Swedish cinema for a young audience has a strong tradition of portraying children as subjects, i. e.  round characters, with some degree of complexity and undergoing certain development. Less noticed is the tendency in many children's films to challenge the paramount idea of childhood as a period of life characterized by innocence. This is carried out through several thematic and aesthetic ways, of which the depiction of the subversive child is the most apparent. 

This paper identifies this figure as someone who challenges our society's strict division between childhood and adulthood, often referred to as the generational order. It focuses upon child figures that transgress the norms of childhood in different ways. For example, in The War Game (2017), Malte behaves like a military strategist inspired by John Nash, and in The Girl, the Mother, and the Demons (2016), Ti acts like a parent to her mother. By hereby suggesting that children have a huge potential, they both address the unstable and fluid quality of age. And thus, they also, indirectly, challenge the power relations that is the foundation of the generational order.

The theoretical framework of this paper is interdisciplinary, deriving from cinema studies as well as childhood studies. By intercrossing these research fields, children's film is illuminated as a potentially subversive arena, where not only the innocence of childhood, but the very concept of childhood, might be called into question.