Films for children 7+

Danny asks Sarah out on a date. To make everything work, Sarah needs to borrow her mother’s car. But her mother, Dr. Thun, a podiatrist, is against the idea, saying that the city is too dangerous. When her mother is not paying attention, however, Sarah decides to take the car anyway. It turns out that Dr. Thun has something secretive hidden in the car. That evening, Sarah and Danny experience an extraordinary adventure.

Fifty years ago, Robot was sent into space to investigate if there is life on Mars. By the time he returns, the world has changed so much that he is completely useless. Alone and resigned to his fate, he wanders around the planet. Until he meets a Viking—an aging, lonely warrior. In this tale about friendship, computer-generated animation is combined with drawings and live images to create an extraordinary, moving whole.

You just need to add boots to the feet, draw in a dress, a head, a ponytail, add a few strokes around the feet—and before you know it, you are skiing. What was a hole is turned into the gaping maw of a monster that expands so much that it bursts out of the frame. The touch of a magic wand transforms creatures into something else completely. A simple but extremely clever animation, the subject of which is drawing and how it can be used to create other worlds.

An African mother and her three sons, who can count on her love and her help in any situation. She is their entire world, and she gives them the entire world. And when her boys grow up and she is left all alone, she remains ready to do anything for them. It may look like she has lost everything, but life goes on. A simple, moving animation about the ties that bind us, love, time, and the continuity of life.

That was a particularly jellyfish kind of day, says Jesper’s father. There were an awful lot of them—purple and blue, changing into a variety of shapes—in the water close to the beach. But jellyfish dislike guests—they prefer to have the water all to themselves. With stunning imagery, this short film combines photography and animation to create an entirely new reality.

When Lieuwe’s beloved cat gets sick and dies, he buries her in a box in the garden, where she surely becomes food for worms, which attract flies, whose waste is eaten by cows that produce milk for Lieuwe to drink. Does this mean that the boy now has something of his black cat inside himself? This idea is, on the one hand, a bit odd and, on the other, somewhat pleasant.

Sometimes Seya and her father take a boat out into the swamps to search for bones. Once, a really long time ago, dead cows were disposed of there, in deep ditches. The bones they find are really big. Seya and her father taken them home and arrange their findings in the garden in order to reconstruct an unusual skeleton. Nothing in nature is lost, and such discoveries are a wonderful adventure.

One day, Alice gets on a bus. A sleepy boy gets on after her, but in front of her is an odd creature that starts chatting with her in an aggressive way. Could this really have happened? Or was it just a product of her imagination? The dialogue is borrowed from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, but the director sets the scene in contemporary Toronto instead. The effect is hypnotizing.

Did you know that grizzly bears, which are known to be loners, actually really like people? Or that Kodiak bears get pleasure from gathering up leaves? And what about polar bears and their love of whipped cream? But only the real stuff, nothing from a spray can. A funny animation with sparing but expressive drawings that presents five extraordinary facts about bears.