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When I was four, I watched a movie where the villain is an insidious evil spirit with a glowing face locked within a large, heavy old book. It fully preoccupied my scaredy-cat mind for the rest of the day, and after I was tucked into bed that night, I climbed out to pluck all the oversized books from my bedroom shelves and heave them into a pile in the hallway, where they couldn’t hurt me. “What are all these books doing here?” I heard my mom tut later through the door. The movie? The Care Bears Movie from 1985. (And I’m not alone.)
As a child with a robust imagination, movies affected me deeply, and many of my favorites from that period have retained their magic in my adult eyes: The Neverending Story, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Secret of NIMH, Auntie Mame, A League of Their Own.
These beloved films (not the Care Bears one) are all included in A24’s new book for young movie lovers, Hey Kids, Watch This!, which offers some 100 prime choices for family movie night. Spanning decades, genres, moods, and languages, the recommendations are divided into four sections—Preschoolers (ages two to four), Little Kids (five to seven), Big Kids (eight and nine), and Tweens (10 to 12)—and, crucially, are all available on streaming services. They’re sure both to spark the imaginations of cinephiles in training and satisfy adults sick of, say, Bluey or Frozen.
It also serves as a mini primer on children’s movie history. In addition to features on Studio Ghibli and Aardman Animations (creators of the beloved Wallace and Gromit), the book highlights Don Bluth, the filmmaker who posed a serious challenge to Disney’s hegemony in the 1980s with films like the box-office smash An American Tail. Of course Disney is also represented, but with a roundup of the studio’s lesser-known gems, like Cool Runnings (1993), The Rocketeer (1991), and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), my personal favorite. Readers can create a Mad Libs–style Oscar speech and get tips from IndieWire critic David Ehrlich on how to watch and talk about movies, alongside trivia galore, pages to track and rate their movies watched, and movie-themed games charmingly illustrated by Anna Haifisch.
The book’s impetus stemmed from A24 executives facing a struggle familiar to parents of young children everywhere: figuring out what to watch. “Choosing something on Netflix is a nightmare, especially with kids,” editor James Cartwright tells Vogue. “They get distracted by everything. We wanted to put together a book that bypassed that terrible experience and brought more of the magic of watching a family movie together.”
Visiting the video store was a hallowed ritual for him as a child in the ’90s. “I so vividly remember going to Blockbuster on a Friday night after school, picking a couple of movies for the weekend, and just absolutely vibrating with excitement that we were going to get to watch films I had seen trailers for,” he says. “That’s something that streaming services have taken away.”
Cartwright’s team whittled down a list of 800 titles, gathered from a wide swath of A24 contacts and industry insiders, to around 100. For the final cut, they aimed for a variety of themes, genres, and stories across time periods and cultural backgrounds.
Despite the A24 imprimatur (or perhaps apropos of it), it doesn’t aim to be a high-brow cinema book for kids. “It’s supposed to be kind of an all-brow thing that embraces all levels of cinema,” Cartwright notes, citing 1995’s A Goofy Movie as an example of a Disney standard that improbably developed a cult following. “We were all quite skeptical about it, but on watching it together, it’s a good movie,” he chuckles.
Some films also faced tougher scrutiny, from Cartwright’s five-year-old son. “When I first put it on Yuri Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog [from 1975], he was immediately like, ‘No black and white.’ I was like, ‘Come on, just stick with it.’ And by the end he loved the hedgehog.”
But even some films made in the 21st century have a dramatically different look and pace from the frenetic CGI programs most kids today find themselves saturated by on screens, like Paw Patrol and Peppa Pig. “I don’t want to be too cruel about Pixar Studios,” Cartwright says carefully, “but there is a slightly sanitized—or at least homogeneous—visual style that kids have become accustomed to. And they think that’s what entertainment looks like.”
One of Cartwright’s favorite films from the book is The Cave of the Yellow Dog, a 2005 drama about a six-year-old girl returning to her family and readjusting to life in remote Mongolia after spending the school year in the big city. “There’s so much about the universality of being a child, no matter where you are, that comes through the film and will engage them, even though it’s not fast-paced and plays out like a documentary.”
As for unseen gems, Cartwright suggests Robin Robin, a 2021 Oscar-nominated Aardman Animation short by next-generation talents Mikey Please and Dan Ojari, and The Secret of Kells, a 2009 animated feature that’s the first in an Irish folklore trilogy (it lost to Up at the Oscars).
And eventually you may encounter that moment of truth: whether kids will appreciate a film you cherished as a child. Cartwright had such an experience with The Little Rascals (1994). “I remember watching that trailer and being desperate to see it. It just felt so relatable—a bunch of kids doing dumb things and having the most fun. I showed it to my son 30 years later, and he loved it as well. That was really satisfying—we successfully crossed the generational divide.”
