepest animal identity, that distinguish them. So the pigs grunt and love to roll in the puddles, the rabbits are often hyperactive (miss Rabbit has a thousand jobs!), mr. Fox, according to the stereotype of the fox as a sly animal, works as a crafty seller while mr. Bull embodies a worker who capitalizes everything on his physical strength. It also happens that the animal identity of some characters comes into contact with their very human ethnic and/or national affiliation, creating interesting intersections. Madame Gazzelle, for instance, unites to the gracefulness acknowledged to her species a certain French elegance, Pedro Pony takes on the sleepy traits that are stereotypically (and inappropriately) attributed to the Latin Americans etc. The way Peppa Pig deals with diversity—mirroring the will of the authors to present to children the problem of multicultural coexistence in a simple way—has to do with an inextricable crossroad of nature and culture, profound personality traits and group belonging. But, while some irony may be raised over the national stereotypes from time to time, animal affiliation is not even discussed. Accepted as it comes, it represents the
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norm and doesn’t need to be hidden. That’s why each of the characters emits his own cry freely. The emergence of such animal signs in no way represents a source of embarrassment for anyone. Characteristic, moreover, of the series is a certain idea of hybridization of these same animal traits among the components of the community. So it happens very often that, while interacting, the characters of the series discover themselves able to appreciate the species-related characteristics of the interlocutors, making them their own, for example, in the play. In one episode, Candy Cat, one of Peppa’s companions, teaches her fellows how to behave like cats, stealthily advancing up to the moment of jumping or purring. In another, Kylie Kangaroo proves to jump higher than all her friends but Peppa proposes a variation to the favorite pastime of her kangaroo fellow, that is jumping high on the puddles of mud. Needless to say that the episode ends with the family of kangaroos who shows to relish the joys of such an activity just as any family of pigs. The possession of a specific animal identity does not imply that the characters cannot put themselves in the shoes of the others: a rule that will be taken very seriously, if it is true that even the queen (the only human subject in the series, together with Santa Claus) will be persuaded by the little pig to practice such a pleasant diversion. But what is, in particular, the inheritance Peppa receives from her animal belonging and the meaning of choosing among the various breeds of mammals precisely the pigs as a reference for the protagonists’ characters?
6 Pigs in Pop Culture Pop culture is filled with anthropomorphic pigs [9]. Already since the old testament, pigs have been pointed out as impure animals par excellence. Their figure in time has characterized the satirical literature, progressively accumulating a sequence of negative connotations connected now to the dirt (pigs roll in the mud and their world is ‘‘the low ‘‘of triviality), now to a lazy corporeality seen exclusively in terms of sensuality and, consequently, as a denial of any spiritual value. This is linked to a certain prosaicness that is recognized to pigs. According to such attitude they are depicted as not able to discern any value but in purely economic terms (pigs have bad taste and are the satirical cliche´ of the capitalist, greedy for money). At the same time, however, the pig represents an animal of proximity: not exactly of affection, it is, in its unawareness, painfully directed to sacrifice in the name of its owner’s desire of economic well-being (often associated with its ‘‘fat’’) on the ever looming difficulties of a peasant life. That is why, on the one hand, the mere presence of pigs in the farmyard immediately brings an ancestral sense of security, but, on the other, it constitutes a sort of ineradicable melancholy for the useless and unconscious suffering which they’ll be designated at.
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7 Swine Peppa Peppa’s pigness, as noticed, is above all middleness. It is unconsciousness of the complexity of the world and unconscious assumption of a middle-class order for it, the only possible and perhaps even thinkable. Peppa as a perfect stereotypic pig is unaware and actually not interested to think about the fate of the world. But the pigness of Peppa’s family also emerges on the side of the loud noises they use to emit and of their predilection for mud puddles. These two aspects refer to the stereotype of the pig as an abject animal referenced above, bound to the lowest bodily instincts, bearer of an aesthetic of ugliness and attached to the dirt and to the cacophony of its noises. The series takes position on this issue by defusing it, that is assimilating this same cacophony to the rank of a normal attitude not at all deserving to be stigmatized but— on the contrary—well worth being regulated. Here comes one of the most important aspects of Peppa’s educational message: people should not be scandalized by the unexpected emergence of the body (with its physiological ugliness) but they should accept that much of animality whose everyone, more or less consciously, turns out to be a carrier. In this sense, the pigs in Peppa Pig are not simply the outcome of a peaceful synthesis between humans and animals. On the contrary, their body stands as a proper battleground between these two essences that in some respects are irreconcilable. The characters of the series experience the complex condition of being human facing the emergence of their deeper and wilder animal side, covertly suggesting that all humans should advantageously experience such a state provided that they remove all the obstacles of cultural nature that prevent self-recognition in a wider feral belonging. The second step, after accepting this emergence, is to inscribe it within the social body, which basically means to regulate it. Anthropologists [see 5] have noted how the problem of hygiene is closely linked to the constitution of any social group: it is through the notions of purity and danger that the boundaries of citizenship are delimited and that otherness is recognized. Such awareness can be the key to understanding Peppa’s insistence over the pleasure of jumping on mud puddles, starting with the first episode. Giving into temptation is allowed within a precise ritual of protection before and purification after. Wearing rain boots and, once finished to play, having a bath, emerges as a way of making corporeal/animal identity acceptable, and, on the other, a way of positioning it into a cultural frame by delimiting its boundaries. How to regulate access to pleasure in everyday life? The invitation of Peppa’s family is to do it by ceasing unnecessarily censors behaviors in the name of a legitimated shamefulness: parents, rather than talking tough at any of their children’s infractions, prefer to correct them lovingly. Above all, they know to laugh of themselves, of their own weaknesses, being well aware that every aspiration to citizenship must deal with a tendency to disorder, which is certainly swine but, clearly, out of metaphor, too human, well worth being looked with the right dose of complicity. Swine form reveals perfect to exemplify this paradox, being pigs animals which, more than the others, are inculpated of not being able to resist to earthly flatteries: it is by raising on the side of imperfection, making up with the charge of ugliness which everyone is normally bearing, accepting the natural swine propensity to pleasure that, according to the series, one can reach full humanity.
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8 Amerindian Masks In the 1990s, the French semiotician Jean-Marie Floch published Visual Identities, a book that would have proved fundamental to the future of media studies. The idea behind Floch’s work was simple: to understand the articulation of media discourse, one needs to consider the texts circulating in it as cultural artifacts deserving to be studied through the tools of cultural criticism, looking at the strategies that move them beyond the signs. In one of the book’s most famous chapters, he tackles the analysis of the visual identities of Apple and IBM. Faithful to the indication of considering the activity of these brands within the normal articulation of the cultural machine, he chooses to refer to the anthropologist Le´vi-Strauss [18], focusing on his work over the masks used by the Amerindian tribes. According to Floch, to understand the avantgarde of the global technological discourse, it was necessary to look back at the way in which populations considered ‘‘primitive’’ [17] built and spreaded simulacra (what is a logo if not a simulacrum?) in their social environment. And how do these masks work? During his travels among the American Indian tribes, Le´vi-Strauss realized that the enquire over the ethnic masks should have not only be focused over the tribe within which those same masks were circulating but had to be enlarged to the neighboring villages. Only so, it would have been possible to reconstruct a real system, let’s say intertribal, within which the meaning of the single masks could be understood. Le´vi Strauss himself wrote: «I did not find an answer to these questions until I realized that, not unlike myths, masks cannot be interpreted autonomously and individually, as separate objects. Seen from the semantic point of view, a myth does not acquire meaning unless it is inserted into the whole of its transformations; similarly, a certain type of masks, considered only under the plastic aspect, refers to other types, by which, transforming their contour and colors, it assumes its own individuality» [18: 10–11, my translation]. In his work, he noted, among the Salish tribe, a particularly problematic mask, called Swaihwe´, linked to the values of wealth and fortune. When enquired as separate elements, the visual traits of the mask were incomprehensible. Why does the mask have feathers? And why extruded eyes? What does the aquiline nose refer to? To answer these questions, Le´vi-Strauss realized that he had to travel to the neighboring tribe of the Kwakiutls. His research led him to trace in the same Kwakiutl tribe another mask, called Dzonokwa, linked to the values of wealth and fortune, with features that were perfectly opposed to the Swaihwe´ one. From here, a basic hypothesis: each of the plastic traits of the masks could have been explained by the fact of being exactly the opposite of the ‘‘competitor’’’s. That is: to competing contents correspond reverted visual traits. The discovery of such deep logic of the visual articulation of the American Indian masks led Floch to acknowledge that such mechanism2 could have been recognized in the communication of Apple and IBM. Being them competitors on the 2
It is what in Semiotics is known as semi-symbolism. Semi-symbolic systems are meaningful systems characterized by a correlation between a category of the expression plane and another one of the content plane. For an introduction to the problems involved by this type of significant systems, see entry ‘‘semisymbolic’’ in [12: 203–206]. From this first proposal of Floch, Semiotics has widely used this concept, see as Refs. [12, 20, 23].
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global IT market, their visual identities were, in fact, overturned: where IBM focused on straight lines and on orthogonality, Apple chose the curved line, if IBM proposed a monochromatic brand, Apple raised with the its multicolored apple and so on. So, as for the tribal masks, even the myths of the communication society can be understood only through comparison, in search of a general system that regulates their transformations.
9 Peppa and Olivia Following Floch, such mechanism can be recognized in the launch of the AngloAmerican series of cartoons for early childhood, Olivia, on Rai YoYo, compared to Peppa Pig. The story is based on the books of ‘‘Olivia the Piglet’’ published for the first time in 2000 by the American illustrator, Ian Falconer. The series of books has received, worldwide, an unexpected success of both critics and public, reaching the remarkable goal of six million copies sold, eventuality that may explain the choice of transposing her adventure to television (2009). From that moment until today, the cartoon series has achieved great popularity, being broadcasted in over 120 countries and obtaining prestigious awards such as the Parent’s Choice Award. The first launch of the series in Italy takes place in the spring of 2014: it takes very little recognizing this new character as a proper anti-Peppa called to embody an alternative (although still swine) to her hegemony. Olivia’s proposal of meaning represents an excellent example of how the mythological structure of fiction can be explained by the law of ‘inversion’ presented above. Proceeding, therefore, as Le´vi Strauss would have done with his masks, we might compare the representation of the characters of both the competing serials, confiding that this may be the best method to recognize their significant traits. Let’s begin to list the common elements. Both Peppa and Olivia are TV series aimed at early-childhood, they have been aired on tv in heavy rotation, curiously, even in the same schedule of Rai YoYo. Absolute protagonists of both series are two anthropomorphic pigs dressed in red. The format within which their stories are inserted is very similar, short episodes (5 min in the case of Peppa, 10 in that of Olivia), both related to the genre of the dog-and-pony show. At the core of their adventures we find, then, the same willing to provide models of behavior to the little ones by making the protagonists interact in a context of life firstly familiar and secondly urban. Even the ‘‘class’’ placement of the two families is comparable: a middle-class one, consisting of a small family unit with a clerical attitude. Precisely starting from this commonalities, a strong dichotomy emerges between the two series: both aim at having the same role of hegemonic and exclusive reference in a sort of new animated pedagogy suitable for both children and parents. Starting from this common basic will, they offer themselves as two actual forms of life opposing and rivals. The articulation of their semiotic challenge, as foreseen by Le´vi Strauss, works according to the law of ‘inversion’ at the basis of his work on the Amerindian masks. Within the set of similarities just registered and having taken note of the propensity to hegemony of both stories, up to verify the
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hypothesis of Le´vi Strauss, a systematic inversion of their visual traits should be acknowledged, aimed at visualizing their ‘‘philosophical’’ irreducibility. Their difference of graphic style immediately catches the eye. While Peppa bets on a two-dimensional design, Olivia is drawn by an advanced rendering of the original graphic line of Falconer. If, therefore, the goal of the producers of Peppa was to position their proposal against the mass of early childhood cartoons made in 3D, now, the cliche´ to break down is represented by the hegemony of Peppa. The return to the 3D graphics is revealed, therefore, for what it is, a way to position Olivia against Peppa and make this difference as recognizable as possible. If Peppa is constituted only by simply sketched traits and elementary forms, such as those that a child could have imagined, Olivia’s design is hyper-detailed and saturated with information. Thus we have two tendencies, on the one hand, that of Peppa which leaves a high rate of ambiguity to the representation and, on the other, that of Olivia which, however, leaves nothing to free interpretation and deals with defining every element. Let’s make an example. At one point, both Peppa and Olivia have to fly with a plane, the first to go on holiday in Italy, the other in order to go visit her grandma (but the flight is only imagined as, during the episode, the audience learns of its cancellation at the last minute). Let’s look at how the two cartoons display the plane (Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4). Immediately stands out the difference between the two pairs of images, the first one related to the sketch and to the universe of the abstract and the other, however, linked to the replica and the universe of the actual. The preference for the simplified line made by Peppa or, on the contrary, for the hyper-structured outline led by Oliva immediately connotes the two cartoons: if Peppa is a bricoleur piglet interested, with the simple means of board available, to trace scenarios as general as possible that her small audience will be called to contextualize, the anti-Peppa, Olivia—it begins to emerge clearly—is affiliated to the logic of the engineer, as such, interested in fully defining her settings, even, as showed in the pictures, managing to design the visual identity of the aircraft, marked by its own brand name and its own logo [10, 11, 20, 23]. This gap goes together with a proper system of recognizable differences in the way of behaving adopted by the characters. These differences emerge precisely
Fig. 1 Aircraft as visualized in Peppa Pig series
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Fig. 2 Aircraft as visualized in Olivia’s series
Fig. 3 Interior of the aircraft as visualized in Peppa Pig series
because of the underlying similarities between the two series previously noticed. If the world of Peppa is by definition multiracial (in the proper sense of populated by different animal species and figured out with references to the most diverse ethnic groups of a cosmopolitan social scenario), Olivia’s world is strictly piggy, inhabited by animals of the same species. Even the way of living one’s own pigness is very different from the one series to the other: if, as we have seen, Peppa proves to be fully swine in her propensity to middleness, representing a positive example of reconciliation between cultural affiliation and animal propensity, Olivia is will to power, ambition to rise from the bottom up to reach the peak of self-realization, despite any animal heritage, which will be predictably denegated and rejected by her. It is clear that the two texts proceed in two antithetical directions. Peppa Pig may be recognized in a general trend of recovery of the corporeity, which shows an attitude of cautious aperture towards pleasure (a trend that also includes, for example, the limelight of gastronomy, nowadays so overflowing to take the form of an actual gastromania [25]). In its pedagogical version, this same trend is presented
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Fig. 4 Interior of the aircraft as visualized in Olivia’s series
in the form of a benevolent acceptance of one’s animality with a view to make a conciliation between body and soul possible. Supporting such position leads to question some of the cornerstones of a certain educational tradition that looked at the emergence of the body as an event to be sanctioned properly, in the name of a puritanical and aim in itself respectability. To this inherited hardness, Peppa (and her family) opposes a complicit smile, which aims to defuse the sanction in the name of a ‘‘weakness of the flesh’’ both swine and, in the end, human. On closer inspection, it is the institutionalization of a model that has made the fortune of big global brands like Mac Donald’s or Ikea [1]. They have, indeed, and not by chance, focused attention on the fact that breaking the rules of a certain bon ton (in the advertisements of Mac Donald’s adults and children eat with their hands and are free to dirty their shirts with ketchup) does not imply an absolute release of pleasure. More wisely it constitutes a proposal of re-articulation of the relationship between soul and body, against the excesses of a certain Protestantism of continental and Anglo-Saxon matrix. On the contrary, the Olivia’s universe is perfectly fitting in an absolutely Cartesian and individualistic logic. Olivia wants to emerge from anonymity at all costs. Already in the theme song, she appears in a sublimated projection of herself, receiving, as only a great diva can, a carpet of roses from the audience at the end of her performance. The family ties represented in the series are very different from that of Peppa Pig. Olivia’s family lives as an independent nucleus, without the intrusion of grandparents highlighted in the case of Peppa. Olivia’s parents are the only lean pigs in the world of television, Dad gets back to be absent as in most fiction for children and mum is much less ‘‘flexible’’ than Mummy Pig: rather than showing herself as a resolver of small domestic problems and a magnanimous and patient judge of the pranks of her children, in fact, she shows herself assertive, fights so that the climb to success of her favorite may be rewarded by success. To achieve this objective she gives advices, explains tactics and stratagems, admonishes about
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the rules of good manners which must be complied to be accepted into society. The horizon of the existence of Olivia and her family is the so called midcult [6, 19], an unquiet middleness as much kitsch as well as trusting in the value of the social pyramid and in its peak, to which, with a bit of sound individualism and sacrifice, everyone can even aspire. What is really interesting, however, is the way in which Olivia deals with her adventures. One of the most celebrated features of the character is that of her imagination. Olivia’s series is proposed as a way to encourage the imagination of children. The presentation of the series published in the corporate website3 of Rai YoYo introduces Olivia as ‘‘a pig with a disruptive and imaginative personality, who faces family events and small daily challenges like all her peers, looking for ways to solve them and overcome them with imagination, energy and a great desire to have fun’’. But what does her imagination actually consist of? And what is the difference with the way our Peppa proceeds? In one episode, after learning of being invited by her friend Francine, Olivia begins to prepare for the event. Such opportunity is good to circumscribe her much-vaunted imagination at work. Olivia proceeds anticipating experience, that is activating a projection of what awaits her. Her expectations are, on the one hand, hyperbolic (she imagines to be the receiver of an exaggerated princess treatment) but, on the other, once again, very detailed. Olivia’s imagination is an actual staging, made up of precise settings and certain roles, unequivocal action scripts and expected emotional nuances. Far from being a mean of escape from reality, Olivia’s imagination rather anticipates it, constituting, in effect, a way of planning her relation with the world at disposal of her boundless ambition. It happens, however, that reality does not fit with her high expectations. That is why she regularly turns out to be frustrated by the comparison with the actual parterre of relationships in which she is affiliated. This dissatisfaction emerges, in particular, at the end of the day, when, in bed, she ends up singing, alone, a comforting song, with the sole function of reaffirming her will to power: ‘‘They say ‘Good night, Olivia, your big day is through’. But how can I sleep, there is still so much to do?’’. On the other hand, however, this attitude to programming also emerges in the ‘‘routinisation’’ of the experience in the form of ‘‘rules of life’’, which, during the episodes, she is not missing to explicit and list just in case they may be useful in the eventuality she is facing. Undoubtedly, engineer’s logic. Peppa way of proceeding is exactly the opposite. The key to understanding her behavior lies in corporeity. If everything in Olivia is denial and freeing from the trivialities of life in the name of a realization of the spirit, Peppa Pig not only shows, as we have seen, a basic indulgence towards the unexpected emergence of the body with its natural tension to pleasure but looks forward to exploit a precise group affectivity from the relationships in which she is involved. Unlike Olivia, Peppa is clearly a subject ‘‘with’’. Peppa is above all a way of interacting, a familiar mood, a will to do together regardless of ‘‘what’’. What matters, in Peppa’s stories, is making one’s presence felt. Every character is called to emotionally ‘‘adjust’’ himself with the 3
http://www.raiyoyo.rai.it/dl/PortaliRai/Programmi/PublishingBlock-844eb8e1-6772-4ebf-b3453cddc0e103f0.html?ContentItem-6d832e12-a3f2-4794-91bb-d37d0c363932. Accessed on Dec 22, 2015. My translation.
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others who are with him. This interaction regime creates an intense emotional environment that immediately infects the members of the family. One understands, then, that, even the question repeatedly raised of Peppa’s alleged hedonism represents only a superficial manifestation of a deeper logic: experiencing pleasure (and, likewise, feeling sorry) is a particular declination of a general mood that arises from trying hard together. Thus emerges a profound animal identity, which can no longer proceed linearly through the consequentiality of logical thought but spreads like a rhizome among the members of the family, investing them before and beyond any linguistic mediation. This animal complicity, is found to develop in parallel to the narrative articulation of the episodes, with their trials and small victories: the middle-class heroes of Peppa’s family reveal themselves in the grunt that emerges from the majestic depths of their own unconscious, in their becoming-animal [4] despite the world of conventions asks for rationality and language. At this request, they oppose the regression to the animal cry, the involution towards a primordial and laconic need of being animals, by rolling in mud puddles. To this silent world, Peppa Pig, a truly revolutionary series from this point of view, has the merit of leaving the way open, letting it emerge. In such an emotional environment, George, the young brother of Peppa, represents the most sensitive thermometer: with his tearful counterpoints or, on the contrary, with his smiles and laughter he manages to give substance to the fluctuating emotions in a given situation. Peppa Pig’s family is thus primarily rediscovered as a community of feelings. The verve of Peppa is, hence, explained. It is contagious both in the fictional universe in which it is inserted but especially in the relationship that the piglet establishes with her own young (and older) viewers, founded, precisely, on the empathic contagion. The final laugh which closes every episode is, then, pedagogical, because it proposes to defuse the concerns and problems faced in the various episodes in a crescendo of expectation and emotional transport. But is also pedagogical in a less obvious sense, since it can make the many and really different people which constitute the public of the series experience—by properly infecting them—its fundamental message, through their own body. At this point, having detected the dimension of duality that opposes Peppa and Olivia, it is possible to widen the outlook, looking for a further coherence between the different characters that populate the television imaginary addressed to early childhood in Italy. For this reason, we will turn our attention to some series recently re-circulated by Rai YoYo.
10 The Unbearable Lightness of Being of La Pimpa La Pimpa is the Italian character of cartoons aimed at early-childhood par excellence. Conceived by the Italian cartoonist Altan, it firstly appears in 1975 on a popular magazine targeted to children called Corriere dei Piccoli. From that moment, it never ceases to collect consents, firstly with the comics and, later (1983), with the TV series produced by Rai. The success of her adventures reaches up to the present day, since the episodes of the series dedicated to her have been included in
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the Rai YoYo programs which, not surprisingly, uninterruptedly was been airing them with Peppa, Olivia and Barbapapa. La Pimpa is a she-dog with red polka dots who lives in a quiet little house with her owner Armando. The domestic atmosphere is tailored to children. It is pacified, such as in an eternal present, populated with objects as ordinary as, after all, mythical: sofas, cuckoo clocks, stoves, demanding to be thought of as ideal types of a reified perfection, the kind to which every child may aspire in an average family context. La Pimpa’s adventures are mostly taking place outdoor but in the evening, she, as a faithful dog, returns at Armando’s, happy to find her family scenario exactly as she had left it. It is worth noting that the peaceful horizon represented by the household is, however, built on a non-traditional scheme. La Pimpa’s family is not made up of father, mother and children, but of Armando and her, whereas Armando is entrusted to behave—Altan have been reminding that several times—as father and grandfather at the same time towards her. In this sui generis family, therefore, mum is missing, but her absence is, in fact, perfectly explained in the uniqueness of the dog/master relationship, which frees the reader/audience from any presage of trauma for the loss of the maternal figure. Indeed, we know nothing of the past of La Pimpa and Armando, except that they met in the woods and chose to live together as a father and daughter. A perfect expedient, it would seem, that allows us to look at the series as a great story about positive fatherhood. But how do Armando and his dog live, then? They interact at the beginning and at the end of each episode. Usually, La Pimpa wakes up in the morning and, after taking care of her hygiene, goes to have breakfast with her master. Breakfast time is important in their relationship because it represents the moment when, together, they plan the activity of the day. As soon as an agreement is reached on what to do, Armando leaves the scene and let La Pimpa go for her adventures. The problem of detachment is, therefore, at the basis of the proposal of the format: Armando wants his little one to leave home and experience the world. That’s why it does not show a protective attitude towards her at all. On the contrary, he goes his own way out to do his daily chores, regardless of what may happen to the little dog in the meantime. Armando chooses not to ‘‘address’’ his puppy. He doesn’t propose himself as an intransigent dad nor as intrusive companion but, on the contrary, as a facilitator of adventures. And the adventures, by definition, are out of the household. It is worth relating this manipulation deficit with another particularity of the series. Whereas there is no clear mission and no starting guidance by Armando, whereas he does not make any effort to lead the way, the world takes over. This is why La Pimpa does not get stranted, indeed, once alone. She interacts in a living world, all to be deciphered, in which animals, plants, objects and even atmospheric agents provide for the paternal absence, taking the floor as subjects and helping the little dog to go around. Here’s explained why the series gets full of friends: Gatta Rosita with whom she experiences the difference (dog and cat), Coniglietto with whom, instead, she finds herself complementary, Olivia Paperina with which she realizes her maternal instinct and many others. But, perhaps, the most striking result of Armando’s pedagogy is that La Pimpa looks at the world without fear, ‘‘plays soccer with the
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lion’’ (as declared in the theme song) without this circumstance assuming any air of threat. She comes to Africa with her friend airplane, she even flies riding a rocket, she always accomplishes incredible adventures but rigorously with a happy ending. The freedom of action granted to her by Armando is therefore the true privilege of La Pimpa who, thanks to such paternal openness, looks at the world with confidence and without fear. And one understands how such freedom, which is above all emancipation from control, is, in the current scenario, increasingly difficult to grant to the young spectators, so precociously equipped with tablets and mobile phones. There is a second moment, however, in which the figure of the father emerges, that of returning home. La Pimpa returns for dinner and reunites with Armando, who looks not at all troubled by her absence. Armando, an avid reader, waits for his little dog, sent ahead for the day, to tell him of the adventures faced. Also here: from Armando, there is not any value judgment. On the contrary, complicity and amazement. Moreover, Pimpa’s stories are very different from the typical children stories: they have no moral. They are absurd and far-fetched and contain no teaching. They tell about crocodiles eating apples from the tree under the house, of frozen pizzas nibbled with a penguin, of a little dog playing football with a crab which pierces the ball with its claws. They teach nothing but are worth for their fantastic value, for their bizarreness, for the very fact of being stories regardless of any moral, which, not surprisingly, Armando punctually refuses to draw. Which cannot but have a consequence: La Pimpa, in spite of her amazing adventures, does not evolve, she remains the same as ever without such condition getting, in any way, annoying. Just like the loving Karenin of Kundera’s novel [14], she remains perfectly satisfied in her canine time which is, by definition, circular, punctuated by the return and repetition, perfectly fitting the serial format.
11 Nostalgia for Barbapapa Barbapapa is a French comics’ series, drawn by Annette Tison and Talus Taylor right at the beginning of the Seventies, from which a movie and a very popular TV series aimed at the early-childhood have been spun off. Starting from the success of the comics, a feature film, in Italian, ‘‘Le avventure di Barbapapa`’’ gets released as a result of a cooperation between Holland and Japan. Subsequently, an exclusively Japanese animated series comes, which will make them known in Italy as well as around the world, determining their global success (Barbapapa is dubbed in 30 languages and distributed in 40 countries). The protagonist of the series is a family of giant ‘‘blobs’’ that have the characteristic of being able to assume the desired shape (‘‘Clickety-click… Barba-trick!’’ they proclaim as they gets transformed) to solve the problems in which they are involved in their daily life. They come from the ground. Barbapapa, the head of the family, sprouts fortuitously, like a bud, in the household’s backyard of an ordinary family and, from that moment, tries his hand at a double mission, defending nature that generated him and overcoming his loneliness on earth. With this purpose, he begins a journey that will take him around the five continents in search of a soul mate, which, however, he will find right in the backyard from which he had started traveling, as to say that
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nature begins right out of home and there is no need to go far to re-establish a meaningful contact with it. The spirit of the Barbapapas is mimetic: in their daily life, they apply the rule of putting themselves in the other’s shoes and they do, as often happens in cartoons, fulfilling (since they can) the precept to the letter, by assuming the form either of the objects that surround them or of their interlocutors. This is how they bring out the dark side of progress and civilization; since, as a rule, the aforementioned shoes are wore by the animals fleeing from the advance of the civilization. In fact, Barbapapas’ enemy is always forthcoming on the horizon as a gray and smoky factory that progressively gets closer. In the meantime, however, the Barbapapas interact in town with humans and non-humans in a peculiar way. In spite of their apocalyptic position over the progress, in the relationship with the others, the Barbapapas adapt, they turn to the need, they do not hesitate to intervene where they feel that their intervention may be necessary. Without losing their identity. Which is, in general, dictated by a primordial trait (Barbabelle is vain, Barbabravo is combative and rebellious, Barbalive reflective and so on) functionally reconfigurable in the most disparate ways with no pre-established roles. On the contrary: they bet on the spirit of adaptation. On transformation. On design. Such willing applies to the small expedients that can improve everyday life (in an episode, for example, Barbamama turns into a maxi-umbrella able to protect pedestrians from the rain) as to larger issues. Facing an industrialized and massifying horizon that denies any environmental value, the Barbapapas raise with the common sense of seeking compromise; they want a ‘‘sustainable’’ progress based on a mutual adaptation between man and nature, factories (more respectful of the environment) and gardens (urbanized enough). And for this objective, they stand, trying to convince their interlocutors.
12 A Network of Solutions for a Single Problem We have seen Peppa and her family juggling to reach the coveted balance between the world of sensitive perception and family pride, learning to promptly react to the small trials and difficulties of everyday life and adjusting their behavior in the name of a deep family complicity compared to which every difficulty can only lead to a loud laugh. We then went into the case of Olivia, a pig with a fervid imagination, who does nothing but put her imagination to work, foreshadowing scenarios of individual fulfillment. These environments look so actual and detailed to constitute as proper interaction programs established with the purpose of anticipating the experience and hence modelling it. There is, therefore, La Pimpa that bet on adventure, on accident, on hazard. Her adventures bet over the risk of the unexpected and are driven by it, without fear. Finally, there are the Barbapapas with their planning disposition and the willingness to intervene gradually on the world, promoting a culture of sustainability and adaptation, against the rigid and inhuman mechanicity of the industrial world. They believe in the power of communication, they treat their interlocutors as subjects
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aware of their interests even though sometimes they get disappointed by their behavior. Eric Landowski [15] has proposed a model through which we can recognize four different regimes of interaction—programming, accident, manipulation and adjustment—built on the basis of two opposing ways of thinking the relationship with the other, either in terms of continuity or discontinuity. On the side of continuity, the interlocutor is reduced to an object. He will be considered in the same way as a machine whose reactions can be easily predicted. Landowski calls this regime ‘‘programming’’ and connects it with the idea of predictability and low risk. On the side of discontinuity, instead, the interaction with the other is based on the fact of not making any predictions, hypotheses or conjectures about their behavior. This is the model of the ‘‘accident’’, a regime characterized by a very high level of risk, linked precisely to lack of any assessments of the reactions of the other to the stresses exerted over him. By denying the regime of the accident, the model of ‘‘manipulation’’ emerges: here a design approach is dominant. This position consorts subjects who choose the way of trying to explain the pros and cons of the decision proposed to the interlocutor. He will, therefore, be recognized in his quality of subject considered able to decide freely whether to espouse a cause or not. The risk is here moderated. Lastly, we will find the ‘‘adjustment’’, a regimen according to which relationships are regulated on the basis of a fundamental emotional complicity, of a feeling, of a contagion between sensibilities in some contact. The risk regimen is here ‘‘unsecurity’’ (Table 1). On the side of continuity we can recognize Olivia, positioned in the regimen of ‘‘programming’’. She does nothing but plan her experience and the relationship with the others. This arrangement is associated with a regime of meaning that recognize an actual ‘‘insignificance’’ to the world: once Olivia acknowledges that she has been successful on bending under her control a given situation, she just gets tired of it and declare herself (at the end of each episode) ready for the next adventure. The risk regime that can be associated with her behavior is, as pointed out, the one called ‘‘security’’: the future has no secrets for her. This is why she just manages to take the lead in any context, knowing exactly what to do and how to behave. Unlike Olivia, La Pimpa bases her relationship with the others on the ‘‘accident’’. Her adventurous inclination is as much stressed to be at the limit of senselessness. As we have seen, it is really difficult to draw a moral or teachings from La Pimpa’s stories, since they are just characterized precisely by breaking stereotypes and thematic roles in the name of the vertigo led by the risk. We can, therefore, ascribe her propensity to hazard to the so called ‘‘pure risk regime’’. There is, moreover, Peppa Pig, which, as we have seen, focuses entirely on the denial of any programming. Her interaction regime is that of ‘‘adjustment’’. The characters in the series prefer to model their behavior on the basis of a coveted emotional complicity, avoiding addressing their interlocutors too drastically but aiming instead at making sense together. It is understood that the risk that impacts in this type of dynamics is higher than it may seem, insofar as one can never be sure that the actions put in place get successful on triggering the necessary involvement in the interlocutor. Finally we have the position of Barbapapa that we can ascribe to
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La Pimpa Make it be
Make it happen
Make it come
Scheme of Interaction: Programming based on regularity (Thematic Role)
Scheme of Interaction: Accident based on hazard (Catastrophic Role)
Scheme of sense: the “insignificant” Continuity III
Causal Regularity
Mythical probability
Symbolic Regularity
Mathematical probability
Constellation of adventure
Scheme of sense: the “senseless” Discontinuity I
Scheme of risk: security
Scheme of risk: pure risk
Constellation of prudence
X
Scheme of Interaction: Addressing based on intentionality (Modal Competence)
Scheme of Interaction: Adjustment based on sensibility (Aesthetic Competence)
Non discontinuity II Scheme of sense: “having meaning”
Consensual Motivation
Perceptive Sensibility
Decisional Motivation
Reactive Sensibility
Scheme of risk: limited risk
Non continuity IV Scheme of sense: “ making sense”
Scheme of risk: Insecurity
Make it will
Make it feel
Make it do Barbapapa
Peppa Pig
the regime of ‘‘manipulation’’. Barbapapas trust in the neighbor and treat him as a full subject with autonomy and common sense, perfectly able to accept rationally and assume under his responsibility any project. Their regime is the one which refers to ‘‘meaning’’. They, through the mediation of language, simply manage to explain exhaustively the terms of any agreement, constituting a risk regime that has to do with the ‘‘limited risk’’, that is with an assessment of the reliability of the different options available.
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13 Peppa Overwins Interpreting the narrative articulation of each of the series analyzed has allowed us to recognize their meaning proposal but, at the same time, has not exhausted the question of Peppa Pig’s success. Among the cases analyzed (Peppa, La Pimpa, Olivia, Barbapapa) and the corresponding four interaction models that we can recognize, Peppa overwins. Why? What is the charme of its solution compared to that proposed by the other cartoons? As we have seen, the recognition of her experience as a child in a family that is undergoing great transformations has certainly contributed to make children and parents fall in love with her. Behind an appearance of devotion to a petty bourgeois decorum of yesteryears that nowadays can only sound vintage, it is not difficult to recognize the shifts that are transforming the shape of our families. The precariousness of work, the reconfiguration of gender roles, the degradation of the paternal authority and the parallel return to an enlarged family configuration, nowadays extended to the grandparents are just some examples of dynamics that in essence find a resonance in the series. While it is true that these transformations are far from being painless and that families are currently facing them going through difficulties and uncertainties, it is also true that precisely of these transformations Peppa Pig tries to give an optimistic representation. Peppa Pig, as we have seen, stands as a contemporary myth [2] because it provides solutions to these problems, because it proposes a reconciliation of these conflicts. First of all, remembering that, our families in transition are, for the children, the only known reference which they, hence, see as a positive example, recognizing to them the value that parents are often not able to see. The inept father who cannot even plant a nail, in this sense, is not, for Peppa and her little brother, a degraded father,4 it is simply her funny dad. The grandfather who interferes in the family dynamics is a positive, solid anchor and security rampart for the whole family. Peppa Pig suggests that, despite everything, it is possible to reach a balance. Even in a scenario in evident fibrillation and so resoundingly different from the one inherited, it is legitimate, then, to aspire to the family realization. This realization, on closer inspection, is the exact opposite from the attitude to control to which modernity had accustomed people. It is precisely here the meaningful difference between Peppa and her pig rival Olivia, heroine out of context, whose issues do not fit with the times of change we are going through. At the same time, family realization as it is coveted on Peppa Pig does not show any sense of antagonism towards parents, it does not want to deny them in the name of the adventure and of the call of the world, as Pimpa does. The proposal of Peppa, then, cannot even believe in language, in its ability to mediate, in the rational agreement between peers like the Barbapapas do. They are out of fashion for this reason, because they propose a design approach, rationalizing and confident in a scenario that, with the implosion of the industrial world, has revealed its propensity to jam, hybridizing project and rhetoric, marketing and goodwill, inextricably.
4
For the Italian debate over this issue, see [3, 27, 28].
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To the impossibility of gaining access to a regimen of programming, to her refusal of adventure just for the sake of it, to the distrust of the usefulness of a sincere planning disposition, Peppa contrasts her solution. Her peaceful horizon chooses, as a sign of the times, the adjustment as a strategy. If everything is not as it should be, if the programs made almost never produce the expected results, a further family logic emerges, a newly found family disposition, a sense of family that is mainly emotional. Being a family, proposes Peppa Pig, is to feel like a family, with one’s own body, with one’s own emotional mood, with one’s own complicity, although not everything goes as it should. This very swine awareness is the deepest teaching of a pig-hero to her public of young fellows.
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