1969 Sesame Street

I find current episodes of Sesame Street too frenetic, and I don’t like all the tie-ins with commercial products, but we’re really enjoying watching the original 1969 season of Sesame Street. It’s a bit gentler and slower paced, with some lovely sequences of hand-drawn animation, some great musical guests, some funny sketches, and some beautifully mesmerising, semi-abstract nature imagery and sound that would probably never be chosen for a children’s show today. There’s a bit too much slapstick humour for my taste (though the kids love that too!)

Age: 3+
Child rating: 9/10
Parent rating: 9/10
Running time: 59 minutes
Where to find it: Many episodes are on youtube

Geese Swans (also called The Magic Swan Geese)

This is a nice 1949 animation by Alexandra Snezhko-Blotskaya and Ivan Ivanov-Vano, based on a Russian fairytale. A young boy is taken away by some evil swan geese which belong to the witch Baba Yaga, and his sister goes to rescue him. On her way, she helps, and is later helped by, an outdoor bread oven, an apple tree, and a stream of milk. M. (4) found the part at the witch’s house a bit scary, so we skipped over that (and this is why I’m rating it 5+, though some kids might be ready for it younger).

Age: 5+
Child rating: 9/10
Adult rating: 9/10
Running time: 17’30”
Available: Available free here

Pick, The Little Mouse

Here’s a sweet, wordless animation by Gennady Sokolsky, which tells of a year in the life of a little field mouse, and contains lush imagery of the natural world. There are a few brief moments which some younger kids may find scary – when the mouse is chased by a boy, some sea birds, and an owl – but everything turns out ok.

Age: 0+
Child rating: 9/10
Adult rating: 9/10
Running time: 17’30”
Available: Available free on Youtube

Volgens de Vogels/According to the Birds

This is a truly beautiful hand-drawn (pencil on paper) animation by Dutch artist, illustrator, and animator Linde Faas. There’s no storyline, but it portrays nature – birds flying, leaves falling, dandelion seeds blowing – in such a life-like and compelling way that I simultaneously want to go camping, want to do some drawing, and want to spend the afternoon at an art museum. The beautifully-recorded soundtrack is simply birds singing, leaves rustling, wings flapping, and other natural sounds. (I’m always so glad to find a filmmaker who doesn’t unnecessarily superimpose music when it isn’t needed.)  M. (4) and L. (16 months) were entranced too. I’m really looking forward to exploring what other films Faas has done.

Age: 0+
Child rating: 10
Adult rating: 10
Running time: 5 1/2 minutes
Available: free here and elsewhere

The Wind in the Willows (1983)

This is a very nicely done stop-motion animated version, which sticks closely to the book. We watched about half an hour of it, and then M. (4 years old) complained that it was “boring.” I tried to convince him that there’s no such thing as boring, that this was a very nice film, and that he should give it a chance. And then I burst out laughing because I realized that I had always found The Wind in the Willows (whether as a book or a movie) boring too. I include this here because it is good, and I wish we liked it – but we just do not seem to be a Wind in the Willows family. (It’s not that we’re immune to the charms of early 20th century anthropomorphic British animals – we just seem to prefer the Beatrix Potter tales!)

Age: 1+
Child rating: N/A (we’re not the right ones to judge)
Adult rating: N/A
Running time: 79 minutes
Available: there are various free versions online

Vinni Pukh (Winnie-the-Pooh)

This is a fascinating Russian version of Winnie-the-Pooh, with beautiful illustrations and animation by Fyodor Khitruk and a colourful orchestral score by Mieczysław Weinberg. The characters are more animal-like, the scenery more wild, the pacing a bit slower, and the dialogue more enigmatic – interesting to adults as well as kids – than in the Disney animated version most of us are probably familiar with. Khitruk left Christopher Robin out of his telling of these tales so the animals would all be on equal footing as the central characters. There are three 10-minute episodes, available in Russian with English subtitles. I can usually get the kids to just watch without me having to read them out loud!

Age: 3+
Child rating: 8/10
Adult rating: 10/10
Running time: 10 minute per episode
Available: for free on Youtube

The Snow Cat

This wintery story is based on a book by Canadian/American author Dayal Kaur Khalsa, adapted by Tim Wynne-Jones and animated by Sheldon Cohen. A grandmother tells her young grand-daughter the tale of Elsie, who lives alone in a cabin near the woods, and longs for a companion. Elsie makes friends with a magical snow cat and an injured goose, and comes to find comfort and companionship in nature and the cyclical return of the seasons. This story can certainly be taken at face value, as a magical tale, but it is also about coming to terms with loss, change, and death – and indeed Khalsa wrote the book as she was coming to terms with her own diagnosis of breast cancer. (M., looking over my shoulder says “it’s sad because the cat melts,” but that it is nice when that cat returns as a cat-shaped pond.)

Age: 4+
Child rating: 9/10
Adult rating: 9/10
Running time: 23 minutes
Available: for free here on the NFB website

It’s Snow

This is a beautiful cutout animation by Canadian director Gayle Thomas, made entirely of paper snowflakes. It’s wordless, accompanied by gentle steel pan drum music.

Age: 0+
Child rating: 8/10
Adult rating: 8/10
Running time: 5 minutes
Available: for free here on the NFB website

Christmas Cracker

This enjoyable animated short, co-directed by Norman McLaren, Gerald Potterton, Grant Munro and Jeff Hale of the National Film Board of Canada, consists of three Christmassy/wintery tales in different styles of animation, cut-out, stop motion, and hand drawn.

Age: 0+
Child rating: 9/10
Adult rating: 9/10
Running time: 9 minutes
Available: for free on the National Film Board of Canada website

My Mum is an Airplane

This is a fantastic, beautifully illustrated story by the Russian animator Yulya Aronova. There’s a little bit of narration (in Russian with English subtitles) at the beginning, but it’s not too much to read out loud, or can be understood perfectly without the words. It starts out describing an enjoyable diversity of kinds of mums (musicians, carpenters, circus performers, etc.), before getting to the airplane mum (and her little child), and the rest of the film is the airplane mum’s adventures delivering mail. There’s one potentially scary airplane in here, and a storm, but any tension is short-lived, and everything turns out ok. We all love this!

Age: 3+
Child rating: 10/10
Adult rating: 10/10
Running time: 7 minutes
Available for free on Vimeo