In 2014 the Chilean animated short film Historia de un oso [Bear Story], directed by Gabriel Osorio Vargas, made history; having received an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 88th Academy Awards, it became the first-ever Chilean winner of an Academy Award and the first Latin American animation to win an Oscar. Based on the life of the director's grandfather, who was imprisoned after the 1973 coup d’état, eventually living out the rest of the seventeen-year dictatorship in exile, the enchanting animation and melancholic soundtrack transport the viewer to a familiar historical milieu as lived through a child's innocence. The whimsical and nostalgic tone of the short film confronts directly the horrific human-rights abuses, still a divisive ground regarding collective memory and the complexities of forging ahead as a unified nation.

Continuing with the same modus operandi, contemporary representations in literature and popular culture embrace the child narrator as a unique interpretive voice for reflecting on times of dictatorship. The works rely on the perspective of the child to address the preoccupations of adult audiences. In a similar vein, children's literature treats real historical and societal rifts, oftentimes masked in imaginative magical plots. When approaching children's literature, philosophers and scholars remind us of the latent agenda of the genre. Perry Nodelman, in The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature (2008) warns, “claiming that anything any child ever reads is children's literature is a seriously counterproductive move” (3).