Movies for kids? Ask a kindergarten teacher

“How many of you want to go see ‘Ratatouille’?” kindergarten teacher Brooke Newman asks her class. “OK,” she reports back. “Every hand is raised.”

When trying to understand the cinematic tastes of your average 6-year-old, you can’t go wrong asking a kindergarten teacher. And Brooke, who’s been teaching for 15 years, just happens to be my sister — the person I saw movies with as a kid. She’s currently teaching at Marquez Charter School, which is in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles, and also happens to be the school that we both attended as kids.

Times have certainly changed. We came up during an era when animation was basically dormant; the time between the classic Disney films such as “Lady and the Tramp” and “Cinderella,” and the modern classics such as “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin.” Now, barely a weekend goes by where there isn’t a movie with animated talking animals learning lessons about life. And guess what? The kids go see them all.

“Anything with cute animals is very popular,” Brooke says. “When (the school year) started, it was the whole “Happy Feet” thing this year, but that’s gone to the wayside and “Shrek the Third” is definitely popular.”

Believe it or not, many 6-year-olds are going to see movies like the PG-13 rated “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.”

“I would say a third of my class has seen ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 3,’ ” Brooke says. “It’s surprising how many R-rated movies my kids go to. Their parents just take them.”

Everything from sneakers to food
And though the humor of “Pirates” may go over the kids’ heads, the marketing certainly doesn’t.

“I don’t think (they go) as much for the movie as for the stuff they can get,” Brooke explains. “Anything where they can collect stuff. They want the toys. They want to dress like a pirate. Everyone wants to be like Captain Jack — all my boys. They dress like him and then they say they’re a pirate.”

And it doesn’t stop with just a simple T-shirt. Brooke sees everything from backpacks to shoes to food with movie marketing. “I think that’s the strangest. When food changes over to be the characters of a movie. They eat ‘Shrek’ Go-Gurt.”

Her kindergartners aren’t just fans of the latest movies, they like classics too. “I have my ‘Star Wars’ fanatic kid who comes in here every day, talking about ‘Star Wars.’ He knows every single character.”

She has another student who’s obsessed with “Grease.” She says the girl’s mom turned her onto the film. “And the daughter started learning all the words. Kind of like we did,” Brooke says, reminiscing about our days of singing in the living room. “Then she recruits people on the yard to be Danny.”

One movie that’s extremely popular with the little girls in her class is “High School Musical.”

“I don’t know how much they understand of it,” Brooke says, “But they just like the singing and the dancing. They definitely don’t like the love story part. That’s all ‘eww.’ God forbid any character kissed another character in a movie, you wouldn’t hear the end of it.”     

Even Shrek and Fiona prove no exception to this rule. “There are side comments like, ‘That’s so gross’ or ‘How could they do that?’ I have this really sarcastic kid that said, ‘They had to go and ruin the movie, didn’t they?’ ”

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