Valentine’s Day is a weird occasion, and not just because it operates so fully in the pocket of Big Pharmacy That Also Sells Greeting Cards and Candy. It’s a holiday ostensibly built around romance, something that adults generally have more experience with, that nonetheless often feels most thoroughly celebrated by school-aged children. That explains the seeming paradox of so many listicles that promise the best kid-friendly Valentine’s Day movies, which are then padded out with TV specials—understandably, because who makes full-on Valentine’s Day-ready movies for kids? In fact, isn’t it kind of weird and off-putting when an animated movie with a tween-or-younger protagonist shoehorns in a kind of quasi-love-interest? (I speak specifically of you, The Lorax.)
At the same time, it’s natural for some younger viewers to develop an interest in stories with a romantic angle—and thanks (?) to the old production code, film history is full of romantic movies that wouldn’t rate more than a PG on today’s MPAA scale—movies where onscreen action is quite chaste and the innuendos remain too obtuse to kids. Not so different, in other words, than any number of family movies with jokes “for the parents,” only with a much higher baseline level of sophistication. Eight-year-olds will probably want to stick with Super Mario Bros. or whatever, but for older and more cinema-curious kids of around 11 or 12, there are a plethora of gateway romances that can both ease them into more grown-up stuff and raise their standards for what constitutes a worthy love story—in the movies and maybe even in life, too. Here, then, are a group of Valentine’s Day-appropriate movies you can watch with your kids without you feeling embarrassed or them feeling bored. Let’s start with the younger side of this spectrum and proceed through a 20-movie program designed to foster an appreciation of great movie romances.
Here are 20 kid-friendly Valentine’s Day movies:
Tangled (2010)
There’s a good chance your kid will have already seen this one, depending on their interest in Disney animation. If they have, use it as a reference point for how a romantic comedy is supposed to work. If they haven’t, well, this Rapunzel riff is the Disney cartoon that best approximates rom-com rhythms (the screwball cadence of Meg from Hercules notwithstanding): Strong personality types, sly banter, slapstick farce and, by the end, a heartwarming connection between two leads who seem genuinely made for each other—even if in this case they literally were, by animators with computers.
The Princess Bride (1987)
There’s plenty else going on in Rob Reiner and William Goldman’s fairy-tale adventure—swashbuckling, revenge, comic relief, a clever framing device—so that if your kid is still at the kissing-is-gross phase, they’ll probably still have a good time. But one of the loveliest touches in this timeless classic is how in the end, it sweetly connects love as a romantic concept back to a form of love kids better understand, with Peter Falk’s narrator offering a gentle “as you wish” to his initially resistant but eventually enthralled grandson (Fred Savage), paralleling the dedication that Westley (Cary Elwes) pledges to Buttercup (Robin Wright).
Mirror, Mirror (2012)
Granted, any comic fairy tale following The Princess Bride has its work cut out. But Tarsem Singh’s zippy girl-power take on Snow White has the spirit of a mismatched rom-com at its center, with scrappy and independent Snow (Lily Collins) matching wits with a prince (Armie Hammer… sorry!) who comes across as a doofus but eventually rises to the occasion. It’s a more nuanced bit of royal mockery than the broad-side-of-a-barn satire served by Enchanted—and the production design and costumes are vastly more luscious.
Beauty and the Beast (1946)
Before there were Jerry Orbach and Angela Lansbury voicing animated animate household items, there was Jean Cocteau. This story’s been with us since the 18th century and rendered in countless iterations, so I’ll forego the plot summary and just say: From the fourth-wall-breaking preamble, in which the director entreats the audience to approach the film with inner-child-forward faith in the magic of fairy tales, to the end, Beauty and the Beast remains a treasure of subtle imagery, mesmerizing music, baroque opulence, romantic intensity and total indulgence in fantasy, aided by Jean Marais (Beast) and Josette Day (Belle) delivering enchanting performances. The themes explored here are traditional fairy tale tropes: innocence and greed, the transformative power of love, the fear of the unknown, magic. Cocteau was a celebrated poet as well as a filmmaker, and this is a strong example of how the two crafts inform one another, in the way it harnesses imagery to create metaphorical connections. Weird and powerful filmmaking. —Amy Glynn
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
A younger kid may not be ready for a full-on leap into unfulfilled romantic longing, but what if it’s preceded by some balletic action choreography? Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon deftly mixes its literal action-movie kicks with touches of fantasy and romance, with the passionate relationship between Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi) and Xiao Hou (Chang Chen) juxtaposed with the unconsummated love between the older, wiser Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat) and Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). It’s also never too early to get an experienced reader into the habit of accepting subtitles.
The DUFF (2015)
If there’s one thing that fascinates tween-age kids, it’s slightly older teenagers. Based on the novel by Kody Keplinger (which she wrote while she was still in high school), The DUFF (which stands for “designated ugly fat friend”—a nasty term for a friend-group member whose popularity can’t necessarily stand on its own) has a lot to say about beauty ideals and how we perceive our self-worth. While the film sometimes veers into preachy territory, its central romantic relationship (and a terrific lead performance from Mae Whitman) is enough to elevate it. And frankly, with so many teen-centric options for younger viewers to look up to, a little preachiness isn’t necessarily a bad thing.—Andy Herren
The Half of It (2020)
Director Alice Wu successfully pulls off a great trick: Making a movie about young people that convincingly shows us how big their feelings are to them without making those feelings seem ridiculous to us. If the story of The Half of It borrows its central conceit from Cyrano de Bergerac, it at least puts a few interesting spins on it: Ellie (Leah Lewis) is an outsider in unique ways. She is the only Asian student at her school, an immigrant whose underemployed and linguistically challenged father struggles to run her household. She is the student who is so good at writing that she runs a side hustle writing papers for her entire class. And then there’s the other little matter of her feeling same-sex attraction in a stiflingly small, overwhelmingly Christian town.—Kenneth Lowe
Your Name (2016)
Truth be told, all of the recent animated features from director Makoto Shinkai, including Weathering with You and Suzume, would probably fit the bill here; he specializes in open-hearted, fantasy-tinged romances between young people, often affected by environmental factors. But Your Name is a particularly strong starting place because it’s got such a great hook: Two teenagers mysteriously switch bodies at random intervals, and get to know each other’s lives as a result. As the complicated but engaging narrative goes on, it weaves together elements of dreams, memory and time-travel, while the romance itself stays relatively chaste—there are bigger things at stake, until there aren’t—without feeling entirely neutered. Fitting with a central metaphor of the film, Your Name braids romantic longing into a larger, interrelated story concerned with how we perceive and experience life through our strange brains.
Sing Street (2016)
Sing Street spins art out of history, but you might mistake it for pop sensationalism at first glance. If so, you’re forgiven. In sharp contrast to John Carney’s breakout movie, 2007’s sterling adult musical Once, Sing Street aims to please crowds and overburden tear ducts. There’s a sugary surface buoyancy to the film that helps the darkness clouding beneath its exterior go down more easily. Here, look at the plot synopsis: A teenage boy living in Dublin’s inner city in 1985 moves to a new school, falls in love with a girl, and forms a band for the sole purpose of winning her over. If the period Carney uses as his storytelling backdrop doesn’t make Sing Street an ’80s movie, then the mechanics of its story certainly do. You may walk into the film expecting to be delighted and amused. The film won’t let you down in either regard, but it’ll rob you of your breath, too.—Andy Crump
Whisper of the Heart (1995)
Before his untimely passing in 1998, Yoshifumi Kondo was one of Studio Ghibli’s most promising animators, a former protégé of the senior Miyazaki and popularly considered as one of his successors. Whisper of the Heart, his first and only directorial effort, has all the makings of a true Ghibli classic while managing to distinguish itself apart from and deservedly alongside that some of the studio’s most renowned films. The film tells the story of Shizuku, a strong-willed and precocious bookworm confident in her love of writing song lyrics and reading stories, though uncertain of her impending future beyond junior high school. After meeting Seiji Amasawa, an ambitious young violin-maker who shares a kindred passion for literature and dreams of one day attending school in Italy, Shizuku is moved to follow and cultivate the calling of her own talents while making sense of the nascent whispers of adolescent affection stirring within her heart. Among the film’s many merits are its endearing screenplay, penned by Miyazaki, the gorgeously rendered cityscapes of Tokyo and the fantasy backdrops present throughout its third act, and above all its captivating film score composed by Yuji Nomi. (The use of Olivia Newton-John’s rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” which later becomes the film’s central motif, is particularly effective.) At once a stirring love story and an endearing portrait a young woman’s life within a close-knit working class family, Whisper of the Heart is a thoroughly satisfying film and a touching coming-of-age drama.—Toussaint Egan
It Happened One Night (1934)
OK, after some cartoons, fantasy-adventures and teens, it’s time to bring out the big guns with the ur-text of rom-coms, while it might still retain some freshness. Of course, It Happened One Night should feel fresh no matter when in life you see it; it’s written, directed and acted with just that much zing (and won Oscars in all of those categories, cementing its place in film history). Even romance neophytes may recognize certain tropes from this farcical road-trip in which the two traveling parties (in this case, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert) distrust and dislike each other at first, then grow increasingly attracted as they endure various travel difficulties, but Frank Capra’s classic remains a gold standard for this kind of plotting, even as it turns 90.
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
One great thing about Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn is that they have rom-coms in a variety of modes. Something like Holiday is great for a more reflective, end-of-year mood, while Bringing Up Baby is more full-on screwball—although really, the fact that so much of it involves an errant tiger connects it to plenty of broader farces and family pictures that would follow in its wake. What is Katharine Hepburn in this movie if not an earlier version of Martin Short in Clifford or John Leguizamo in The Pest? Just kidding, sort of; the zaniness of Bringing Up Baby has a purity lacking in other movies about characters who annoy their way into everyone’s good graces.
Roman Holiday (1953)
Just as Bringing Up Baby puts a dizzily romantic spin on the animal farce, Roman Holiday takes a younger-skewing subgenre—the princess story—and imbues it with genuine feeling. Audrey Hepburn (who, you’ll have to stress to your young pupils, is not related to Katharine despite their mutual prominence on this curriculum) plays a genuine princess who meets an American reporter (Gregory Peck) on a trip to Rome, where they spend a little time together in relative anonymity until they must part. Fans of Disney princesses like Aladdin’s Jasmine may be familiar with the downside of all that glamour, and may find it jarring to see a romance with such a bittersweet ending—but if you’re going to be introduced to the more melancholy side of romance, Audrey Hepburn seems like the perfect tour guide.
Funny Face (1957)
And anyone taken by Hepburn’s European charms in Roman Holiday can jump straight into the Technicolor dazzle of Funny Face, a musical that pairs the luminous star with Fred Astaire, sends them to Paris, and lets both of their dancing styles shine through. Funny Face doesn’t seem to have as strong reputation as either An American in Paris (in terms of musicals about American hoofers in Paris) or The Bandwagon (in terms of later-period Fred Astaire), perhaps because of the admittedly questionable romantic relationship between Hepburn and a decades-older Astaire. But for swoonworthy visuals and entertainment value, it’s hard to beat Stanley Donen’s intensely colorful musical, and some of the filmmaking on the musical numbers has a more contemporary sensibility than other musicals of this period. (Granted, Hepburn’s beatnik dance solo probably doesn’t count there, but that’s just charming as hell either way.)
You’ve Got Mail (1998)/The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
On one hand, You’ve Got Mail probably feels as dated now, a quarter-century after its release, as its source material, The Shop Around the Corner, did back in 1998. (Those two movies were separated by nearly 50 years, but technology feels like it has only accelerated in the 21st century.) But it’s entirely possible that phone-obsessed or phone-coveting youngsters would find an excavation of ancient online rituals—signing on to AOL to instant-message and check emails!—fascinating, much the way we might pore over cave paintings, or even swoon over the old-fashioned letter-writing pen pals of The Shop Around the Corner. It’s also possible that the basic principles of these rom-coms, where Tom Hanks/Jimmy Stewart and Meg Ryan/Margaret Sullivan correspond without knowing that they already know each other IRL, will resonate with anyone aware of how our public and digital selves both overlap and diverge.
Return to Me (2000)
While there are plenty of 21st-century romantic comedies that are probably fine for teenagers, it’s a little trickier to find some that are both appropriate for a ten-year-old and actually good. The little-seen charmer Return to Me fits the bill, a decidedly old-fashioned and PG-rated romantic dramedy about a widower (David Duchovny) meeting a waitress (Minnie Driver) who received his wife’s heart in a transplant. It’s in the vein of family-meddling rom-coms like While You Were Sleeping or My Big Fat Greek Wedding, only the family isn’t quite so meddlesome and the tone isn’t quite so sitcom (though Bonnie Hunt, who directed, has plenty of sitcom experience). It’s important to establish that romantic movies, even ones with notes of real sadness, can be nice and sweet, rather than centering on deception, instinctive dislike and dating-based bets.
Badlands (1973)
Just as it takes time to learn the lingo and patterns of rom-coms, and how they relate and conflict with real-life affection, it takes time to understand a bad relationship masquerading as love. Terrence Malick’s first movie puts two all-stars (Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen) on the run as young killers, but their romance—or lack thereof—can become as engrossing as their crime spree. A mesmerizing movie in general, hinting at the visual poetry that would come to define Malick’s work, Badlands also has a bluntness at its heart: Running off with someone just for something to do, just to stave off boredom and ennui, can only go one way. Especially if that someone is an older, disaffected garbageman. Being quietly angsty lovers on the lam is a subgenre in and of itself, but Badlands counterpoints its more explicit peers like Bonnie and Clyde by wondering if the people capable of such evil are equally capable of love. “Little by little we fell in love,” Spacek’s Holly narrates, but there’s nothing there in the text or the performances to back this up. When she says, “I looked good to him and whatever I did was okay, and if I didn’t have a lot to say that was okay, too,” it’s terribly sad instead of convincing. They coexist, but they don’t relate. Their actions have consequences, and they never seem to really expect them. They live in the cruel version of the romance genre’s fairy tale, where they’re imposing their Main Character Syndrome on everyone around them. And that becomes painstakingly clear as the pretty film unfolds, its central relationship collapsing into nothing. As much fun as there is getting caught up in the daydream of movie romances, there’s equal catharsis in recognizing an empty “romance” that just resembles that daydream. There’s a cold beauty to Badlands and a disillusioned maturity that’s accessible to anyone who’s experienced the big emotions of youth, and the (sometimes unfulfilled) expectations to have those big emotions.—Jacob Oller
What’s Up, Doc? (1972)
In an entirely different style of old-fashioned, Peter Bogdanovich pays homage to old screwball comedies with this then-contemporary riot of gags, patter and bothering. Barbra Streisand plays the neo-Hepburn figure (back to Katharine this time) with a touch of Bugs Bunny—hence the catchphrase title—as she insinuates herself into the life of a nerdy square (Ryan O’Neal). As much as the movie owes to inspirations like Bringing Up Baby, it has its own caffeinated goofball sensibility that feels like a welcome respite from other famous romances of its era, sometimes even of its own stars: O’Neal’s Love Story gets a parting shot here, and you have to imagine Bogdanovich might have dinged Streisand’s The Way We Were, too, if it hadn’t trailed this one by a year.
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Here’s the strategy at work here: You don’t want to show a burgeoning rom-com fan The Philadelphia Story straight away; will anything else really compare after watching peak Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn in a witty love triangle? But if they check it out after watching The Shop Around the Corner and Bringing Up Baby, it might seem like a kind of rom-com Avengers. (Put His Girl Friday, Holiday and, say, Bell, Book and Candle ahead of this one to further exacerbate the effect.) Even if that comparison doesn’t quite land, this comedy of remarriage is just about perfect, and offers a helpful life lesson, to boot: Even someone as charming as Jimmy Stewart doesn’t always walk away from a romantic dilemma unscathed.
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.