‘The kid is not my son’: Rejecting the adult in Boy (2010)

This article examines how Māori director Taika Waititi rejects the ‘adult’ across his cinematic body of work, offering instead a vision of the world through the eyes of children, privileging whimsical and nonsensical humour to challenge conventional definitions of maturity and development. With reference to several theoretical conversations on the child’s perspective in film and a non-linear coming of age, this article addresses already established writings on Waititi’s films as sites of subversion; the rejections of the ‘adult’ are the key to developing these arguments. First, he rejects the ‘adult’ perspective, using a childlike, fantastical cinematic viewpoint to confront and eschew the social norms that pressure the child protagonists into replicating socially accepted ways of becoming and being ‘mature’. Second, Waititi offers alternative, non-linear paths of development that reject the generalization of the adult, siding instead with outsider characters that are shown to have ‘failed’ in the eyes of the society. Finally, an analysis of Indigenous development narratives, their influence on how the definition of ‘maturity’ is challenged and how this intersects with Waititi’s whimsical, childlike humour reveals a nuanced rejection of the ‘western’ adult inherent in traditional coming-of-age narratives.