Kid Stuff: Movies

This is the second in a very occasional series of posts discussing the following proposition: in the English-speaking world, the last 50 years has seen a dramatic increase in the quantity and quality of text and visual mass media intended for children. The first post, on kids’ animated cartoons, is here.

As noted in that post, “intended for children” here means mass media particularly targeting children aged 4-12 as the primary audience. So, Disney movies are included here, while the original Star Wars movies are not. Kids absolutely watched Star Wars — I watched it as a kid — but they weren’t the primary audience.  Stuff aimed at the youngest children is excluded here, as is Young Adult stuff. (I agree that the boundaries of the latter category are very slippery.)  Movies means movies in theaters, not including TV movies or straight-to-video stuff.

So then: from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, movies for children were generally mediocre to bad. There were individual works that were good or excellent, but not many; and the average was dismally low. And the quality was not much better at the end of this period than at the beginning.

But starting in the back half of the 1980s, kids movies suddenly started getting better, and then around 1995 they started getting very good indeed. The period 1970-1986 was a dark age for kid’s movies; the period 1995-2012 (0r so) was an astonishing age of gold. There was a massive cultural transformation here, and it happened fairly quickly.

One big driver of this was the Disney Renaissance.  This is well known — there are books about it — but the TLDR is that, for reasons beyond the scope of this blog post, Disney suddenly went from making mediocre animated films that nobody much cared about and that didn’t make much money (Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Fox And The Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver And Company) to making animated films that were good to excellent, hugely successful, and in some cases have become part of the shared cultural database:  The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Mulan, Beauty and the Beast, Hercules, The Lion King.  (And also Who Framed Roger Rabbit — Disney was and is ambivalent about that one, because reasons, but it was Disney owned and Disney produced.)

— At this point in the conversation there’s always That One Guy who says oh come on Bedknobs and Broomsticks had Angela Lansbury and I *loved* The Black Cauldron as a kid!  Which, fine, but its IMDB score is 6.3 and it has 56% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it was a commercial and critical flop at the time.  So don’t bring that stuff unless you have numbers to back it.

Anyway: there’s a complex backstory to why Disney animation suddenly stopped sucking, and you can look it up if you like.  It involves a cast of bigger-than-life characters (Don Bluth, Roy Disney, Jeffrey Katzenberg) and has a twisty plot line involving everything from personal grudges to failed corporate takeovers.  But the key point here is that very suddenly, starting in 1987 and continuing thereafter, Disney started making animated movies for kids that were actually good.

But then for almost a decade — 1987 to 1995 — Disney was producing good animated movies for kids, and Disney was pretty much the /only/ one producing good animated movies for kids.  Others were trying, but… DuckTales the Movie, FernGully, Quest for Camelot, Thumbelina, Rock-a-Doodle, The Land Before Time: yeah no.  Pixar was still in beta, Don Bluth was flailing. If you’re looking for good animated movies for kids from this period, it’s basically Disney, some early Miyazaki, An American Tail and maybe The Nightmare Before Christmas. And that’s about it.

But then Pixar comes online in 1995 with Toy Story, and pow: that’s when stuff really gets going.  Disney was going from strength to strength during this period — Lion King, Hercules, Mulan, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin — but now you could also go see The Iron Giant or A Bug’s Life or Toy Story 2 or even Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, an animated Batman movie that was better than most of the live-action ones.  And suddenly people were animating classic kids’ books like Stuart Little and James and the Giant Peach, and these adaptations didn’t suck!  Dreamworks shows up late in the decade and while their first offerings (Antz, Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado) weren’t top-tier, they were still vastly better than the stuff that was around before 1987.  And now there were these these things from “Studio Ghibli” (are they Italian?) — that had been big in Japan for years, but just now got released to the wider world?  My Neighbor… Toto? Is that an Oz thing?  Kiki’s Delivery Service? 

In sum: there’s an inflection point for this stuff in the mid-1990s, and it’s very sharp.

And it wasn’t just animated films.  The generational-marker non-animated kids film of the early 1980s?  Is there one? The Goonies, maybe?  The Dark Crystal or The Never-Ending Story if your definition of kid stuff includes severe psychological damage?  Maybe one of the early Muppet movies, or E.T., if you’re willing to stretch a point?

Ten years later:  Babe, Free Willy, Homeward Bound,  Home Alone, The Sandlot, The Mighty Ducks, The Little Princess, The Witches, Matilda, Jumanji, the two best Muppet movies… 1990s kids were starved for choice compared to their older cousins.

But then it got better!  If you were a kid in the 2000s?  Let’s take a deep breath…

Animated:  Finding Nemo, Lilo and Stitch, Wall-E, Ice Age, Up, Kung Fu Panda, Happy Feet, Ratatouille, Shrek, Shrek 2, The Emperor’s New Groove, The Princess and the Frog, Polar Express, Madagascar, like five great Miyazakis, Cars, Toy Story 3, The Incredibles, Flushed Away, How To Train Your Dragon, Tangled… It just goes on and on.  

Pause a moment and look at that list again.  There are at least five movies on that list that people will put on a Top 5 list of Greatest Animated Movies Of All Time.  There are a bunch of movies that are just really good movies, kid stuff notwithstanding.

And even the B-tier stuff was good.  Disney flops like Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet?  Still much better than anything Disney was doing between 1970 and 1987!  Weak-ish Miyazakis like Ponyo and Arrietty?  Still Miyazaki, still good!  Odd, half-forgotten Disney experiments like Bolt, Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons?  Still interesting and totally worth watching!  Wallace and Gromit:  Curse of the Were-Rabbit is the weakest of the Wallace and Gromit films.  It’s still super creative wacky fun! 

Did you ever see Over the Hedge, The Tale of Despereaux, Chicken Run, or Rio?  Firmly secondary at the time, mostly forgotten today.  But Despereaux is actually a wonderful little movie, Chicken Run is solid Aardman madness, the animation on Rio still kicks 20 years later and if Over The Hedge had come out in 1984 it would be remembered as a massive, game-changing instant classic.  

Even if you go down to D-tier, throwaway stuff and flops like Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron?  That dumb little movie has a rocking soundtrack by Bryan Adams and Matt Damon as the voice of Spirit.  Osmosis Jones?  Bill Murray, with voice work by Chris Rock, Laurence Fishburne, and William Shatner as the corrupt Mayor. Monsters vs. Aliens is pretty slight, but it might be worth watching just for Hugh Laurie as Dr. Cockroach.  Shark Tale has Will Smith and Robert de Niro, for goodness’ sake.  Suddenly animated kids movies were attracting serious star talent.

Good lord, there were a dozen animated Barbie movies in the 2000s and ‘teens, and they… weren’t horrible!  (I know, because I had a seven year old who watched a bunch of them.)  Simple fun plots, basic but decent animation, okay musical numbers, and the occasional sly wink for the parents.  They were there to sell toys, but they were so much less awful than they should have been.  

Non-animated?  Not quite the same explosion of riches, but still much more than a generation earlier: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Elf, Enchanted, Ella Enchanted, Madeline, Holes, seven!  Harry Potter movies, Night at the Museum… there was a lot going on there, too.

I could trace this forward into the teens, but I’ll teal deer it: the tide receded a bit in the following decade.  Still a lot of good stuff, but not quite the explosion of riches there were from the late 90s to the early teens.  It’s possible that my judgment may be skewed; my kids stopped watching kid movies not long after this.  My youngest is a teenager now, and if she’s not rewatching Gilmore Girls she wants to binge Attack on Titan or Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.  But when I look at the best kids’ movies from 2017 or 2019 or 2022… there’s plenty of great stuff (Inside Out! Coco!  The Lego Movie! ) but not quite the relentless drumbeat of top-quality content there was 15 or 20 years earlier.

Why? 

I don’t know!  Nobody seems to know! 

I mean, we do know why the Disney Renaissance happened.  But why was it followed — after a delay of nearly a decade — by an explosion of great movies for kids that continued for a generation or so?  And then why, after fifteen or twenty years or so, did that somewhat slacken?  And why did that explosion take place at roughly the same time as an explosion of great kids’ cartoons, kids’ books, and kids’ TV, at least in the English-speaking world?

I don’t know.  I lived through it, but I don’t understand it.

Comments welcome.