Top 10 family movies
10. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming previously collaborated on You Only Live Twice, but this feels closer to a true fusion: James Bond for juniors with a modern fairytale element. It's easy to unpick who did what: from Fleming's side you get a gadget-stuffed car, a heroine with an absurdly suggestive name (Sally Ann Howes' Truly Scrumptious), a Bond-style baddie (Gert "Goldfinger" Frobe) and a daring assault on his secret lair. It was also produced by Bond-merchant Cubby Broccoli, with sets by Ken Adam. And from Dahl's side you get empathetic children's plight (essential with two such ickily wholesome lead children), anarchically eccentric adults, a folkloric baddie to haunt young nightmares (the Child Catcher), and a class-conscious romantic subtext to ground it all.
What really makes the film fly, though, is the cartoonish reality it's set in. You can see why it's often mistaken for a Disney film. It's a similar universe to that of Mary Poppins, minus Dick Van Dyke's cockney mangling: a fantasy England with better weather, brighter colours and a lack of reserve about bursting into song-and-dance at the drop of a hat.
You can also see why it made for an enduring stage show. The musical numbers (penned by Disney's Sherman Brothers) are irresistibly catchy, energetically choreographed and extremely silly – though not without some grown-up wit. Thus, Frobe's Baron Bomburst attempts to off his wife even as he sings to her, "You're my chu-chi face," or the memorable Doll on a Music Box operates as both a risky subterfuge in the fantasy plot and a climax to the adult heroes' courtship – not to mention proof that Sally Ann Howes actually invented robotics.
Yes, it's corny and dated – especially the special effects – but it's a dense, action-packed yarn that easily holds children's attentions for two hours – and has done for generations. Steve Rose
9. Rataouille
One downside of Disney buying Pixar was that the latter's idiosyncrasies were phased out. In came sequels and prequels and princesses; out went oddball ventures with low-merchandising potential such as Ratatouille. The film's director Brad Bird (who had already scored a hit for Pixar with The Incredibles) put it best: "It's got an almost unpronounceable title named after a dish that's obscure to most Americans, and it's about rats in the kitchen. Oh, and French cooking too. Not what you'd call a slam-dunk at the box-office." Any such obstacles were overcome by originality, flair and sheer film-making joy.
Ratatouille is a wistful comedy about a rat named Remy (voiced by the comic actor Patton Oswalt) who can't stomach the junk food his family expects him to eat. He flees to Paris, where he reverses the fortunes of a legendary restaurant on the wane. He befriends Linguini (Lou Romano), a garbage boy harbouring dreams of becoming a chef, and hides beneath his toque, orchestrating the lad's movements at the stove by pulling his hair like a puppeteer yanking a marionette's strings.
Rats aside, the movie looks delicious. Colours and textures are heightened, from the nocturnal Parisian streets to the grub itself. The very sensation of eating is visualised, too: when Remy combines the flavours of strawberry and cheese, the screen fizzes with gaily coloured Catherine wheels. The film's message about the importance of experimentation and the democratic power of art is also sincere and sophisticated. There's even redemption for the sinister restaurant critic Anton Ego (Peter O'Toole), who gets to deliver the film's moral: "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." That message might be lost on younger viewers more entranced by the rodent slapstick, but give them time: seen at different ages, each viewing of Ratatouille delivers fresh flavours. It's a meal that never goes stale. Ryan Gilbey
8. The Princess Bride
'Gleefully throws out any attempt at realism' ... The Princess Bride. Photograph: 20thCFox/Everett/Rex Features
It takes a particular genius to captivate viewers with a fairytale even as you're persistently reminding them that it's all made up and you can probably guess what's going to happen anyway, but The Princess Bride was serving up self-aware fantasy back when computer power couldn't begin to contemplate making something like Shrek.
The film is both lovably old-school and cunningly postmodern, framing and interrupting its wild adventure with "real world" bedside scenes that preempt any impatience and incredulity modern kids (especially boys) might have ("Has it got any sports in it?" "When does it get good?" bedridden Fred Savage asks his grandpa Peter Falk).
It gets good straight away. The story grandpa Falk (or, rather, screenwriter William Goldman) is telling would be more than enough for most movies on its own: a mischievous variation on the "rescue the princess" yarn that rapidly branches off in its own unpredictable tangent – one that's closer to Monty Python and the Holy Grail than Sleeping Beauty.
In fact, the "rescue the princess" element is the thinnest thing about the movie. The peripheral characters are so memorably sketched and performed, Cary Elwes and Robin Wright look rather dull as leads, crowded out as they are by the likes of Wallace Shawn, André the Giant, Christopher Guest, Peter Cook, and most memorably of all, Mandy Patinkin. It's still impossible to see Saul in Homeland without thinking, "My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!"
Those recurring catchphrases, and the sense of seasoned players having a great time, keep the movie romping along at such a clip, you keep expecting it to run out of steam, but not this time. Despite lack of special effects, star names or big-budget flourishes, here's barely a dull moment or a duff line in the whole thing. That's proper movie magic right there. SR
7. The Jungle Book
King of the singalongs ... Louis and Baloo in Walt Disney's The Jungle Book (1967). Photograph: Walt Disney Animation
It can't be coincidence that Walt Disney died in 1966, during the production of The Jungle Book. There's a freedom and grooviness here that's largely absent from previous Mouse House features, as if the studio let down its hair and got with the beat once the old man was gone. The finished product is the least Disney-like Disney, with its distinct lack of wholesome, heteronormative values. You could even go further and read the film as a paean to the gay lifestyle. What is the story about if not a bunch of bachelors seeking to co-opt a fresh, young arrival into their ways of life? Until a pesky female comes along and spoils it all "He would have made one swell bear," sights Baloo. As for Rudyard Kipling, he'd have choked on his kedgeree to see the postwar liberties taken with his colonial fables. Disney instructed his writers not to bother reading the book.
But liberated hippie-era viewers dug it, and so has pretty much everyone since. For one thing, The Jungle Book is just about the only kids' cartoon with songs a grown-up would happily sing along to. Just as Baloo is powerless to resist King Louie's beat, the musicality of the movie is infectiously inhibition-conquering. This movie really swings. Few animated characters have ever danced so joyously, and there's a jazzy rhythm to the dialogue that almost makes it feel like beat poetry. And it was hip enough to even reference The Beatles!
Even with Kipling's "heavy stuff" removed, there's still a serious side to The Jungle Book. Gay allegories aside, the story of a child seeking his place in the world, sampling the lifestyles of others, having his naivety exploited and learning who to trust, speaks to us all. And there's something masterful about the way the weather reflects the emotional tone – the sky turning greyer as Mowgli approaches his lowest and loneliest point, before the decisive thunderstorm. When Mowgli finally does find his place with the humans, it's not exactly a happy ending – more a bittersweet one. It's a reminder that the fun has to end some time. Whether we like it or not, we've all got to grow up. SR
6. Spirited Away
Film Spirited Away (2001)
Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki took his lead from Lewis Carroll to rustle up this delirious rites of passage tale about a small girl's adventures in a bath-house for the gods. One moment 10-year-old Chihiro is bored on the back seat, en-route to a new home. The next, it seems, her parents are pigs, she's forgotten her name and is being asked to scrub down a "stink spirit" that has booked an appointment. Somewhere up ahead sits a dragon and a witch.
In a perfect world, more children's films would be like Spirited Away, which boasts a kind of dream logic, rustling up an outlandish universe which nonetheless runs to its own set of rules. Most film-makers install their supporting players as fixed representations of good and evil. Miyazaki, however, sends them bouncing like pinballs, troublesome and scary, so that the diffident "No Face" blooms into an all-consuming carnivore. Spirited Away has the same skittish, volatile rhythm. It's a magic spell, a booby trap, a helter-skelter to a happy ending. Xan Brooks
5. Toy Story
Until Cars ruined the record in 2006, the Pixar logo at the start of a movie was the nearest thing in cinema to the kitemark. Audiences could rest assured that the level of wit, storytelling and technical prowess would be incomparably high. Toy Story in particular was startlingly fresh. It wasn't only that, as the first full-length computer-animated feature, the technology was zingy back in 1995. It wasn't even that the narrative concept — toys come to life, with their own grudges, affections and hierarchies, when we aren't looking — was groundbreaking. Rather it was the aplomb and inventiveness with which these elements were combined. No distinction was made between the sensibilities of viewers young and old.
Some of the animation has inevitably dated as badly as the mobile phones of the era. Pixar hadn't really mastered humans back then. But given that the main characters were Woody, a toy cowboy, and Buzz Lightyear, the snazzy interloper who steals the affections of Woody's fatherless owner Andy, that hardly mattered.
The emotional core of the movie, centred around Woody's efforts to restore himself to Andy's arms, was horribly attuned to the displacement fears of the younger members of the audience, though it never became mawkish. The worst you could say is that the script overlooks the irony that the supposed villain of the piece, Andy's dysfunctional neighbour Sid, is actually the thriving creative element here. Unlike goody-two-shoes Andy, he dismembers old toys and fuses them into eccentric if freakish new hybrids. (He'd get a job at Pixar in a shot.) But the movie is such a riot of ideas and colour that this is no deal-breaker. The rest of the feast includes gold-standard voice work (as Woody, Tom Hanks gives arguably his greatest performance); a smattering of acute, original songs by Randy Newman; and a screenplay (Joss Whedon is among the writers) full of jokes that pop like champagne corks. RG
4. ET – The Extra Terrestrial
Ouch ... we anticipate some contention here Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/UNIVERSAL
There are those who believe that Steven Spielberg reached the peak of his powers with this rapturous 1982 fantasy. They have a point: this is a movie to phone home about. In ET he distilled an entire career's worth of themes, preoccupations and pleasures into one poignant vision. The plot is simplicity itself. A fatherless boy, Elliot (Henry Thomas), stumbles upon a stranded alien in his backyard and endeavours to help him get home—wherever home might be. With the help of his siblings (Robert MacNaughton and a button-nosed, button-cute Drew Barrymore), prying grown-up eyes are evaded. No adult male is even seen from the waist up until near the end of the movie: this is emphatically a boys' world, but one in which there is a persuasive maternal presence. (Was there ever a movie mother as sympathetic as Dee Wallace playing Elliot's beleaguered single parent?)
ET himself, as designed by Carlo Rambaldi, guarantees our affection, though it looks touch-and-go at the start. Vast pop-eyes set in a shrivelled-pumpkin head on an extendible neck, with vocal cords of purest sandpaper-and-tin-tacks, he is the antithesis of the foetus-like aliens from Close Encounters. The relationship which develops between alien and child, though, is one of the most profound and moving in all cinema. There's no doubt that the special effects (including flying BMXs and a spaceship like a Christmas-tree bauble) and John Williams's career-best score do their bit. But it's the intimate touches that make ET one of the most delicate of all those movies that are routinely lumped together as "blockbusters." "The equivalent of the mothership landing in Close Encounters," Speilberg once said, "is, in ET, perhaps a tear out of Henry Thomas's eye." RG
3. Bambi
Bambi. Photograph: Publicity/Disney/Sky Movies
This 1942 story of a fawn growing up to be prince of the forest is the apotheosis of a five-feature run of Disney films each worthy of that overused word "masterpiece"; its predecessors are, chronologically, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia and Dumbo. No other animation studio — not Pixar, not even Studio Ghibli — managed five knock-outs straight out of the box like that. It is also one of the strangest and most sensually avant-garde of animated movies, with minuscule adjustments in light, shading and sound playing the part that emphatic characterisation and narrative would later be expected to occupy. Imagine the film facing the focus groups and test screenings of early 21st century Hollywood. It would wobble on its tiny legs in the face of such orthodoxy.
And of course, the picture is still the most upsetting of all Disney animations. The murder of young Bambi's mother by hunters is not only a model of visual skill and economy (no humans are ever seen) but the cinematic childhood trauma by which all others are judged. By the time the studio tried to replicate that scene with the demise of Simba's father in The Lion King, it had forgotten what made Bambi so piercingly special: subtlety, elegance, understatement.
Not forgetting the tender and pioneering drawn-cel animation techniques. The film may be cherished by younger audience members for its cutesy-pie woodland characters such as Thumper the rabbit and Flower the skunk, even if those same viewers will need the word "twitterpated" explained to them. (Clue: it has nothing to do with social media.) But the real triumph is the animation's unprecedented level of realism. The film's colours are vivid and true. Like the emotions. RG
2. It's a Wonderful Life
Frank Capra's 1946 heartwarmer stars James Stewart as a bright boy from a dull burg. George Bailey wants to kick the provincial dust from his boots and see the world. He winds up embittered, skint and suicidal, his golden promise all behind him. Eventually, in what may be cinema's most literal representation of the deus ex machina, a kindly angel shows him what Bedford Falls would be like had he never actually lived in it.
A flop on first release, It's a Wonderful Life has now been enshrined as a Hollywood classic. It's seen as an evergreen staple of the Christmas schedules; a picture that's as purely, reassuringly American as a slice of apple pie or a Norman Rockwell illustration. But is it really that simple? These apples taste sour and there's black on that palette. Evil goes unpunished and the hero's right back where he started.
What makes Capra's film so great, I think, is that its buoyant message is borne out of disappointment and pain. George Bailey makes peace with what he's lost and then embraces what he's gained. It's a wonderful, compromised, effortful life. It's the life we all relate to. XB
1. The Wizard of Oz
Evading the censor's grasp … Margaret Hamilton (left) and Judy Garland in the 1939 film adaptation of The Wizard Of Oz Photograph: c. Everett Collection / Rex Features
The Wizard Of Oz, starring the 17-year-old Judy Garland, is America's Alice in Wonderland: a piece of movie-mythology which is surreal, subversive and intoxicating. The talking apple trees that slap you when you try to pick their fruit are the equal of anything in Lewis Carroll. "There's no place like home" the movie tells us. But the truth is that there are plenty of places like boring old home, but nowhere like glorious Oz, that place of enchantment, experienced in vivid colour after the drab monochrome of Kansas. Hollywood and the entire movie business was built by talented people who couldn't wait to get away from home, get their one-way bus ticket to Los Angeles and work in the Oz dream factory, with all the fervour of insiders who know that the wizard is just a little guy, but promote his gigantic legend all the same, as an inspiring and superior reality.
This is a movie which speaks to our fascination with the exotic, the mad, the unreal. The Ozscape production design is elaborately theatrical and artificial and yet seductively complete and entire of itself. The film itself can be unexpectedly subtle. One of its cleverest, unacknowledged touches is Judy Garland singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow during the black-and-white section, when of course the point is there is no rainbow, and so the shift into colour is itself the film's fulfilment of a rainbow-prophecy. There is enduring freshness and innocence in the film, exuberance, life and fun. And Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion is genuinely funny: watch this YouTube clip of Dorothy's first encounter with the Lion, crying, and you can see at 1:02 how Judy Garland almost corpses at Lahr's comedy business, wiping his eyes with his tail.
It is a story which makes heroes of children, and child-like adults, showing how they take control of their own lives with a bold plan audaciously carried out. In dreams begin responsibilities, and in this adventure begins Dorothy's sense of how to make sense of the adult world. Peter Bradshaw
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