You may have noticed that your favorite show and your child's favorite show have very different aesthetics--but have you ever wondered why that is?
Fairy's House kept two essential elements in mind when designing the visuals of our show: exaggeration and contrast.
Young children love exaggeration. Parents play into this this instinctively when they speak what researchers call infant-directed speech, or“parentese”: that distinctive, exaggerated, singsongy way that adults talk to babies. Parentese is incredibly engaging to young ears, and helps children to learn language by emphasizing important parts of speech.
Just as parentese exaggerates speech patterns, puppets exaggerate facial features (Wass & Smith, 2015). Experts like Dr. Tim Smith state that these features, like cartoonishly large eyes, help attract the viewers’ attention. Characters often also have things protruding from their heads. This creates motion when they turn their head and allows young viewers to clock that someone is the same character, just from a different angle (Geddes, 2020). Bunny’s ears, Chickadee’s beak, and Munk’s conical muzzle all serve this purpose.
Children also love contrast. When characters have clearly marked facial features, set against solid background colors, they are easier for young eyes to see. Chickadee's blue tuft set against yellow feathers, and Bunny's hot pink nose set against white fur (pictured above) are no accident! Additionally, our set is designed so that the characters will often be seen against a simple backdrop of soft pink, helping them stand out to viewers even more.
These exaggerated, high contrast features make it easier for young children with less developed optical processing faculties to visually lock in and track salient information, like a character who is talking. Then, the learning can begin.
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