From the two aspects of form and content, cartoons have their own characteristics, which are easily accepted by children and have a positive effect on the development of children's thinking.
1. Weird visual styling. Because comics are designed and produced according to people's imagination, they are not limited by real things and can be shaped, deleted, exaggerated and deformed at will.
In a sense, it is a positive transcendence of limited realistic time and space. The protagonist of comics often has the prototype of his real life, retaining some forms and attributes of the prototype, but he is not constrained by the prototype. Some cartoon characters are combined together, which are composed of some parts of several prototypes; Some are fused, that is, formed by dissolving the morphological structure of each prototype and integrating its functional attributes. These are easy for children to accept and interesting.
Children's thinking is still self-centered in the early life, and they will use assimilation methods more than adults to grasp the world in front of them. For children, what things look like is not important, what matters is what they mean to themselves. Therefore, in the world of children's wishes, we can change the real structure of things to obtain a certain function. Cartoons just cater to the needs of children. In order to fly, people can grow wings. In order to win, heroes can have magical weapons; All kinds of animals can have human expression and will and so on. The visual modeling of cartoons has great freedom, which allows children to experience a strong sense of morphological change and freedom, and get endless fun from it.
2. Multi-channel sensory stimulation. Animation has developed from pen, ink and paper to film, television and computer software, realizing the transformation from single visual stimulation to all-round and multi-channel sensory stimulation. Especially today, with the adoption of computer synthesis technology, the synchronization of sound and picture and the integration of time and space, children gradually move from reading culture to multimedia culture. Many cartoons are fast-paced, colorful, dynamic and well-repeated, which are easily accepted by children.
Children are in the early stage of life development, and their senses need a certain amount and quality of stimulation. These stimuli of different degrees and natures are not only the external conditions for children's sensory and physiological development, but also the accumulation of original materials for children's thinking development. The maturity and acuity of vision and hearing are closely related to people's thinking ability. Good sensory training in childhood is the foundation of future intellectual development. Today's cartoons can really integrate vision, hearing and kinesthetic sense in artistic form, and effectively stimulate children's senses in a concentrated way in a short time.
3. The theme is clear and the content is rich. Most cartoons have distinct themes, and the plot is unfolded layer by layer according to the theme, which is both simple and layered. The protagonist is relatively fixed, with distinct personality characteristics and logical and continuous behavior, which can leave a deep impression on children. Materials with distinctive themes can make children concentrate, carry out thinking activities around a center, and complete a complete thinking process unconsciously. This is conducive to the construction of children's thinking structure and the establishment of logical framework.
Comics are also very rich in content. From the universe, earth, land and rivers to science and technology, military affairs, interpersonal relationships and art, some basic knowledge and principles in various fields have entered the hearts of children in a lively form. Cartoons, loved by children, make them unconsciously master information, broaden their horizons and enrich their lives, which not only has a good effect, but also accumulates a lot of perceptual materials for children's thinking development.
4. Strong emotional color. Cartoons have obvious emotional tendencies, such as joy and sadness, love and hate, relaxation and tension, tranquility and excitement. In childhood, due to the lack of rational development, children's emotional experience is often faster, stronger and easier to indulge in than adults. Cartoons with strong emotional colors can guide children to experience other people's emotions and deepen their inner experience.
5. childish. Cartoons capture children's hearts with their childish pictures, music and words. Cartoon characters have exaggerated deformation, their manners and speeches show children's characteristics, their thinking is animism, and the evolution of the plot follows children's logic. It can be said that the charm of animation lies in its innocent and lovely romantic atmosphere everywhere, which is not only naturally accepted by children, but also irresistible to adults. When children's eyes are fascinated by cartoons, we can see that the innocence of the two fits well.
Second, the limitations of cartoons on children's thinking development
Cartoons are full of children's lives, but also bring some negative effects, such as causing myopia, causing violent tendencies, taking up too much life and study time and so on. Parents and teachers should be reminded of its limitations on children's thinking development.
1. Deprive children of real life experience. Children's thinking and emotional development need real life experience, especially in early childhood, and direct feeling is particularly important. Animation is artificial life after all. Its shape, action and plot are the products of people's imagination, which are fixed in a certain medium. No matter how beautiful and lifelike the characters and scenery in comics are, they are fake after all, which is a simplification and abbreviation of the real thing, giving people a far less rich and profound experience than the real situation. Nowadays, urban children live in an era of electronic high technology, so their knowledge space has been greatly expanded, but at the same time their real life space has become increasingly narrow. They know the starry sky on TV, the solar system, the Milky Way and the universe, but they have never experienced and thought about the real starry sky overhead. They know about the sea, tides and waves on TV, and even tell stories about pirates and little mermaid, but they can't imagine the shock of the real sea to people's hearts. In children's life, there are all kinds of imitations and imitations, but they are getting farther and farther away from Mother Nature. How much time and energy do children who invest a lot of energy and time in cartoons leave for real life? But the thinking lacking direct experience and real experience is imperfect, so children's activities are like castles in the air, lacking a solid foundation.
2. Form a fixed mode of thinking. Childhood is a critical period for the occurrence and development of thinking structure. Children take extensive physiological, psychological and cultural experience as raw materials, and abstract the most general human thinking framework and logical structure from a large number of raw materials, thus realizing the construction of thinking. Therefore, in this period, the accumulation of raw materials is particularly important, because its nature and quantity will directly affect the formation of children's thinking mode and thinking ability in the future. At the same time, due to the universality and richness of human culture as a whole, individuals can transcend their own narrowness, one-sidedness and contingency and reach a higher level of civilization only if they have it comprehensively. If we accept a certain culture too narrowly in our early life, our thinking will easily form a certain fixed pattern. In childhood, it is very dangerous to be too limited to one cultural experience. Once a certain mode of thinking is formed prematurely, it is very difficult to change it later.