With talents like Ronald Dahl and Ian Fleming contributing to this magical Hollywood classic, it's no wonder it still resonates with adults and kids.
Continue reading "The Timeless Charm of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" »
Okay, so you’ve decided your baby won’t watch television until at least the age of five. You’re convinced Baby Einstein videos won’t make her a genius either. You see those wide innocent eyes staring at the screen and you feel, well, guilty. Here is something to make you feel better or worse depending on how you look at it.
Go to Youtube.com and type in three words: cute baby animals. Now with the click of a mouse you’ve got at least 25 homemade videos - baby tigers at the zoo, a litter of seven fluffy puppies running around someone’s suburban Japanese kitchen, a string of slow fade photos of kittens frolicking in the grass to a warbling Judy Collins. You might cringe but your baby will love them and learn all the animal names too. Also, they are only one to five minutes long so forget feeling guilty.
The drawback – just try to send an email now with your little one in the room. She’ll begin to pull at your leg and cry, “Amull! Amull! Animal!”
One of Madelyn’s favorites: tiny dogs in costumes, kitties in wicker baskets (the horror!) all set to Coldplay’s Yellow. Beat that.
By Liz
It's a geography lesson for 3-year-olds, but it's also a cartoon. A movie starring Donald Duck, but no grown-up of any age can look away. A musical from the golden age of musicals, with numbers as elaborate as anything from MGM, but nobody's in it you've ever heard of (except of course Donald Duck), and the score is all hot and south-of-the-border style. A Latin musical.
Give up? I'm talking about Walt Disney's The Three Caballeros, one of the most remarkable movies for children ever made. Disney's seventh animated feature film, from 1944, is not as well known as the early biggies like Pinocchio and Snow White but it's just as great and in a genre all its own.
It's a tour of Latin American countries by three avian cartoon characters, with ravishing illustrative art and knockout musical numbers to get across something of the culture of Patagonia, Mexico, and most memorably, Brazil. I had never seen it as a child but discovered it when my daughter Kate fell in love with the movie and asked to watch it more than any of her prior obsessions. So I sat down and watched it with her and couldn't believe my eyes.
You don't need me to tell you about Make Way For Ducklings. It's a classic among classics. And you will love it narrated sweetly on this DVD ($13). But what makes this video especially great is that it also features versions of several other Robert McCloskey stories, including the intelligent and beautiful "Time of Wonder." It's about the changing of the seasons in Maine, and it is unusually abstract and artistic for a children's book — which probably explains its relative obscurity.
It teaches a child how to listen, look at nature and get in touch with a whole set of nineteenth-century perception skills that have been swept away in a typhoon of tripe spearheaded by the Doodlebops and Oobi. Be warned, there may come a time when your children are too old for something so simple, but until the age of three or four (when their lovely and serene natural states are corrupted), they may well adopt this as their favorite bedtime video. Get the books, too.
By David
Originally published on Babble.com
