As the father of three young adults, I remember clearly those days when we’d watch just about any new kids movie that was released. And I also remember feeling like studios took advantage of that desperation for entertainment, filling the latest unoriginal script with enough silly gags that the little ones would giggle as the parents checked the time. I was always so thankful for those rare family films made with the same kind of care that went into the latest arthouse flick.
We’re keeping a running list of the latest movies for children for you to peruse and find something that the whole family might enjoy. We’ve included a synopsis of each.
Here are seven of the biggest new kids movies from the last few months:
1. Inside Out 2
Release Date: June 14, 2024
Director: Kelsey Mann
Stars: Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Kensington Tallman, Liza Lapira, Tony Hale, Lewis Black, Phyllis Smith, Ayo Edebiri, Lilimar, Grace Lu, Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Paul Walter Hauser, Yvette Nicole Brown, Ron Funches
Rating: PG
Inside Out 2, the sequel to the Oscar-winning film, revisits Riley (now voiced by Kensington Tallman) in the full-blown throes of adolescence. Thirteen-year-old Riley is about to graduate from eighth grade. In the first movie, Riley was adapting to life in California. Now Riley is adapting to leaving middle school behind for high school. Parents of teens will be charmed (and definitely feel validated) by how accurately the movie captures this period of time.“Family island” is blocked by “friendship island” in Riley’s brain. A construction crew comes through her mind and posts a “Pardon Our Dust. Puberty is Messy.” sign. That’s when all the new emotions descend on Riley. There’s Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and my personal favorite, Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos). With her head constantly bent over, Ennui, who is obviously French, is too exhausted to even get up off the couch and controls Riley’s console from her phone. Exarchopoulos’ droll delivery is one of the film’s many highlights. The script by Meg LeFauve (who also wrote Inside Out) and Dave Holstein perfectly captures our complex minds. Nostalgia (June Squibb) humorously keeps trying to make an appearance. Suppressed emotions, brainstorms, dark secrets and streams of consciousness are all brought to life. As in the first movie, Inside Out 2 is vibrant and full of color with fun, tongue-in-cheek visuals. (Sarcasm literally causes a chasm). And these new emotions have a darker spin: Anxiety is bright orange, a pulsating bundle of nerves; Envy is green, naturally; and Embarrassment gets more pink with each passing humiliation. Director Kelsey Mann keeps the action zipping along, while Amy Poehler brings that same determined effervescence to Joy. And Hawke, as the increasingly frantic emotion who thinks she’s helping until she realizes too late that she’s not, plays Anxiety just right. I took my very own Riley to the screening. After the movie, which she enjoyed, she told me she felt “called out” by much of what she had seen. “Is that okay?” I asked. “Yes,” she responded. “At least now you know what’s going on in my head.” —Amy Amatangelo
2. Ultraman: Rising
Release Date: June 14, 2024
Directors: Shannon Tindle, John Aoshima
Stars: Christopher Sean, Gedde Watanabe, Tamlyn Tomita, Keone Young, Julia Harriman
Rating: PG
Of the many colorful characters conceived after the Godzilla-inspired tokusatsu boom, few loom as large as Ultraman, a superhero who grows to gargantuan proportions to protect Japan from supersized monsters. The big guy was so beloved that he helped usher in the Kyodai Hero subgenre, which is all about do-gooders who transform into giants so they can battle hulking creatures. Following a barrage of TV series that carries on to this day, word of the character’s exploits eventually went global, resulting in a worldwide fanbase that eagerly awaits the numerous shows, movies and videogames about this savior from the Land of Light. Ultraman: Rising, a new film from Netflix Animation, is the latest installment in this storied franchise, and unlike many other entries in the series, it feels tailor-made for newcomers. Through its colorful cuts of animation and superpowered antics, it’s a family-friendly film that hones in on the greatest battle of all: parenting. The story follows Ken Sato (Christopher Sean), a legendary baseball player who moves back home to Japan at the prompting of his estranged father, Professor Sato (Gedde Watanabe). It turns out that his pops is Ultraman, and after getting injured on the job, he asks his son to take up the family business. Ken isn’t thrilled at the prospect, and he’s in the middle of balancing his life as a ballplayer and superhero when things get even more complicated. After a fight between a giant winged lizard and the anti-monster wing of the military goes sideways, Ken finds himself the parent to a 30-foot-tall baby kaiju. Although Ultraman: Rising doesn’t hit quite as hard as its hero’s Spacium Beam, the movie looks great, is adorable, and works perfectly as a standalone story for series newcomers. It was very clearly born of personal trials and tribulations from raising a kid, which comes across in the everyday brutality of Ken’s long hours cleaning up monster slime until he heads into work half-asleep and struggling. Ultraman: Rising may not quite reach the heights it could have, but it works as a sincere ode to parenting—and this supersized hero. —Elijah Gonzalez
3. My Oni Girl
Release Date: May 24, 2024
Director: Tomotaka Shibayama
Stars: Kensho Ono, Miyu Tomita
Rating: TV-PG
Although Studio Colorido’s films haven’t left quite the same impact as some of their high-flying peers, their output has successfully mixed the everyday and otherwordly to deliver a solid stable of work, from the surrealist Penguin Highway to the shapeshifting teen angst of A Whisker Away. Their latest is My Oni Girl, a coming-of-age story that taps into a similar vein by melding the mundane with folklore as its characters battle both arctic monsters and adolescence. While its plotting can’t quite keep up with its fantastical flourishes, My Oni Girl still proves a pleasant, albeit slight production with just enough going for it to appeal to 2D animation enthusiasts. We follow Hiiragi (Kensho Ono), a first-year high school student living in Japan’s Yamagata prefecture, who, up until now, has done everything asked of him. He is accommodating to his peers, listens to his parents, and is in the middle of being similarly helpful when he meets Tsumugi (Miyu Tomita), a spirited girl his age who turns out to be an oni (in Japanese folklore these guys are traditionally quite murderous, but here they’re chill). She’s left home to search for her mom, who mysteriously disappeared from her village one day. My Oni Girl may not reach the heights of this studio’s best work, but it’s got just enough juice to make it an agreeable folklore-tinged escapade that will likely land with anime fans skimming through Netflix’s catalogue. Its leading characters gel with one another, their central gripes are well-defined, and its animation usually picks up the slack when its narrative drags. Although I wish it took some bolder swings, thanks to its impressive visuals and a few key emotional moments, this snow-swept journey didn’t leave me out in the cold. —Elijah Gonzalez
4. The Garfield Movie
Release Date: May 20, 2024
Director: Mark Dindal
Stars: Chris Pratt, Samuel L. Jackson, Hannah Waddingham, Ving Rhames, Nicholas Hoult
Rating: PG
The Garfield Movie is a rights-expiration party from no animation studio in particular. Technically, yes, there this one: The movie was animated by DNEG, a firm without a strong identity of its own, assigned to a product relaunch designed to bring the feline comic-strip and cartoon-show staple, created and brand-managed by Jim Davis, into the lucrative world of big-screen CG animation while enhancing his cuteness (and presumably his lucrativeness) by 20 to 35 percent. And hey, why does he have to be so mean to his dog sidekick Odie, anyway? Don’t kids like it more when cats and dogs nuzzle up to each other with empathy, rather than kick each other off of tables? Yet despite all this corporate positioning, despite the softening of Garfield’s behavior and the flattening of his voice–now provided by Chris Pratt in a match as inexplicable as his Mario–The Garfield Movie is an amusing slapstick adventure with some comic-strip zip. All told, it’s a surprisingly good time. The Garfield Movie may be as disposable as one of those numbered paperbacks that ex-kids of a certain age may fondly recall from their Scholastic book orders, but it approximates their sense of fun, too. —Jesse Hassenger
5. If
Release Date: May 17, 2024
Director: John Krasinski
Stars: Cailey Fleming, Ryan Reynolds, Steve Carell, John Krasinski, Fiona Shaw, Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Rating: PG
You can sense the cancer in IF coming a mile away. Whimsical home movies depicting an intensely happy family, writing-therapy narration about “the stories we tell ourselves,” a director seemingly hell-bent on bringing Pixar aesthetics into live-action… within seconds, adults in the room will understand that it won’t be long before that unspeaking mom on screen is donning a head scarf and the home movies cut out. Kids will be more surprised, especially if they were sold a zany comedy where Ryan Reynolds clowns around with a fuzzy Monsters, Inc. version of Steve Carell, playing a purple imaginary friend (“IF” for short) called Blue. The purple creature is called Blue because “his” kid, the one who originally dreamed him up and named him, was colorblind. Nevermind that a child young enough to make up an imaginary friend would be perfectly likely to say one color but mean another, or that this is not generally how colorblindness works, anyway. IF, written and directed by John Krasinski, seems to have absorbed from Pixar primarily the idea that it is funny and eventually somehow moving when magical creatures and/or made-up worlds have quotidian-sounding rules to follow. In a particularly literal-minded touch, Krasinski extends this vision to jokes – hence the colorblindness to explain Blue, hence the “weird” IFs with pedestrian backstories. Everything in IF has its place, even when nothing makes any particular sense. The movie gets so wrapped up in sorting through the whimsical bureaucracy of discarded IFs that it forgets to create an actual world to hide it under.—Jesse Hassenger
6. Kung Fu Panda 4
Release Date: April 9, 2024
Director: Mike Mitchell
Stars: Jack Black, Awkwafina, Viola Davis, James Hong, Bryan Cranston
Rating: PG
While the Shrek series has long been identified as the DreamWorks signature (Shrek, Fiona and Donkey still get the final placement on the company’s obligatory overindulgent character-roll-call logo), maybe that unofficial honor should go to Kung Fu Panda instead. It’s the only mainline DreamWorks series to make it to four entries (though the Puss in Boots movies still give the Shrek-verse an overall edge), and its batting average is a lot higher, with inventive animated action sequences, appealing character designs, and memorable use of the DreamWorks celebrity-voice rolodex, with none of that Shrek smugness insisting that it doubles as sophisticated entertainment for adults. It’s even a similar formula: A big lunk with a heart of gold finds his calling as an unexpected hero. Over and over. That’s what happens in Kung Fu Panda 4, which continues the journey of Po (Jack Black) by putting him through similar motions as the other sequels: Having become the Dragon Warrior, protector of the Valley of Peace, Po is called upon to fulfill some other, suspiciously similar role for which he feels reluctant and unprepared before rising to the challenge. In this installment, Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) informs Po that he must select a successor, so that he may ascend to the title of Spiritual Leader, which sounds an awful lot like the teaching position he was expected to assume in Kung Fu Panda 3 (and is little-mentioned here). Kung Fu Panda 4 will entertain children, and it will inspire another sequel. Call it DreamWorks zen. —Jesse Hassenger
7. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Release Date: March 23, 2024
Director: Gil Kenan
Stars: Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, McKenna Grace, Paul Rudd, Logan Kim, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, William Atherton, Kumail Nanjiani, Patton Oswalt
Rating: PG-13
If Ghostbusters: Afterlife ignited pure rage inside my Ghostbusters-loving heart three years ago, then Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire was surely created to chill my soul and deaden my feelings to protect me from any more cinematic hurt. Like a rube, a little piece of me believed that the earned criticisms leveled at Ghostbusters: Afterlife, accusing it of being a hollow exercise in nostalgia mining, would inspire writers Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman to take the notes and get creative with their miraculous second bat at the IP. Welp, the joke’s on me. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire doubles down, fully committing to its existence as a cynical nostalgia raid masquerading as a movie. This time, Kenan takes over directing duties, with the duo churning out a screenplay that somehow wooed back a boatload of talent, including even more original Ghostbusters cast members, everyone from Afterlife, plus comedians who try their best, like Kumail Nanjiani, Patton Oswalt and James Acaster. But yet again, no one gets used to their potential! In fact, if you told me Kenan and Reitman fed every piece of Ghostbusters mythology into ChatGPT, hit return and shot exactly what was spat out, I’d 100% buy it. —Tara Bennett