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At around age 12, Tony didn’t need a bedtime story to sleep, and he didn’t like walking around and hiking with us anymore. We understood of course, but we still wanted to have some family time together, so we started the family movie, till now. In 2015, after we moved to our own house, we bought a projector, and speakers. The family movie moved to a better quality.

Tony chooses movies. We give suggestions sometimes. He is responsible for downloading and delivering the movies. Once a week, usually Friday or Saturday evening, we’ve watched dozens of good movies together. I will try to list out the movies we’ve watched as complete as possible and roughly at a chronological order if I can.

“Ice Age”Series: one of my favorites. I think we started from this one. Such a lovely story. Pictures and dialogs are awesome.

“Up”, “Rio”, “Brave”, “Croods”, “Epic”: All are great. All are warm and lovely stories. Love them all.

“Kong Fu Panda” Series: our favorite. We’ve watched them through the years.

“Toy Story”Series

 “The Polar Express”: We had the book in Chinese when Tony was about 5. He read it so many times, and we reviewed it every Christmas. It made me want to cry sometimes. The movie is good too.

“The Chronicles of Narnia” Series: Classic of children’s literature. We only watched the first one: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. We should finish the whole series.  

“Frozen” “Tangled”: Princess Stories. The two men weren’t so excited about them, but very good movies.

“Rise of the Guardians”

“Mr. Popper's Penguins”

“How to Train Your Dragon” Series: We watched the first one on the flight from Beijing to Toronto in 2010, but couldn’t understand it back then.

“The Adventures of TinTin” Series: Tony’s favorite, once. This is one of them he read and watched many times.

“Transformers”: Tony was crazy about “Transformers”. He knew most of the movie lines, in Chinese. We only watched once I guess after we came here, just to end that era.

“Home Alone” Series

“Mars Needs Mom”

These are the first stage of our family movies. You can see the stories are simple (except TinTin), warm and lovely. They are about friendship, family, love, and courage and adventures. They all are kids friendly, and listed in Family Movies list. They are highly agreed among we three.

The stories of the movies below are getting more complicated, and they are obviously for older age groups. Tony chose most of them. We didn’t really know their existence before introduced to be family movies.

“Night at the Museum” Series

 “Ratatouille”: A very interesting story. Love it.

“Puss in Boots” Series

“Avatar”

“2012”

 “Monsters Inc.” and “Monsters University”

 “Madagascar” Series: I love the music “I like to move it, move it”

“Mr. Peabody & Sherman”

 “Big Hero 6”

“Inside Out”

“Cars”

“Megamind”

“Wreck it Ralph”: Remembered the main character’s opening line “I’m bad, and that’s good. I will never be good, and that’s not bad”

“Pixels”

“Despicable Me” Series

“Wall-E”: I’m not a Science Fiction fan, but loved this one a lot. Earth our motherland was abandoned by human being, damaged and full of garbage. Wall-E the robot was left behind to clean up the mess……

“Home”

 “Interstellar”: Another good Science Fiction

“Independence Day”

“Battleship”

“Pacific Rim”

We didn’t agree on all of these movies to be good movies, but they aren’t bad either, and they were popular among kids of Tony’s age I guess. You see we’ve got more Sci-Fis and Games and Wars here. No more warm and lovely stories. I probably missed a lot. I remember we watched many small silly-kind movies this period of time, but I don’t remember their names. Most of them here I had to search up online or ask Tony.

We are getting to some big movies here. They are famous and popular. We had to wait for Tony to grow up to this age to watch them. At this time, it seems just right to watch these movies. We didn’t have to really discuss what we wanted to watch. They are just there waiting. I mean the four of them: Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Star Trek.

“Zootopia”: This one doesn’t belong here. But it came up late, we had no choice. Tony was against to watch it, too childish that’s what he said. I made him to watch anyway. Lots of great children movies we haven’t had a chance to watch yet and Tony is already growing out of that age.

“Pirates of the Caribbean” Series: Jack the Pirate is so funny!

“Harry Potter” Series: The British accent is so heavy, and the story is so complicated. Suddenly we feel shy about our English. Tony had to download the new version with subtitle for us. The books are addressed for kids of grade 4 and above. I doubt that fourth graders can understand such a twisted story. This is the beginning of our family movie to have subtitle as a must. How I missed the “Ice Age” movies. The story and dialog and speech are so clear. This movie has really stretched me a bit. Oh, thanks for Tony’s explanation to help me catch up.

“The Lord of the Rings” Series: It has to be the one after we finished “Harry Potter”. We had watched a bit of both before, and didn’t like them. Now we picked them up as family movies, and loved them.

“Star Wars” Series: Everyone claims to be a fan of Star Wars. I didn’t get it at all at first. We tried to watch the new one when Luke’s family visiting, and all four adults left the scene after just 10 minutes of the movie getting on. Luke’s parents actually fell into sleep right after the movie started. I made it a mission to watch them, all of them. You know what? it’s not so hard, nor so bad. We finished them all in a row. I still cannot claim myself as a fan, but am very glad I watched them. You’ve got to try something new, and you’ve got to step out of your comfortable zone sometimes.

“Star Trek” Series: It seems only right to watch this one after the Star Wars. We only did two episodes so far, the first one and the newest one. The first one was too slow, and we lost interest. But we’ll try to get back to them.

“The Matrix”: What’s real and what’s virtual? Can you really tell? How do you know if we are not living in a dream? The movie probably tries to tell something more serious, but I don’t get too much yet. I’ve watched twice, mind you.

Japanese Animations: Tony highly recommended these. We tried to express our disagreement at first. I cannot tell it’s simply because of the movies or something else.

 “Yamato” Series: a very simple Sci-Fi story. Makes me think about “Journey to the west”. But Tony was very enthusiastic about it. Stopped hundreds of times in the middle to give comments of the movie.

“Steins Gate” Series: Not just we can time travel. We can actually live in different time lines living different lives at the same time. Isn’t this something new? But the story goes back and forth while the main character, the mad scientist, time travels back and forth. It slows the story down, and a bit annoying.

 “Spirited Away”: an interesting story, but don’t get why it’s so famous.

“Jurassic Park” Series: We are watching it now! I was reading some postings online about places we are planning to visit this summer, and someone described one of the national parks so beautiful, like in “Jurassic Park”. I was like: hey, why don’t we watch this movie. This should be a good one for family movie. And we are watching them now.

The overall pattern of family movies we watched is from simple to complex, from warm family stories to wars and human futures. They grow as Tony grows. At the very beginning, we guided what to watch, but very soon Tony took over. Later on, he had to stop in the middle of some of the movies to explain the plot in order for us to catch up.

I would never have told you that I liked animations or Sci-Fis, but going through this list, I’m surprised that we’ve watched so many animations and Science Fictions. And I liked most of them. You never know. I’m very glad we have spent the time to enjoy these movies, to explore movies and life in movies. We have two more years before Tony goes to university. His school will probably be getting busier, but we will try to squeeze in some more movies.

We like them, both the movies and the times together, with some drink and snack, and with Tony explaining the stories when we don’t understand.