Even the music suggested a deep respect for children-in some places, it consisted of little notes sprinkled here and there, like background thoughts at other moments, it swelled into an intricate symphony.Īs the film notes, Rogers took his time on the show: together, unhastily, we observed a turtle, an egg timer, the workings of an apple peeler, fuzzy yellow chicks. Even if you were a kid who preferred more boisterous entertainments, or found his style too simple or too slow, it was impossible to question his integrity or intentions. Rogers wanted his show to be a place where children could recognize their emotions and learn what to do with them, and he taught this art through songs, stories, and direct conversation with the camera when he spoke to that camera, he imagined speaking to a single person. “We both had childhoods where we weren’t allowed to be angry,” his wife says. Rogers keenly remembered his own childhood, which Neville depicts through tender, fanciful animations-inspired, he said at a recent screening, by forties-era children’s books and “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Rogers grew up affluent, at times sickly-one animation shows him in bed, imagining that his bent knees are mountains-and at times overweight. From this awkward beginning, it seems to say, he got somewhere wonderful, and so did we. Here, the film begins in earnest, playing the beloved “Mister Rogers” theme and unspooling colorful titles. “Maybe that’s too philosophical?” he asks. The film opens with black-and-white footage of Rogers sitting at a piano in 1967, talking about how he’ll use mass media “to help children through some of the difficult modulations of life”-to go, for example, “from an F to an F sharp.” The performance is both affecting and dissonant Rogers’s patient confidence, familiar from his show, feels a bit lofty. It was “a little tough,” Rogers’s grown son says, “to have almost the second Christ as my dad.” But Neville humanizes Rogers by reminding us how strange he was, and how bold. “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” doesn’t disillusion-or gratify-viewers with revelations of hidden flaws. “It was pretty way out for the Presbyterian Church.” “His ordination was as an evangelist for television,” his widow, Joanne Rogers, says in Neville’s movie. Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” which was secular and inclusive, was his way of preaching. The rituals last as long as the song, and the song was sung many hundreds of times. Often, there were slight variations: some zipper whimsy, or an object brought with him, such as a football. Rogers, in a jacket and tie, opens the door, smiles, and sings: “It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor-would you be mine?” In every episode, as he sings, he performs the same ritual-going down the two steps to the closet, taking off his jacket, hanging it up, putting on one of several colorful cardigans, zipping it, sitting, taking off his shoes, chuckling, putting on his sneakers. As we enter it, the theme bursts into piano jazz, and Mr. We float over a colorful model of a town and head toward a little house. Its theme song opens with a chiming harmonium. “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” which ran on PBS from 1968 to 2001, has a gently spectacular beginning. How Fred Rogers did this, and what it means, is at the heart of Neville’s movie. It involves a cardigan-wearing man teaching us, respecting us, and expressing care for us in ways that people on other shows rarely achieved or even attempted. Many childhood memories make us nostalgic, but the “Mister Rogers” emotion is something different. Millions know that feeling-it’s the reason that so many are responding to Morgan Neville’s new documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” about Fred Rogers and his long-running children’s show, with gratitude and a sense of temporary salvation. This happy feeling, I realized suddenly, had something to do with “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”: I’d reënacted part of a ritual I’d seen there dozens of times, and it had tapped into a deep well of childhood contentment. Photograph from EverettĪ few months ago, upon returning home from work, I hung my jacket in the closet, slipped a sweater off its hanger, put it on, and felt a small surge of pleasure. Morgan Neville’s new documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” follows the life and work of Fred Rogers, who took the radical position that children’s feelings were as important as those of adults.
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