My little cousin came over for a sleepover once, and I put on Coraline because the case said PG and had a cartoon girl on the cover, so I figured it was safe enough for a nine-year-old. About twenty minutes in, she asked me to turn it off, right after the Other Mother’s eyes turned into black buttons, and she ended up sleeping with the hallway light on that whole night. I remember feeling a little embarrassed, like I’d picked the wrong movie.
A lot of movies made for kids get filed under “safe” simply because they’re animated, or because a studio’s name is on them, without anyone checking what’s actually inside. The ten movies on this list all wear that label, and every single one of them uses it to sneak something heavier past the adults in the room. None of them needed an R rating to say something real. They just needed a parent who wasn’t paying close enough attention
10
‘Babe’ (1995)
James Cromwell as Farmer Arthur Hoggatt poses with Babe the pig in Babe.Image via Universal Pictures
Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) wins Babe (voiced by Christine Cavanaugh) at a county fair, and the piglet ends up living in the farmhouse instead of the barn once he turns out to be good at herding sheep. That setup sounds like standard kids’ movie material, but Babe never lets you forget the farm runs on slaughter. Babe finds out early that pigs like him are usually raised to be eaten, not kept as pets, which is a harder truth than most G-rated films bother handing a child.
Ferdinand the duck learns to crow like a rooster because roosters get to live, while ducks get cooked for Christmas dinner, and even the sheepdogs, Rex and Fly, carry real grief over sheep they’ve lost before. The film was serious enough that it got nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars that year, which almost never happens for a movie about a talking pig, and it says a lot about how much more grown-up this story is than its marketing let on.
9
‘The NeverEnding Story’ (1984)
Tami Stronach puts something into Barret Oliver’s hand in The NeverEnding StoryImage via Warner Bros. Pictures
Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) rides his horse Artax through the Swamp of Sadness, and the horse simply stops walking and sinks into the mud because he’s too sad to go on. There’s no monster attacking him and no villain to blame, just sadness thick enough to drown in, and the film hands this to a young audience with almost no warning at all.
Bastian (Barret Oliver) reads about this while hiding from bullies in his school attic, and the book he’s reading keeps bleeding into his real life until the line between the two nearly disappears. Fantasia itself is being swallowed by something called the Nothing, a stand-in for despair rather than any normal movie villain. Decades later, people still bring up the horse scene as one of the moments that scared them the most as kids, and it’s become something of a running joke online for exactly that reason.
8
‘The Witches’ (1990)
Anjelica Huston as The Grand High Witch with a wig and witch face in The Witches 1990.Image via Warner Bros.
The Grand High Witch (Anjelica Huston) spends most of The Witches disguised as an ordinary woman until she peels off her wig at a hotel convention and reveals a bald scalp underneath. Real witches in this story have no toes, square feet, and claws hidden inside gloves, and the film shows all of it up close instead of keeping the horror offscreen.
Luke (Jasen Fisher) gets turned into a mouse partway through the story and stays that way, since the witches don’t get beaten in some clean, reversible way that undoes what’s already been done to him. Author Roald Dahl was reportedly so unhappy that the studio softened his original ending, in which Luke stays a mouse for good, that he tried to get his name taken off the credits entirely.
7
‘Return to Oz’ (1985)
Dorothy Gale (Fairuza Balk) places a crown on the head of the Scarecrow who sits on a throne in ‘Return to Oz’ (1985).Image via Buena Vista Distribution Co.
Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) gets sent to a hospital for electroshock treatment in the opening scenes, because the adults around her think believing in Oz means something is wrong with her mind. That happens in the first ten minutes of a Disney movie technically marketed to children.
Once Dorothy gets back to Oz, Princess Mombi (Jean Marsh) keeps a hallway full of severed heads in glass cabinets and swaps her own head out depending on her mood. The Nome King turns people to stone just by looking at them wrong, and none of the music or color from the beloved 1939 film is around to soften it. Return to Oz bombed badly at the box office when it came out, and it’s easy to see why parents in 1985 weren’t ready for a sequel this bleak.
6
‘Coraline’ (2009)
The character of Coraline, voiced by Dakota Fanning, in the movie of the same name, ‘Coraline.’Image via Focus Features
Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is a bored kid who finds a small door in her new house leading to a version of her life where everything is brighter and her parents finally pay attention to her. The catch is that the Other Mother (voiced by Teri Hatcher) wants to sew buttons onto Coraline’s eyes to keep her there for good, and the film shows exactly what that looks like on the children she’s already done it to.
Coraline has to go back and free the ghosts of those kids, who stayed behind because they traded their eyes for attention they weren’t getting at home. Based on a Neil Gaiman book and made in stop motion by the same studio behind ParaNorman, Coraline is regularly ranked among the scariest films ever marketed to kids, and parents online still argue about the right age to show it.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
5
‘ParaNorman’ (2012)
A young boy, Norman, looking ahead with a hopeful expression in ParaNorman.Image via Focus Features
Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) can see and talk to dead people, which makes him an outcast at school long before the real plot kicks in with a centuries-old curse hanging over his town. The town once executed a child for witchcraft, and that same child comes back as the villain, not because she’s evil, but because she was scared and angry when she died and never got the chance to grow past it.
Mitch (voiced by Casey Affleck) turns out to be gay in one line near the end, delivered so casually it barely registers as a reveal, which made ParaNorman one of the first mainstream animated family films to include an openly gay character at all. The film spends its whole runtime on bullying and fear turning into cruelty, then asks you to feel sorry for the monster instead of being scared of her.
4
‘The Iron Giant’ (1999)
Hogarth sits on the ground in the woods as the Iron Giant crouches down to speak to him in The Iron Giant.Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal) finding a giant robot (Vin Diesel) in the woods reads like the setup for a cute, low-stakes boy-and-his-monster movie. Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald), the government agent hunting the giant down, could have stayed a cartoon villain scribbling in a notebook. Brad Bird doesn’t let him. Mansley is paranoid because the Cold War rewarded paranoia, and the film shows exactly how one scared, ordinary man becomes the reason a small town nearly gets bombed off the map.
The giant was built as a weapon before he ever met Hogarth, and the film never lets you forget it. So when his combat systems finally switch on near the end, it isn’t a twist, it’s a fact the movie planted an hour earlier and left sitting there. What breaks the pattern is what he does with it. He flies into an incoming nuclear missile instead of letting it hit the town, and his last word to Hogarth, in that halting robot voice, is “Superman,” not a name, a decision about who he’s choosing to be. No swelling music sells it to you. The film just lets him go.
3
‘Pinocchio’ (1940)
Pinocchio and Jiminey Cricket in Pinocchio (1940)Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Pinocchio (voiced by Dickie Jones) gets lured to Pleasure Island with a group of other boys, where they can smoke, drink, gamble, and break things with no adult stopping them, which sounds like a dream until the boys start turning into donkeys one by one. Lampwick, a boy Pinocchio befriends there, panics as his hands turn into hooves and his voice turns into a bray mid-sentence, screaming for his mother the whole time it happens on screen.
The men running the island load crates of donkeys onto a ship afterward, meaning the boys are being sold into labor once the transformation finishes. This was only Disney’s second animated feature, made in 1940, and film historians still point to the Pleasure Island sequence as some of the most disturbing footage ever put into a family movie.
2
‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’ (1971)
Image via Paramount Pictures
Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) greets the children touring his factory with a fake limp that turns into a somersault, a small moment that tells you right away he isn’t entirely trustworthy. One by one, the kids on the tour get punished for their worst habits in ways closer to horror than comedy. Augustus Gloop (Michael Bollner) gets sucked up a glass pipe, Violet Beauregarde (Denise Nickerson) swells into a giant blueberry, and Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole) gets thrown down a garbage chute by squirrels that decide she’s rotten.
Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum) survives mostly because he’s poor and polite, not because he’s especially clever or brave, which says something about what Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory actually rewards. Roald Dahl wrote the book this is based on, and he reportedly hated the film so much that he refused to let the studio adapt any of his sequels.
1
‘Matilda’ (1996)
Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman, and Mara Wilson as the Wormwoods looking in the same direction in Matildaimage via Sony Pictures Classics
Matilda (Mara Wilson) has parents, Harry and Zinnia Wormwood (Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman), who forget her birthday, call her stupid, and let her raise herself while they cheat people out of money for a living. Once she starts school, her principal, Miss Trunchbull (Pam Ferris), locks kids inside a spiked cabinet called the Chokey and once forces a boy to eat an entire chocolate cake in front of the whole school as punishment.
Matilda develops telekinetic powers partway through Matilda and uses them to fight back against every adult who’s hurt her, including her own parents. This is the third Roald Dahl book turned into a movie on this list, and it might be the kindest one, since Dahl usually let the cruelty win more often than he let a kid win back. Danny DeVito directed the film himself, on top of playing the father Matilda has to escape.
