A24 wants to turn your baby into a film buff
Determining which movie to watch has never been such an undertaking. With so many streaming services at our disposal, it can take as long to choose a title as it would to watch the first act.
Now add kids to the mix. You could eliminate the conundrum altogether by watching “Coco” for the millionth time, but wouldn’t you rather a different song get stuck in your head for once? Gone are the days of guiding your child to the kids section of Blockbuster to see which tape they gravitate toward. VHS covers are no match for the internet’s boundless supply of jazzy shapes and colors.
Enter “Hey Kids, Watch This!,” a new book printed by the publishing arm of the independent film studio A24, which hopes to be a savior to parents who are spoiled for choice. Divided into different age brackets – preschoolers ages 2 to 4, little kids ages 5 to 7, big kids ages 8 to 9 and tweens ages 10 to 12 – the 288-page tome offers detailed recommendations for “films that kids can get excited about, and that inject some of the magic back into” the selection process, according to editor James Cartwright.
“There is a tendency to dumb things down for kids, to oversimplify or oversanitize stories for them,” Cartwright said. “I’m reading my kid a load of Greek myths at the moment. He’s most fascinated by the ones that involve death and dying – big, meaty themes. Children will grapple with complicated ideas if you let them. When we were choosing these films, we weren’t just choosing ones that are sweet.”
No, your kid isn’t going to be quoting Fassbinder before they can ride a bicycle. But A24, a trendy studio that has earned a reputation as an industry tastemaker, is well-positioned to turn your kid into a rambunctious, sticky-fingered film buff. Preschoolers are guided toward some famous titles – including Hayao Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988) and Disney’s “The Fox and the Hound” (1981) – but also to niche entries such as “Rainbow Dance” (1936), pioneering animator Len Lye’s striking color film, and “Microcosmos” (1996), a French documentary on tiny creatures.
These recommendations arrive after a foreword by Julian Shapiro-Barnum, a 25-year-old comedian known for posing life’s big questions to little kids playing outside in New York in his popular web series, “Recess Therapy.” Existential topics are rendered simple by children wise beyond their years (“Everybody has a little bit of kindness in them that they can change into a lot of kindness,” one girl plainly states).
“I have consistently been blown away by how much kids are aware of,” Shapiro-Barnum said in an interview. “They have very uncomplicated opinions about those concepts in a way that’s really powerful. I feel like adults overcomplicate things, and kids can see them in a little more of a black-and-white way.”
Neither of the book’s authors – Jon Dieringer and Caitlin Quinlan, who each write about film for a living and have previously worked with A24’s book imprint – have children of their own. So they looked to kids in their lives – the offspring of friends, film critics, programmers – and revisited their individual childhoods to craft a master list of recommendations. It had to be whittled down quite a bit. While the age brackets originally included a category for teenagers as well, the team decided that was too broad and ended at age 12. Quinlan shed a quiet tear as they axed the section on teen movies based on Shakespearean plays (“10 Things I Hate About You” and “She’s the Man” come to mind).
“We were trying to think outside the box and be more expansive in our definitions of ‘children’s film,’” Quinlan said. “We tried to flip things on their head … and find things that really do work for children even if it’s an experimental film from the ’30s or something that was never intended for children.”
It might not occur to you to boot up the Criterion Channel app with a 9-year-old sitting next to you, but Jacques Demy’s vibrant musical “The Young Girls of Rochefort” (1967) appeals to all generations. The book exposes children to films from all over the world. The section devoted to big kids includes Satyajit Ray’s classic Indian drama “Pather Panchali” (1955) and the outlandish action-comedy “Shaolin Soccer” (2001) from Hong Kong director Stephen Chow, for instance.
Dieringer and Quinlan kept diversity in mind – in terms of genre and style, but also prominence. A millennial parent might remember watching “Babe” years ago, but would they consider the artistic integrity of its 1998 sequel, “Babe: Pig in the City”? People “totally overlooked and slept on this film,” Dieringer said, noting its strangeness was clearly inspired by “German expressionist film.”
“It’s like making a mixtape,” Dieringer said. “If it’s all hits, it’s boring.”
Each recommendation is accompanied by a short description of why it made the cut, along with some comparable titles that could make for a fun double feature. The end of the book includes a “family film tracker,” where you can record a star rating (out of five) and viewing notes. It recalls the active listening required of Dieringer in his youth, when his father tasked him with writing essays about the obscure DVDs he purchased for his curious son, whose taste surpassed the Blockbuster library.
“I don’t mean to sound all ‘eat your vegetables’ about it, but film is a major cultural form, and I think, in time, it’s become more and more central to our lives and cultural identity,” Dieringer said. “Everyone is growing up with screens now … the way we communicate is increasingly through video.”
TikTok and YouTube videos can fill a void, but film tends to forge a much longer-lasting connection. “Hey Kids, Watch This!” takes children seriously. It acknowledges that the media they consume can impact how they interact with the world and who they become.
“There is this inherent curiosity and ambitious viewing experience that young people can have,” Quinlan said. “It just needs to be fostered and cultivated to grow into something even more.”