The Documentary: An Analysis Of The Documentary Babies

Humankind has always held a certain fascination for babies. We see a baby and our automatic response is generally one along the lines of “awwe”. New mothers often experience an increase in attention from strangers when going out in public with their new children. The bottom line is we love babies. Their big eyes and general helplessness evokes a certain almost maternal desire in each of us. Aside from the obvious psychological and evolutionary science behind these emotions, infancy is a universally significant time that transcends all cultures. The documentary Babies choses to explore this time by examining four newborns and their mothers in Nambia, Mongolia, the United States, and Japan. The sequence of the film follows the babies developmental

Looking to the primary circular reactions we learned about in class, one is able to watch each of these babies go through these changes. From Panijao rooting around on his brother 's stomach and putting every foreign object he can find in his mouth, to baby Mari making a real mess when her father takes her to work, to Hattie handing banana peelings to her parents, despite their geographical distances all the children walk through the different stages of development equally. The method by which this film chooses to takes several still shots of these developments makes their equality ever more

Bayar grows up around herds of cattle and goats and spends much of his time out in the yard with the animals. In contrast, when Mari has the chance to visit a zoo in Tokyo, seeing the tiger makes her cry almost automatically. However, this experience then goes on to pose the question of how would Bayar handle the city of Tokyo? Would it make him feel uneasy? This was one of the things I found surprising about this film mostly because I had never spent much time truly thinking about how the environments we grow up in effect what seems natural to