Her first few movies
By: Andrea Maderna
Tags: Mulan, Parenthood, Movies, Disney, Parenting

A few things have changed since when I originally wrote about the things I (used to) watch with my daughter Vanessa. She still likes those things, but she watches them much less and she dabbled with other stuff, like Trotro, a show she discovered on Netflix with her babysitter. It’s a French show about a donkey doing kids stuff and Vanessa really loved it for a few weeks. It’s cute but I have to say that I found the singing and the voices really annoying. She also tried Les Lapins Crétins : Invasion, which stars the Raving Rabbids from Ubisoft video games. It’s also on the French Netflix and of course it was my idea to try it. It’s moderate fun, but frankly not as much as I expected and it didn’t stick too much with her. Two more recent discoveries are T’choupi à l’école, which is also French and is a CG show about a bunch of kindergarten kids doing cute stuff at the kindergarten, and Masha and the Bear, a crazy show about a messy little girl who strikes the life of a bear with the strength of a hurricane. She loves both of them and the second one has the added bonus of making me and my wife laugh our asses off.

All of these shows are in French, which is a good thing, since she has been mostly watching English spoken stuff and I’d like her to watch things in all of the three languages she’s learning.

(Well, Masha and the Bear is Russian, But I’d say it’s a bit early for subtitles, so we opted for the French language)

Then, during a short vacation in Italy, with the complicity of her grandad, she developed quite the passion for Chip and Potato, a Canadian show about a young pug that basically lives the life of a regular kid, in a world full of anthropomorphic animals. And Chip’s got a plush, Potato, which secretly is a mouse she befriended. This is also on Netflix and I have to say I initially didn’t like it much, because of the looks and the fact that most of the characters look and sound like they have a serious cocaine addiction, but Vanessa really loved it, so I gave it a serious try and, well, it’s not Hilda but it’s fine. It teaches nice things (or things I agree with, I guess that’s what counts) and it’s cute. Plus, Vanessa learned a lullaby from it and she sings it to me every time she sees me lying on the couch, which is otherwordly cute.

But right now, that’s also a thing of the past, more or less. In the last couple of weeks, Vanessa fell in love with music videos. She always liked to watch, every once in a while, videos from her favourite songs, but she recently decided that she really loves that, so her “screen time” has been dedicated to music. Recent top hits have been the Abba and Lady Gaga discographies, both on Spotify and YouTube, and she is learning lyrics, dancing, watching the videos. The Lady Gaga part of it may give my readers the urge to call social services but, what can I say, I think it’s cool, I like her vibe, even though I’m not necessarily a fan. She’s also quite into Marina and the Diamonds (but I guess now it’s only Marina) and she still loves to watch the clips with songs from Disney movies, even from the movies she never watched, but yeah, Abba and Lady Gaga are the heavy hitters right now.

And we started watching some movies together! Of course, being a forty years old dad, my first thought was to show her some Disney classics, at least the ones that don’t focus on princesses falling in love with the first dude they met and constantly needing rescue. Plus, Vanessa was already familiar with some of them because of bedtime stories and because of the songs, so it made sense. We started with The Jungle Book: she loved Mowgli from our evening readings and she loved Bare Necessities, so it was a no brainer. And, well, she seemed to like it and have fun, even though she went to hide on the other side of the living room when Shere Khan was on screen, and she never asked to watch it again. But then we started reading the original book, which I bought in a beautiful edition in my last trip to San Francisco, so I guess that’s good.

Personally, I still think the art style and the songs are adorable, even though by today standards the movie is incredibly slow, kinda boring, I guess. What really annoyed me, though, was the ending. After more than one hour with only male characters (and a wolfmother, of course), here comes the little girl, getting water from the river and singing about how much she hopes to find a beautiful husband, have a daughter and send her to the river to get some water while she’s home cooking. And just to be safe, Baloo warns Mowgli about women: he shouldn’t trust them. OK.

Then we tried Lady and the Tramp, of which Vanessa was also aware because of the big Disney book she got as a present from family friends, but she wasn’t necessarily a huge fan of it. She kinda liked it, she had fun with all the cute animals but she never asked to watch it again.

My opinion? Not that dissimilar from The Jungle Book: art is still lovely, the rhythm is almost unbearably sleep-inducing (or maybe I shouldn’t watch movies from so many decades ago while I’m digesting my lunch) and the way it uses human ethnic clichés to depict different animal races is a bit disturbing. But at least Lady is a strong female character that ends up taking matters in her own paws, more or less. Anyway, Vanessa didn’t really care about the movie, so who cares?

And then love struck hard when we watched Mulan. Vanessa was instantly sucked in, she didn’t speak for the whole movie (which is quite longer than the previous ones), she was annoyed by the old lady at the beginning, she got mildly spooked by the Huns and she ended up having so much fun. She talked about it a lot afterwards, she was constantly riffing on how much Shan Yu is not a nice person. Since March, we watched it together four times and she watched it two or three more times with her mom while I was at E3 (it’s become the secret weapon when she is impossible to manage). It may seem not too much but keep in mind that we let her watch it only when there’s really enough time to watch all of it and, also, only if she didn’t already watch other stuff or play some video games on the same day. So, by her standards, six or more times is a lot. And she always watch it religiously, with very little talking on specific moments while, of course, she sings along with it. She instantly loved Reflection but, after a while, I’ll Make a Man Out of You became a heavy hitter on Spotify and now she can sing almost all of it by memory.

Me? I think it still is a lovely movie, with a fascinating art style, great rhythm and some very nice music. I never loved the songs, even though I’m kinda into Reflection and I almost cried when my daughter asked me to explain what’s going on in that scene. Yeah. I’m silly that way, with Disney movies. I also think that I’ll Make a Man Out of You is scarily sexist, even though it makes sense in the context of the movie. But taken out of context, I have to admit I don’t love the fact that my daughter knows it by heart. I know, I know, I worry too much and in fact I’m not really worried, plus the overall movie is quite nice in that sense, so everything’s fine. I think.

After the second showing of Mulan in two days, we tried Dumbo. I mean, cute animals, memorable music, short running time… what’s not to love? Well, she had some fun with it and she was happy but she never asked for it again. As soon as she had a new chance to watch a movie — which was a couple of weeks later — she went back to the Chinese well and that was it.

What can I say about Dumbo? It’s incredibly cute, the cage scene is heartbreaking, the flying scene with that music (I have to admit I didn’t remember that that music I loved was from Dumbo) is adorable and the crazy drunk elephant scene is still beautifully inventive and visually stunning. By the way, sorry, I never thought that part of the movie was scary and my daughter agrees with me. On the negative side, yeah, there’s always the rhythm issue and the crows are maybe a bit problematic, I guess.

As I said up there, Vanessa started listening Abba classics and she loves them so, a few weekends ago, around the end of June, my wife decided we all had to watch together Mamma Mia! I never watched it so, why not? And, well, we found a new cinematic love for our daughter. She watched it from the beginning to the end without saying a single word, she loved it, she started talking about Sophie and her mother Donna, and Abba songs became even bigger heavy hitters on Spotify. Her favorites? I’d say Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!, Honey Honey and Dancing Queen. And she asked for the movie many times but, since it’s almost two hours long, there haven’t been many chances for rewatches. There’s been only one rewatch a week ago. And once again, she basically watched it in a trance. She’s adorable.

Me? Well, it’s a really simple movie, I’m not exactly a fan, but it’s moderately funny, I like the songs, Meryl Streep is so intense that she makes Abba lyrics sound profound, Amanda Seyfried is beautiful and Pierce Brosnan is Pierce Brosnan, so I guess it could be worse.

Last and probably least, last Sunday afternoon I was really tired, my wife was taking an afternoon nap, Vanessa wasn’t in the mood for sleep and I enjoyed the idea of her not taking a nap, so that she would fall asleep quite early in the evening (after the usual dose of Sunday house-made pizza), have a nice, long, night of sleep and be easy to wake up in the morning.* So I said “Let’s watch a movie!” and she loved the idea. I suggested Toy Story, she seemed into it, it started and… she seemed to enjoy it but then, after half an hour, she started complaining and ended up demanding that we stopped it. Why? From what I could understand, she basically hated every single character apart from Bo Peep.

Personally, I have to say that even though I still think it’s well written and it’s got some nice ideas, you can really feel how tentative the writing was in many ways: it’s clearly Pixar’s first movie. Also, by today standards, it looks terrible and kinda scary.

So we stopped it, but she wasn’t satisfied, she wanted to watch something else. And that’s when we discovered Masha and the Bear.

* The plan worked perfectly.

So I guess we’re back on Mulan and Mamma Mia!