Sean Fennessey teaches us how to introduce kids to movies

Yesterday was my due date. I’m prescheduling this post, so it’s entirely possible that I’m currently chilling at the hospital with a brand-new Critter in my arms. Maybe I’m still chilling at home, with my basketball belly fully intact. Or, quite possibly, I’m giving birth as you read this, which would be cool but probably not all that chill. Who knows!

What I do know is that I’ve got a great interview for you today. This one is for the movie nuts and anyone with a small child in their own life. Sean Fennessey — co-host of The Big Picture podcast, head of content at The Ringer, and author of the film newsletter Projections — joined me for a conversation about how and when to introduce kids to movies. This is an aspect of parenthood that Alex and I are particularly looking forward to, and it’s one that Sean has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about, as both a professional cinephile and the father of a nearly-five-year-old. On this topic, there’s nobody whose advice I’d rather solicit.

Also, he makes bonding over movies sound really sweet. As Sean told me when I asked about sharing his physical media collection with his daughter: “Sometimes she wants to come sit in the Blu-ray room with me and watch a movie, which is legitimately the happiest you’ll ever find me.” May all parents have such a wholesome path to connecting with their children!

Above the paywall, we discussed why it’s worth gamifying movie watching for children, how Sean thinks about screen time, and why you shouldn’t try to over-engineer your kid’s taste in movies. Here’s what you’ll find below the paywall:

• Recs for monster movies that aren’t too frightening for little kids (but why it’s good to have a healthy relationship with feeling scared)

• Sean’s take on the best and worst children’s movies of the year

• The last great movie Sean had seen, as of our interview (hint: it’s very kid-unfriendly)

Let’s get into it.

The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Before we even get into kids and movies, I want to talk to you about writing, since you recently started publishing a newsletter on Substack. How has that been going so far?

I have been reminded of just how difficult and rewarding writing is. It’s hard to not sound like a mouthpiece for the newsletter experience, but I’ve been enjoying the community component. There’s this extraordinary one-to-one interaction, where you work hard on a piece of writing and someone will say thank you and pay for it. I’ve been in media for 20-plus years, and there’s something really astounding about that. For the first ten years of my working life, it felt like I was writing and editing into the void, so it’s been a pretty dramatic shift in that respect.

Hopefully writing the newsletter is making me a better podcaster and thinker. And my wife has really been encouraging me to keep being personal, which is something that, in the dogma of traditional media, is not encouraged. I’m trying to shake off the bad habits of formality, in some ways. You know I mean?

I really do. My husband, Alex, edits all of my newsletters, and he’s always pushing me to be less stiff and more personal. I struggle with that because I learned to write for a public audience in a more traditional newspaper style, and that’s deeply ingrained.

I couldn’t get work coming out of school, so I just started blogging. It was that Blogspot era of 2002 to 2007, where there was a lot of free-flowing, loose writing — sort of a blend between link dumps and essayistic rambling. I felt really comfortable in that space, and then I had to figure out how to port that into the traditional machine. It’s interesting to undo my programming now. Hopefully I’m getting there.

I appreciate that you’re working through that in real time. So, turning to today’s main topic — how to introduce kids to movies — I’d like to start with the obvious questions. What was the first movie you showed your kid? How old was she, and how did it go?

When my daughter was born, I would frequently take the early mornings and let my wife sleep. Alice would lay on my lap while I was in the living room, and I’d watch the most deranged horror movies with AirPods in. She never saw any of those movies.

I remember, vividly, when she was around two, she was having a tough day and wouldn’t nap. My daughter, in general, was a terrible napper and a very bad sleeper until she was about three years old. To cope, I put on Ponyo to see what the effect would be. It was pretty powerful. She kind of vibed and zoned out with it. She’d look, go back to playing, kind of wander around, hang out in her pack and play. That was the first thing she ever saw.

The first movie we took her to see [in a theater], in full, was the Disney film Wish. Have you seen it?

Not yet. There are so many new children’s movies that I haven’t had occasion to see.

It’s a much-maligned, hyper-blenderized princess story that was meant to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Disney. My daughter sat through the whole movie, loved it, and kind of turned her life over to Wish for about 12 months. My wife and I loved it, too. I was doing the pod at the time, but I wasn’t paying very close attention to the critical consensus about the film. It is loathed.

Why?!

It has an Easter egg quality where it’s constantly referencing Disney’s animated films. It’s very fan service-oriented. But I didn’t consume it that way. My daughter had never seen any Disney movies, so to her, Asha and King Magnifico felt like wholly original creations. It was wonderful to see the movie through her eyes in that way.

That movie came out in November 2023, so she was around two years and four months. When I saw that she didn’t squirm, enjoyed it, remembered it, and wanted to talk about it, then we started leaning into taking her to the theater on a semi-regular basis.

After that, were you also watching movies at home? Or were you trying to emphasize the movie theater experience?

We were [watching movies at home], but we were trying not to overdo it. And we wanted to be very considerate about screen time. Before three, in particular, we were trying to not do screens at all. When I showed her Ponyo, it was on a screen, but it was a moment of desperation.

After that, we tried, more or less, to stick to movie theater experiences. Around Christmas of 2023, I got invited to the world premiere of Migration, which was an Illumination animated film about a family of ducks. We brought Alice to that. They gave away a goodie bag of Migration toys, and there was a big introduction with the president of Illumination explaining why the movie mattered to him. I was a little worried about exposing her to things like that — that she would think that you get toys at every movie and there’s always this pomp and circumstance around it. But she didn’t. She enjoyed the movie, and she was patient and really focused. I was like, okay, she’s a movie kid. Maybe she just has my DNA.

As she got a bit older, we started to show her movies at home, mostly on the weekends. She would lock in and not move. Since then, she’s seen over 150 movies. We’ve conquered, effectively, the entire Disney canon. She’s seen most of the Studio Ghibli movies that are appropriate for her and most of the Illumination movies. We’re now moving into live action and fantasy films.

I know you’re a list-maker. Do you have a running log of movies that you want to show her?

I’ll tell you about a cool thing that happened. My wife’s sister bought Alice a scratch-off poster of 100 movies every kid should see. We’re still working through it because not every movie is age-appropriate for her, but if we’re bored or don’t know what to watch on an idle Saturday afternoon, we’ll take out the poster, see what we haven’t scratched off, and tell her about a few titles.

I didn’t have a dossier of any kind — like, she has to watch these things. I certainly have my personal favorites that matter to me, but that poster, oddly, helped us. She also adores her aunt, so she feels like she’s communing with her. I think if you can create a bit of a game or activity around it, kids get more invested in conquering movies.

That’s great tactical parenting advice.

There’s just no way to know what kind of kid you’re going to get. I was talking to the father of one of my daughter’s best friends, and he was like, “She’s just afraid of everything.” She’s afraid of The Little Mermaid. Even though she’s almost six, she can’t really enjoy movies because they terrify her. You can’t plan for that. These things can change — I was terrified of rollercoasters as a little kid, and now I’m going on them with my daughter and having the best time.

I feel incredibly lucky, because movies are both my career and my number one hobby. Alice being so locked into it — and my wife also loving movies — gives us this stronghold, where any time we have a quiet moment, we can look up what’s playing at the Vista Theater or the AMC Burbank 16.

Following in the vein of accepting who your kid is, I’m curious about the extent to which you’re hoping to shape her taste in movies. What I mean by that is: How are you trying to help her cultivate her own taste, and how much do you want to curate for her?

I want her to like what she likes, and I don’t want to impose anything. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I think I’m uniquely qualified to curate —

— which is why I asked!

For the most part, my wife and I both responded to her taste for the first couple of years. She fell in love with every Disney princess. And not just your standard damsel-in-distress types — she was really into Tiana from The Princess and the Frog, Rapunzel from Tangled, and Merida from Brave. She became very obsessed with strong female hero archetypes. It’s easy for me, as someone who spends all day making lists about movies, to be like, “Okay, you might like Labyrinth because you like Brave.”

One of the best things that happened to us, at the end of last year, is that I showed her Star Wars: A New Hope, and she loved it. Like so many kids, she had a love affair with Star Wars over a three-month period. We watched every movie. She worships Rey, young Anakin, and Leia.

On the flip side, she pulled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles off the shelf at the video store, because she had gone to a [TMNT-themed] birthday party. When we started watching the movie, she was not into it. Within 15 minutes, she was like, “Nope.” I loved that movie when I was a kid, but it was not the right entry point for her. The movie’s really gritty — it’s a street story, a lot of martial arts, and even though it is talking turtles, she wasn’t ready for it. So we turned it off.

I think it’s about being as responsive as you can be. And you’ll know if your kid likes something or not. My wife and I also make a pretty concerted effort to have a conversation after we watch a film, just to see how Alice’s comprehension is working and where her feelings are going with regard to characters and ideas. Now that she’s almost five, it’s really fun to do that. You can see her wheels spinning. But even when they’re three or four, you’d be surprised what sticks in their brains.

I’m really looking forward to that aspect of watching movies with kids. Growing up, I feel like family discussions after a movie were often focused on: Did you like it? I’m excited about the possibility of teaching my kid to analyze media a little more deeply than that.

As their vocabularies grow, you can encourage them to seek different ways of expressing how they feel about something. That’s on you, to keep asking more and more questions. Maybe we’re just creating little film critics, and that’s a dangerous act. But I relate to what you’re saying. Growing up, my dad would be like, “Did you think that was funny?” And I would say yes, and then we would stop talking.

Totally. Going back to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it sounds like you had a very placid attitude toward Alice not liking it. Have you ever felt bummed out in that situation? Or are you able to be like, “That’s your taste, and it’s all good.”

My wife and I were a little older when we had our daughter. We were both 39, and we didn’t really plan on having a kid. We’ve been together for a very long time — we were high school sweethearts — so I think a lot of preconceived “I’ve been waiting my whole life to do XYZ with my kid” stuff doesn’t really factor in. It’s helped ground us a bit.

As long as she loves movies, that’s all that matters to me. My first choice would not be to watch The Princess and the Frog or Tangled 100 times. Frozen is interesting because it’s literally one of the most important movies of the last 50 years. There’s no other way to put it. The way it has imprinted on both boys and girls is extraordinary. And… I don’t really like those movies! I don’t think they’re terrible, but I don’t think they’re as good as the Disney classics. But I never discouraged her appreciation for them or told her, “No, we can’t watch that.”

I’m lucky that my daughter is really into action. We can go to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland for four hours. I’m not playing baseball with my daughter, but the fact that she wants to have a lightsaber battle with me is pretty amazing. If she doesn’t care about a movie, whatever.

I would like to channel that attitude as a parent, because it seems very healthy. What movies were really important to your childhood that you’ve been excited to show her?

The number one movie was The Wizard of Oz, which me and my siblings watched over and over when we were four to seven years old. That was a big one for my daughter, as well. We’ve seen it in theaters twice. She loved the Wicked films because she had such a big relationship to that [world].

We’re at an interesting moment with scary stuff. I’m a really big horror person. I’m a huge Jaws fan, and right now there’s a Jaws exhibit at the Academy Museum. My daughter loves the exhibit. She’s never seen the movie — she’s not even five — but she’s seen multiple scenes, because there are stations where you can watch scenes from the movie. She knows what the shark looks like, the names of the characters, that it’s set on Amity Island. And my wife and I are still like, “This is gonna be way too intense for her.” We can’t risk her never being able to go to the beach.

You do live in L.A.

So when is the right time to show her Jaws? I hear this conversation with a lot of parents out here, because you have a lot of cinephiles and movie industry people who want their kids to have these film experiences. We want her to love Jaws, Gremlins, and Tim Burton films — movies that really matter during that six to 11 period of life, where you start to develop your own taste, see genre structures coming into place, and get interested in monsters.