Skinny and Fatty: The First Foreign Film You Enjoyed If You Are 40 and 50 Years Old

Mourning the CBS Children's Film Festival

If you are an American between the ages of 40 and 50 I bet you can remember the first foreign film you enjoyed. Not necessarily the first foreign film you ever saw, but the first one you enjoyed. I'll bet you watched it on a Saturday morning, it was in black and white, it was set in Japan and you know it by its American title Skinny and Fatty. The warm glowing feeling that is settling over your body is known as nostalgia and although often a bad thing, it doesn't always have to be. Even if you haven't thought of this movie in over thirty years, I'll bet a smile has slowly crept across your face. Let me burst through that vague, nebulous years of memory shadows and remind you that Skinny and Fatty was aired as part of the CBS Children's Film Festival hosted by Kukla, Fran and Ollie.

The CBS Children's Film Festival ran for over fifteen years in various incarnations and over that time it aired countless movies from across the world, but for some reason no other movie seems to stick to the memory of middle-aged men and woman, especially men, more than Skinny and Fatty. For the record, the original Japanese title of Skinny and Fatty is Chibideka monogatar. Perhaps I misspoke. Perhaps, indeed, not every middle-aged man recalls this entry on the CBS Children's Film Festival fondly. I am dubious that 45 year old now who were bullies in elementary school or burgeoning high school athletes took to the film the way that those of us who might have viewed ourselves as outcasts did. Skinny and Fatty is actually a rather misleading title because the so-called skinny kid is normal sized. The other child is overweight and becomes, of course, the target of bullying. What makes the film all the more fascinating in the way that it must certainly have reached out to an entire generation of kids in the early 70s is that fatty is more economically better off than skinny and so he begins to question whether the reason skinny has befriended him even though doing so has alienated skinny from from his former friends, is because skinny likes his material objects more than him.