Those critters seem pretty harmless, wouldn’t you say? Well for one young boy, they were the source of cinematic trauma.

Last week, when I spoke with Douglas Trumbull, I started the conversation off with one of my five questions. I broke the ice with Mr. Trumbull by asking him if he could recall his first theatrical experience, and his answer was somewhat familiar…

“It was BAMBI, and it freaked me out – I had to leave the theatre.

It was too much, I think I was only 3 or 4 years old. When the mother deer was going to die in the fire I just couldn’t handle it. Disney was pretty hard edged, there’s been a lot of talk about how even Walt Disney’s family members were horrified by what was in his films. He had scary witches and death scenes, and all sorts of stuff that freaked his own kids out.”

Time and time again, I’m hearing stories about people’s earliest moviegoing memories relating to so-called ‘family’ features. Time and time again, I’m hearing stories about how said family features gave them the heebie-jeebies. Seems a bit counterintuitive, wouldn’t you say? On the one hand it’s a rigged deck…sit any kid in the dark and flash giant coloured images at them, and I’d wager nine times out of ten the tyke’s budding brain capacity just registers the whole she-bang as ‘too much’.

But getting past that first hurdle of sensory overload, it seems like darned near every great animated movie has a moment or two that are almost designed to upset young viewers. Think of that trip to the dump in TOY STORY 3. Harken back to Scar’s machiavellian actions in THE LION KING. Hell, go to any random moment in WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. These movies seem somewhat toothless at first glance, but all it takes is one scary look…one clap of thunder…and junior will shove his sobbing face neck-deep into the popcorn bucket just to make it all stop.

See you take these stories, juxtapose them with the news that parents groups are grumpy that BLUE VALENTINE’S NC-17 was overturned, and you get a paradox of juvenile mental scarring.

What it all adds up to for me, is that movies are subjective and kids are unpredictable. In short, there’s nothing – no branding and no rating – that can prepare people for how their little ones will take to a movie. I’ve watched films with bad words that I’d have no problems showing my nieces and nephews (no word on whether their parents would mind!). I’ve seen PG rated movies that I know would scare the same kids in a hurry.

Perhaps the lesson is that when it comes to movies, if parents really want to expose their kids to these cinematic delights, it can’t happen without a bit of homework. The parents have to know the movie…and more importantly, the parents have to have a good read on their kids.