Parenting & Family Quote by Terry Gilliam

Gilliam is needling adulthood, not childhood. The line lands because it flips the usual panic: we assume the weird stuff confuses kids, but he’s saying the opposite. Children, he suggests, metabolize the surreal as a native language. Adults, trained into narrative hygiene and “making sense,” get irritated when a film refuses to behave. That’s a quiet thesis about imagination as a muscle that atrophies under schooling, work, and the constant demand for coherence.

The specificity matters: Jabberwocky and Time Bandits aren’t merely “fantasy.” They’re Gilliam’s signature mode of baroque, semi-logical dream-architecture, where menace and play sit in the same frame and where jokes aren’t always reassuring. Kids can ride that tonal wobble; adults often want guardrails - a clear moral, a stable reality, a sanctioned meaning. Gilliam’s films withhold those comforts on purpose. He builds worlds that feel like bedtime stories told by someone who doesn’t entirely trust bedtime.

There’s also a sly defense embedded here. By pointing to children’s ease, Gilliam reframes adult discomfort as a limitation of the viewer, not the work. He’s not apologizing for being “too strange”; he’s arguing that strangeness is the point, and that the audience most open to it is the one least invested in looking competent. Contextually, it’s a director with a long history of battling studios and expectations, using the kid/adult divide to justify his refusal to sand down the edges.