Your Children Deserve Nice Things: Home Alone & Why Kids Stories Can Be Good

Let’s Stop Making Excuses For Poor Family Films

In the first week of the Five Nights at Freddy’s film’s release, there was a big divide between critical and audience reception. Audiences seem to generally find it entertaining and critics, myself included, found it disappointing. What struck me was the odd justifications for the film being poorly written.

Comments on critical articles claimed things like it was “for the fans”, but they also said the film was made for children as a defense. They claim that this is supposedly why the film was rated PG-13, so that FNAF’s young fandom would be able to see the movie without getting too scared.

But why does this mean the movie could be bad? Films like Coraline and Spirited Away manage to be creepy with PG ratings and good stories, so that can’t be the reason for Freddy’s lack of critical acclaim.

To me, the issue seems to be partially because of people’s previous affiliations with the video games, but also from a larger idea: these movies are for kids/family-friendly, so, of course, they aren’t as good as “adult” films.

I even experienced this recently with Disney’s latest animated film, Wish. Though I found the film fun, the story and songs didn’t get enough love in my opinion and I left the theatre dissatisfied. Despite this, I again saw the sentiment of it “being for kids”.

These comments seem to believe it’s not only acceptable for family movies to be bad, but inevitable. In my experience, this argument is built on two ideas:

1. Kids lack understanding and life experience, so they don’t have a frame of reference for “good” stories.

2. Kids care more about bright colors, loud music, and fun than they do about a good story.

Because of these two things, a kid’s film is bound to be bad.

As a parent, I find this a bit defeatist and pretentious. It says to me that children aren’t respected as consumers of art. Not only do my kids deserve to have good stories, a certain holiday favorite shows that a film for every age can be excellent:

Chris Columbus’ Home Alone.

The Craft of Home Alone

At first glance, Home Alone is your typical family film. It has a colorful house for Kevin to concoct hilarious hijinks and a soundtrack that is fun and memorable. Who doesn’t love seeing him fool some burglars by rigging all of his family’s mannequins and cutouts as “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” plays?

What makes this movie great is that the well-crafted story and cinematography are very subtle. Most audience members wouldn’t realize that they are experiencing stunning character growth by the film’s writer, John Hughes, or subconsciously being shown the emotional beats through director Chris Columbus’ choice of visual metaphors.

Through these choices, the team behind this family-friendly movie demonstrates that this type of media can entertain the kids and give them a quality story. Home Alone manages to be incredibly meaningful because every piece of it is deeply deliberate and respects its child audience.

Let’s dig into how Home Alone accomplishes this.

The Child Protagonist Is Treated Like A Person

Most kid-centric films use young main characters to check off a box. They say “Kids like kid characters, so we need a kid character” without fleshing them out. Protagonists in these films tend to be comedic relief or something to be taken care of by other characters.

Unlike those films, Home Alone’s Kevin McCallister (played by McCauley Culkin) is the centerpiece of the story. Like his previous films, John Hughes respects Kevin as a character and gives him a fulfilling character arc.

In the beginning, Kevin dislikes his family for “crapping on him” all the time and even goes so far as to wish they would disappear. After this wish is allegedly granted, he irresponsibly seeks out everything denied to him, eating ice cream for dinner while watching a violent movie and running while screaming his head off through the house.

But he finds these things to be temporary fun and that the outside world is very scary.

Kevin continually runs away from his problems, physically and metaphorically. He refuses to go into his basement because the furnace is frightening. His first encounters with burglars Harry and Marv and his scary neighbor, Old Man Marley, result in him hiding under the bed and accidentally stealing a toothbrush as he flees.

At this point, Kevin is cowardly and more concerned about keeping the world away from him instead of facing it. Slowly, he gains his courage, first by telling the furnace to shut up and, in the end, allowing Harry and Marv to enter his home so he can fight back. He lets his fears inside his safe spaces and comes out victorious, more mature, and appreciative of what he has.

Hughes treats his child protagonist like a person worthy of growth. Home Alone is not a morality tale where kids are told the lesson, they are shown the benefits of being brave and growing up through Kevin’s actions.

Truly, it’s a perfect example of how to write a story for kids. Respect for one’s young audience and characters is an essential step towards meaningful children’s media. When one adds the cinematography to this analysis, this film gets even better.

The Adults are Placed on Equal Footing

My favorite part of Home Alone is the parallels between Kevin and Marley, both visually and narratively. They are antagonistic towards each other, but conclude as friends and equals creating the film’s most meaningful moments. What’s even better is that their journey towards equal footing is largely shown through Chris Columbus’ chosen camera angles and visual metaphors.

When the audience is introduced to Marley, he is shown from above. Kevin and his brothers are physically and metaphorically looking down on him for his rumored killings. It shows that Kevin sees Marley as lowly, something to be feared. Right away, the audience is meant to see this old man as unpleasant.

Marley is then shown from below in his next encounter with Kevin. The camera first focuses on his heavily bandaged hand and then shifts to his face from a worm’s eye view. He towers over Kevin and becomes even scarier because of it.

The audience sees these two characters flip between high and low angles, visually creating a sense of conflict. Beautifully, the camera never allows Kevin and Marley to physically see eye-to-eye.

That all changes when Home Alone takes the audience to church. Here, the two characters are mostly shown together at the same camera angle. Both have come to this holy place because they’re “feeling bad” about themselves, though Marley doesn’t admit it initially, and they teach each other lessons.

Marley helps Kevin by putting his feelings into words:

“How you feel about your family is a complicated thing. […] sometimes you can forget you love them.”

Likewise, Kevin helps Marley by encouraging him to be brave and talk to his estranged son:

“All this time I’ve been worrying about, but if you turn on the lights, it’s no big deal.”

This is brilliant because it visually shows that these two have things to offer the other. They are no longer

flip-flopping between camera angles, they’re now on an equal plane.

Additionally, this interaction ends with a close-up of Kevin and Marley shaking hands, but this time, Marley’s wound is covered with a small band-aid. His hand is a subtle metaphor that the two are healing together; their pain can now be handled by something small. Simply put, it’s stunning.

What other family film takes this much care to show adults and children as autonomous beings? It’s an uncommon practice, but adds so much. Once again, Home Alone demonstrates that a family film can be well-made, and perhaps, also that they should.

Conclusion

Kid’s media has a lot stacked against it. This idea that it can’t be good creates a sort of circular logic where studios will take advantage to churn out less quality products that will do better at the box office.

In my opinion, this is partially why there are so many reboots and reimaginings of popular family-friendly films. Children simply aren’t respected as consumers of stories and are expected to only want entertainment.

But just because this is reality doesn’t mean it should be. The only reason I can discuss a 33-year-old film like Home Alone is because it was made with passion and pride. I think a lot of adults overlook that their favorite childhood films stick around for decades because they are quality works of art.

Children may have less experience and knowledge doesn’t mean that the pitfalls of their media should be dismissed. Kid’s media can absolutely be well-written and meaningful, but only if audiences stop making excuses for it.

Your kids deserve nice things.