Monday, August 13, 2012

A Planetarium Rainforest Adventure

On Friday I enjoyed my first ever movie date with Smiley.

Grandma babysat Gallant while Smiley and I went to a Science Factory planetarium dome showing of Bugs! A Rainforest Adventure.  (It appears that you can watch the normal-screen version on Hulu.)

Lots of bugs were featured.  The two stars of the show, whose complete lifecycles were shown, were a caterpillar named Papilio and a praying mantis named Hierodula.  At the end of the film the mantis eats the butterfly, which seemed a very odd choice for a kid's film but did not bother Smiley at all.  He liked the film a lot.

The movie was beautiful and the filming was amazing.  But there was not much of a story: just the two stars eating and developing, interrupted by lots of other bugs, without any sense of narrative flow.  I'll readily trust this reviewer who claims he knows about better bug films for kids.

I was worried that I had forgotten Smiley's earmuffs, but he got used to the volume.

All the audience was families with at least one young kid (some older siblings too), which meant that no one minded Smiley's frequent quiet questions.

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