Boyz N The Hood

distinct: setting,themes,icons,narrative,characters,textual analysis.

The beginning is set in the kids neighbourhood home in south central Los angeles in 1984 and we get to see them walk through their neighbourhood in the morning time. The setting then becomes slightly more morbid as we see the darker side of the neighbourhood where police tape is lining and alleyway corner and what look like political posters have bullet holes in them. The floor is covered in newspaper with blood splatters on it, the viewer would be shocked to see how unnerved the kids are by seeing this.
The setting then again changes to a classroom and a lesson taking place in it before changing back to a sunny day in the neighbourhood.
It shows themes of violence, wrong and right, childhood and shootings.
Right at the beginning of the movie we see a stop sign being zoomed into, i think the stop sign is symbolic of how his trying to get a message across to stop violence and shootings and stop and reflect on what they are teaching younger children is the correct behaviour.
The story is told in a correct time order of the kids day from walking to school, looking at the crime scene, going to school and walking home.
at the beginning we meet 4 characters who are all children 2 male 2 female mainly the two male characters speak however one of the girls does also interact with them as well. They are all dressed for school and are all carrying backpacks. We are then introduced to a school teacher who is wearing a knee length skirt with a belt around it and a blouse with her hair tied back and glasses.
Textual analysis - before we see the setting or characters we get to hear background sound which is parallel to the mood and message of the movie it is off screen and non diagetic. We can hear these unidentified characters say "just pull up,just pull up" "get your shit ready..." before hearing a gun being sprayed and screams of people. we may not be able to see whats happening in this scene but the words exchanged between the characters we can hear and the spray of a gun its clear that there has been a shooting.

We can tell that violence has been normalised for the boys as we see them act violently towards each other and we witness one young boy when walking home seeing someone get beat up, by how un-reactive he is to this we can tell that it must be normal to him and a common thing to happen where he is from as he is simply able to stroll pass without even a flinch of a change of emotion on his face when he sees this. We can also tell that the boys are used to violence as when they witness the crime scene they continue to kick bloody newspapers of off the floor and already at such a young age are able to tell that there was a shooting and people were hurt or killed one young boy even talks about how people were "smoked" last night.