“MagneticOne.org”, a charitable foundation based in Ternopil, has created a project named “Education for 21st-century child.” It is a YouTube channel, offering quality cartoons in Ukrainian. Natalia Haiduk, project manager, pointed out that the decision to implement such an idea came from the fact that TV offers the majority of its content for children only in Russian.
“If you look for TV channels that show animated films, almost everything you find would be in Russian. Our foundation came up with the idea to make a single database, the content of which would exclusively be in Ukrainian – including animated fairy tales, developmental movies, nursery rhymes etc. The database will be available for free, and parents will be able to find a cartoon that would suit the age of their child merely in one click, instead of browsing hundreds of sites,” Haiduk says.
Right now the project is being developed by four members. Some of them are young mothers, who are well aware of the difficulties in finding an interesting and useful content for the child. The authors started to work on the database in December, and now it has been three weeks since the project launched the dedicated YouTube channel. At the moment, the channel, offering 906 movies, boasts 2,847 subscribers and 7,670 views. The cartoons are divided into 10 categories for viewers’ convenience – spanning ages from 8 months up to as much as 25 years. Project members on their own select the movies to upload, but also take into account what parents and children ask them.
Natalia Haiduk explains: “Our discretion is based on several criteria. We take into account the video and sound quality, pay attention to the noise level – it should not exceed the appropriate amount, which is critical for the movies targeted at our youngest audience. But the most important is, by all means, the presence of didactic content. So, series like “Masha i Medved” [Masha and the Bear] are certainly out of the question. Many mothers complain that this cartoon teaches not the best kind of behavior for the child. There are also movies that contain an extremely high level of aggression – featuring, for instance, monsters killing each other. Not only such movies teach nothing, but they also incite bad thoughts. Most of the animated films we have run through are not appropriate for our database. I’m not saying we are being completely impartial in regard to these cartoons – the team is modest in size, and none of us is a professional critic. But we are sure that what we offer is free from overt aggression and violence.”
The most interesting category is made up of animated movies for ages from 18 through 25. According to Haiduk, this section contains movies that are mostly philosophical.
“Here are the cartoons the children would have a hard time to understand completely. For example, there is Zlydni [Misery], a film about envious Ukrainians living to a principle of “no concern of mine” and rejoicing at the neighbors’ misfortunes. I’d say it is quite germane. However, the adults might as well find the content for other age brackets appealing. There are, for instance, “Interesting facts on…” – a series for younger audience I watched with interest myself. The particular episodes, such as 10 curiosities about whales and cetaceans or 18 curiosities about animals and their environment would be handy, in my opinion, for everyone. In the form of keynote presentation they offer high quality information on biology, geography, cultural studies, and linguistics”
So far, project members have only been monitoring and uploading the films already available on the Internet. But soon they are going to hire additional staff in order to (on their own) translate into Ukrainian the useful and high-quality cartoons, which have not yet reached our audience.
