Bad kids’ movies

You know it’s been a thin year for good animated films (which usually translates to family films, with a few exceptions) when only three are being nominated for a Golden Globe. The Croods, Frozen, and Despicable Me 2 are the only movies that are up for the award, and while I’d swap DM 2 for either Epic or Monsters, Inc. 2 myself (yes, we are now in an age where Pixar movies aren’t always up for the gold), it’s a mostly accurate assessment—we have simply had awful kids’ movies this year.

We sat out most movies this year for this reason; in fact, the movies above are the only ones we saw at the movies with our child this year and we normally see every kids’ movie when it is released. We’ve rented others; for example, we rented Turbo last week and while it had a couple of funny moments and I liked the diversity of the characters, overall it was not very impressive.

I’m not sure why this was the case, but I really hope that movie makers understand that as parents, we not only have intelligent kids who want to see decent movies—but that we, too, must see these movies and we aren’t going to pay to see them if they aren’t any good! You can argue that it’s never been cheaper to go to the movies, but that cost does not correlate with pay, and until minimum wage more than doubles it’s going to continue to be expensive to go to the movies for most families, costing about an hour’s work per family member for a ticket (or even more). As long as Adam Sandler’s making an obscenely amount of money, the least the industry could do it make sure every movie that’s churned out is at least decent.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia