Children's Movies That I Love for their Messages

Children's Movies

I have been to many of the children's movies in the last few years  with my grandchildren and I am very happy to say that they are very wonderful vehicles for bringing forth new thoughts of a metaphysical nature.

I personally have prayed that through the medium of a children's movie, our young people could be presented with many messages that will register with them in a meaningful and poignant way.

As a people we have been trying to wake ourselves up through our songs and stories for many years now. 

Here's one  "Twinkle, twinkle little star

                     How I wonder what you are

                     Up above the world so high

                     Like a diamond in the sky

                     Twinkle twinkle little star

                     How I wonder what you are       (some there are that think of ourselves

                                                                          as being ‘frozen star dust')

And then there is

                     Roll, roll, roll your boat gently down the stream

                     Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

                      Life is but a dream                                                                      

                                                                     some there are- I'm one -  that feel that life is

                                                                     illusion, maya, a dream and we don't

                                                                     want to go upsteam but with the flow and

                                                                     gently into that good night.

Below is a sypnopsis of some childrens's movies and their lessons. If you are planning on watching one of these and don't want to know too much about it yet, skip over that one so as not to spoil your viewing of the movie when you go.

                                                                 The  Wizard of Oz

Have you ever thought about how many great thoughts are presented in this old time favorite. Dorothy fall from the sky in her house, (we fell from an estate once) where she is trying to find her way back home. The characters she journeys with, ScaryCrow looking to find a brain, Tinman, looking to find a heart, and Cowardly Lion looking to find courage represent ourselves.  We want to be smart, have more heart felt thoughts, and to be courageous.  And it is the journey that gives us the opportunities that help us to realize those qualities within ourselves.  When Dorothy and the crew finally get the witches broom to take to the Wizard of Oz in order for him to help Dorothy go home and the others characters to have a heart, brains, and  courage, he can't deliver this to them and uses his big booming voice to get them to leave.  I love the line in this that says, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" for it is what we are to do ourselves.  The big booming voices behind the curtain, the ones who would tell you the way out of your problems can only point out ways you can try,  but it is you who will find all that you need within your own self as it happens in this movie. That power latent within ourselves will get us home just as it did Dorothy and as the characters learned was something they possessed already.

                                                             Alice in Wonderland

Another girl falling down down down the rabbits hole under the tree lands in a kind of world where she has her experiences with beings who are all to similar to peoples of our world today.   There is the rabbit always hurrying about trying to get somewhere and being forgetful.  Then the Cheshire cat smiling and fading in and out of existence with his fascinating talk about which way to go.  The caterpillar creature on the mushroom ask Dorothy a pertinent question. "Who are You" and he is not happy with any of her answers. We do find ourselves trying to define our own selves quite a lot when we are on a spiritual quest and we all are on one  whether  or not we know it . 

There is the Tweadaly Do and Tweadaly Dum characters who only care to be goofy and dance and sing and play around but are not at all helpful.  Know any people like that? How about the card characters working so frantically to please the Queen by painting the white roses red, not knowing that they have a right to a purposeful life  without all the strict and cruel  rulings of a Queen who is so unkind  and unfair. If she does not like you,  for any little reason  and she says, "Off with his head".  And the people caring for the baby who have no idea how to feed this baby, a baby which acts more like a pig than a human.  Then there is  that mad hatters tea party where there is all the double talk, no actual purpose being served and no manners at all.  We have played the roles of probably all of these characters at one time or another in our lives.  It is good to have a laugh at ourselves.

                                                            The Never Ending Story

This is a tremendously important story for teaching us that we are very important in the grand scheme of things.  Bastion whose mother has passed away and who lives with his father, is trying  to be sensible and keep his feet on the ground. He likes to draw and  he lives in  his imagination a lot by reading books and dreaming. He is struggling to be brave in a world where he gets thrown into a trash dumpster almost daily on his way to school by older boys who frighten him.  He wants so much to be brave and one day ducks into a bookstore as he is running from the boys who bully him where he finds out about the book with the Auryn, a book that is not a safe book according to the store keeper who intrigues Bastion with talk of this book. 

Bastion takes the book with him to school and spends the entire day in the attic of the school reading the book, skipping class and just becoming self absorbed in the reading of the book. He reads of this land Fantasia which is being destroyed by the "Nothing" . He becomes like an intimate friend to the character Atreyu who is a brave boy willing to answer the plea from the Childlike Empress to stop the Nothing from completely destroying Fantasia. The Nothing is causing Fantasia to be swallowed up into nothingness and Artreyu has to go to the Southern Oracles in order to find the answer as to what will stop the Nothing. He has to face the fearsome Gmork who is wanting to stop Atreyu and who loses Atreyu in the Swamp of Sadness. The Swamp is a place where if you become sad, you will sink to your death in the quicksand so you know you have to keep up your courage and your hope and not fall into despair. 

Atreyu has many adventures, which Bastion feels as thought he is talking to Atreyu as Atreyu goes thorough his trials of looking for the answer.  The greatest part of this story is related in the end where Bastion realized from hearing the Childlike Empress emplore him to know that he by reading the book, has become part of the never ending story and his participation is needed so that Fantasia will not be completely destroyed. He has a hard time believing that he, a mere boy could be so important, but finally he gets the courage to enter into the story line and do a very simple thing which makes all the difference and Fantasia is restored. 

                                                      Shark Boy and Lava Girl

This story is just chock full of metaphysical truths about how it is that we are to give our dreams definition. There are the dream characters which  Max writes about in his dream journal, characters  who live in his dream land. The dream characters  are needing Max there to help them defeat a new foe. Their world is in danger and the two dream characters, Shark Boy and Lava Girl, both need Max to help them define themselves more effectively so that they can battle the Black Magician in their world who wants to control everything and everyone.

Max learns how  to become a lucid dreamer while in the dream world so that he can help his dream characters.  Lava girl is finding that she is not able to help her world since Max created her in his dream to be fiery tempered and erupt into fire when she becomes enraged at something.  Shark Boy also needs to learn to think before he lashes out at injustice in his world because he is being defeated by his own lack of control of his anger.  Lava Girl knows that there is more to her than just her fiery ways and longs to find out who she really is.  As I watched this movie I wrote out more than 50 metaphysical truths that were brought out in a most wonderful way by the writers of this movie. The one that I liked the most was this.  When your dreams become reality, reality becomes the dream.  This is a must see for all on the path to awaken their consciousness and realize their dreams.

                                                               Shrek

Shrek is a very cute movie about an ogre names Shrek. He has to rescue the princess Fionia who is locked away in a tower guarded by a dragon. She has been under a curse wherein  she is a Princess by day but at night she turns into an ogre.  Yet when she is rescued and kissed by her Prince to be, she will be released from the curse.  Trouble is, Princess Fionia falls in love with the ogre Shrek as they are traveling back to the castle.  When the moment comes that she can change into a beautiful storybook princess, beautiful and rich and all that, she opts to stay an ogre like Shrek so that they can be together.  This movie shows so cleverly how that the stereo type, "beautiful is the best way to be" is not such a powerfully acceptable way to think by people who desire true happiness rather than to fit into a mold that has been handed down about what is beautiful and what is not.  The donkey in this movie is very funny and will keep you laughing the whole way through.

                                  The Gods Must be Crazy

Into the Kalahari Desert where the little bushman lives a coke bottle falls from an airplane and is found by the Bushmen tribe living there. They are a very gentle people living close to the earth and at one with their animal friends and the earth but now this bottle that seemed to be a gift from the Gods has fallen into their area and they are having trouble concerning it.

It turns out that the bottle is so useful to them for doing their chores for they use it in various ways and it turns out that everyone seems to want the bottle at the same time. This causes fights to erupt and it frightens the gentle bushmen peoples so that they think, "The Gods must be crazy to have sent us this since it makes us mean to one another". So this little bushman has the task to take the bottle to the ends of the world and drop it off there.  They think that this is the only way to be rid of it so he sets out to travel further than he has ever traveled before in order to return this bottle to the gods.

He meets people in the surrounding country who are fighting a war, people also who are research scientist, and a funny story evolves where the Bushman is taken prisoner because he killed a sheep to eat, not knowing that the people owned herds of sheep and this was not permitted.  The American researcher takes him in because he feels the Bushman would not survive being locked away for six months as was his sentence.  He is just very unknowing about all that is in this new way of life he is experiencing  BUT  for all his ignorance of things, it is the Bushman who ends up saving the day in this story. 

I liked this story because it shows the wisdom of the indigenous people who while they may be ignorant of modern ways, have a kind of knowledge that is in many ways vastly superior to those who think that they are more advanced. This story beautifully and effectively shows a kind of wisdom of the Bushman,  in a very funny and interesting way pointing out the recognition of the ways of the Bushmen as of value.  The Bushman learns that the white people he thinks of as gods at first, are a very heavy people who can't survive without their magic contrivances, so he does not think real highly of their ways and prefers his own.

Two children while on a summer break from school find something washed up by the waves of the ocean.  It is a very unusual box like contrivance and they open it to find some fascinating items in it.  These are items sent from the future by a scientist who is hoping that by finding someone in the past, he can heal the future generation.

Noah and Emma, the two children find that the possession of these unusual rocks which can create a entry into another dimension, and a little stuffed rabbit which can communicate with the girl  Emma, (items which were in the box) gets them into trouble with the government who wants to investigate this happening since the making of the opening of this other dimension by the kids playing around with the magical rocks caused a power outage across the country and was traced to the kids summer home by the ocean.  The children have to work hard to find the way to use the dimensional opening and what it is that they are suppose to do to help for the rabbit called Mimsey, has a way of  communicateing to Emma that she must return to the future or she will die. . They do learn how this is done and in the end they effect a return of the rabbit into the future with a tear from the little Emma on the rabbit for she knew it was dying and was crying, her tears dropping onto the stuffed rabbit. But it was the DNA in the tear she cried onto the rabbit that saved a future generation for they had lost the ability to love and care for one another and what was needed was the DNA of a person from the past who had a very tender and loving heart.   This is a very good story and I enjoyed it very much.

                                                             Brother Bear

This movie is about three brothers, one of whom is accidentally killed and the youngest brother, Kenia,  believes the killer to be a bear that caused his  oldest brother's death. So he kills this mother bear who was only defending her cub and not actually attacking his brother.

Kenia is magically turned into a bear himself  and he has to run from his other brother who believes now that both of his brothers have been killed by a this bear that Kenia now is.  So Kenia is running from his brother who does not know that his younger brother is actually the bear he is hunting.  Kenia meets a young bear named Koda who is looking for his mother.  Kenia befriends him because Koda can show him how to get to the land of the lights in the sky, the Aurora, where he believes he can get the help he needs to be turned back into a human again. 

But on this trip to this high mountain place, Kenia learns of the ways of the bears and finds that Koda is looking for his mother who he got separated from.  It turns out that Koda's mother is the bear Kenia had killed and now he is very torn within knowing that Koda whom he has learned to love, has no mother because of him.  This is a very good movie to show how that when you put yourself in the shoes of another being, you see things differently and you understand that anger and revenge have caused pain to others when an understanding should have been sought first.

                                                                       Ice Age

This is a very good movie to show how to love those who have done something very hurtful to you.  Manfred is a mammoth and this in the land of long ago when the ice age was beginning to close up a passage to the higher country.  A little baby girl was separated from her mother who died trying to save her, and the father was frantic to find his family after tigers attacked  their party of travelors in this wild icy land.  A sloth named Sid and Manfred the mamouth, both find this baby and they are trying to get the baby back to the father before the gap opening the entrance to the higher land  freezes  over with snow and ice and the way be blocked.  They are aided by a tiger who is really on a quest to take the baby back to his boss  tiger for them to kill for these tigers have much hatred for the people. 

It turns out that Manfred, who thinks that he is possibly  the last  mamouth, has a big problem also with returning the baby, because Manfred's  mother and father were killed by men.  Yet the baby is blameless and warms the hearts of both the Sloth named Sid (a very lovable funny character) and Manfred as they journey toward the camp of the men.  The Tiger. Named Diego,  who joins them has to pretend that he only wants to help them when actually he is waiting for the chance to take the baby.  Yet the tiger becomes friends with Sid the Sloth and Manfred  the mamouth and his cold cold heart melts when he realized that they love him like he were family and that they even risk their live to save him. Every one of the characters in this movie overcomes their weaknesses, their hatreds, and this story ends well with the baby getting back into the arms of his father.  

What I like about this movie is that is shows that we must be able to forgive even the most horrible sin committed against us like that of having your parents killed in front of you. Are we there yet, some of us I believe are?

                                                    Finding Nemo

Martin is a clown fish and he has a son named Nemo.  They live on the Barrier Reef and when Nemo hatched he was the only survivor of all the eggs after  a shark  attack which killed his mother and all his brothers and sisters.  So Martin the father never wanted to let Nemo out of his sight for fear that he would be killed.  Nemo hated being confined to such a small area around the coral that was his home and longed to go out into the deep where he could look around and be brave and not have to live in fear as his father was so eager to have him do, but life for Nemo was just too boring and uneventful if you have to always be in fear.

So when Nemo started to school, Martin had to allow his son to go a little further from their home in the coral and one day Nemo in a kind of defiance of his father who was looking on, swam out into the deep part beyond the Barrier Reef.  There a diver collecting fish caught him up and took him back to his home in Australia  to put into his fish tank.

Martin does not know where his son Nemo is and sets out to find Nemo somewhere out there among 3.7 trillion fish in the ocean.  He meets Dory who is a trillion fish and is a very forgetful but  pleasant fish. She wants to help Martin find Nemo but her help turns into more of a hindrance because of all of her zany ways.  Yet she has a belief that if you just trust and believe, things will all work out. They have some very scary experiences and it proves true that her trust and belief do benefit them for they do find and rescue Nemo. 

This is a good movie to teach us about trusting and not trying to live in a fearful clinging kind of way.  There is a turtle in this movie who shows Martin and Dory how to ride the jet streams to get to where they want to go, and he teaches them to more or less not worry and go with the flow.  It is a very good movie I think.

                                           Bridge to Terabithia

In this movie the character, a boy named Jess needs to have a friend and does find a friend in a new girl that moved into his neighborhood.  Their homes are near a wooded area where the two like to swing across a divide on a rope swing and play in a tree house they find in the woods there on the other side.  His friend Leslie is a girl who has a fondness for using her imagination and making their time in the woods be filled with imaginary creatures and adventures that  turn their part of the woods into a real fantasy land for the script  writing of this play in the woods has their imagination  be objectified as to what they imagine they are seeing and playing with.

Leslie's father and mother are both writers and they have a different style of life than Jess has with his family. His family are church goers and one day they invite Leslie to go to church with them.  Jess and his little sister explain to Leslie all about hell and how bad people who don't believe certain things go there.  They speak this way because it is the way they have been taught by their parents and elders but Leslie is more or less not really into that.

Leslie is the first real friend that Jess has ever had and so when she is drowned when crossing over the rope swinging across the divide filled with rain gushing about, on the day that she went to  the woods  without Jess who has been invited by his art teacher to go to a museum of art, he is heartbroken.  He ask his father who has a more or less fundamentalist upbringing, whether he thought Leslie went to hell and his father explains that he can not imagine such a sweet girl as Leslie ever going to hell.  In this movie Leslie is living by what all she can imagine which makes for a very fanciful and interesting play of pretending and  acting through one's imagination.  It is in contrast to Jess's father who in contrast to being able to imagine wild adventures, bases his belief on what he can not imagine, and that is that God would condemn a girl like Leslie even if she did not have the right belief to a place like hell..  This is the first time I saw a movie which actually presented this belief in a format of a movie in such a tender and reassuring way. 

Even though this movie has a sad ending, it is a beginning of telling the truth about something that people sometimes don't bring  up for questioning and I am glad the writer thought to expose this truth through the medium of this movie.

Monsters Incorporated . is a story about energy and a world of monsters, lovable and hard working monsters.  In this world they need electricity to power their machinery of their world and their means for obtaining electricity is to scare children and collect their screams in a kind of container which Monster's Incorporated pipes out to the residents of this Monster World.

A first class Scarer  working at Monsters Inc. , named Sullivan has  a partner named Mike, a one eyed little monster who helps him open the doors to different bedrooms of children.  These monsters have a fantastic way of having  all these closet doors of different rooms of children all over the world which are placed before them by means of a conveyor belt holding thousands of these closet door,  that they must go  each night to  scare the child in their bedroom, collect the scream in their container, and get out fast being sure to close the closet door behind them.  They are told that they can not touch any child for it would contaminate them or have any of the children's toys or clothing touch them.

One night a little girl named Boo accidentally enters the Monsters World through a door that Sullivan had opened.  Sullivan is horrified, afraid to touch her, but he must do something or he is in big trouble if this is found out.  He and his partner Mike take care of this little girl in Sullivan's apartment where they find that her laughter affects the energy of their neighborhood  causing the lights to go on and off. They also find out that touching her does not hurt them and they are working on a way to get her  back to Monsters Inc and get her back through the closet door to her room in her human world.  But it is not so easy to do this because the main monster who runs Monsters Inc has a awful plan.

It seems that the electric company is not getting the volume of  killowats that they once could get because kids were getting harder and harder to scare. So this manager and one of the more  terrible monsters named Skully had decided to take things a step further. Instead of simply scaring the children, they had a machine that would extract all of their fear into it but would  kill the child in process of the extraction.  Sullivan and Mike find out about this and the rest of the story is about how they solve this problem and protect the little girl named Boo.

There are too many details of the story to relate but in the end of this story the plot is exposed and there is a remedy.  These monsters still want their energy but they find that getting the children to laugh creates far more energy and so now they still enter the children's room, knowing of course that they won't be contaminated by the children, but they have to tell them jokes and act funny in order to collect the laughter which runs their world like electricity.

What I like about this movie  is that it is a picture story of something that I think is happening. I believe that there are entities who do feed off of fear energy and are what you might call on the dark side.  They are still a  part of God but they are a distortion of God and they work at this because in their ignorance, they find that this is like food, or vital energy for them, the fear and the anger they engender fuels them.  But they must be shown that there are other ways to get energy and they have to be shown the path (when they are ready to receive instruction)  so that  they learn that the Light is not to be feared, that it is much more rich in nutrition for them if they will change their appetite and learn to love the Light that they are now ignorant of and at war against. 

Some other movies that I won't go into detail about that I think are good  for teaching some truths are the following.

Johanthan Livingston SeaGull (a seagull who left the sea gull mentality)  

The Bicentennial Man (robot who became a man and choose to live and die as a man rather than be a perfect robot and live forever.)

Phenomenon (  A man suddenly  gifted with fantastic intelligence and the  troubles that  this brings to his life)

Mulan   (female energy being shown as something to be praised and honored for it's strength and intuition. Story takes place  in China where females are often very subservient to the male)

Powder - A person too advanced in knowledge to find a place of comfort in this world.

The Iron Giant   A giant robot is befriended by a little boy who helps the robot know that he has a choice in how he will think and act.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory  Charlie Bucket finds the golden ticket and now he can be chosen for his pure heart and guilelessness to be one trusted to run the chocolate factory.

Pay it Forward  A young boy finds a way to bless a lot of people with a plan for giving where the  gift just keeps on giving always moving forward.

Meet the Robinson's   A orphan boy  finds his home while  visiting the future and realizing that his past was the way it was for a good purpose.

Howl's Moving Castle   

Ella Enchanted

Harry Potter

The War