Favorite Animated Films

There is a certain amount of overlap between this list and my list of favorite children’s films, but some of these films, clearly demarcated from the rest, are not appropriate for small children.

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM CATEGORY

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Fantasia (1940)

Dumbo (1941)

Bambi (1942)

The Three Caballeros (1944)

Make Mine Music (1946)

Fun and Fancy Free (1947)

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)

Cinderella (1950)

Peter Pan (1953)

Lady and the Tramp (1955)

Sleeping Beauty (1959)

One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)

The Jungle Book (1967)

Robin Hood (1973)

The Rescuers (1977)

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)

The Hobbit (1977)

The Return of the King (1980)

The Looney, Looney, Looney, Bugs Bunny Movie (1981)

The Secret of NIMH (1982)

The Little Mermaid (1989)

The Rescuers Down Under (1990)

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Aladdin (1992)

The Lion King (1994)

Toy Story (1995)

Toy Story 2 (1999)

Fantasia 2000 (1999)

Chicken Run (2000)

Finding Nemo (2003)

The Incredibles (2004)

Hoodwinked! (2005)

Kung-Fu Panda (2008)

Bolt (2008)

Wall-e (2008)

Up (2009)

A Christmas Carol (2009)

Toy Story 3 (2010)

Kung-Fu Panda 2 (2011)

Winnie the Pooh (2011)

The LEGO Movie (2014)

The Peanuts Movie (2015)

The Secret Life of Pets (2016)

Storks (2016)

Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017)

The LEGO Batman Movie (2017)

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM CATEGORY: Ages Nine and Up

Animal Farm (1954)

The Hobbit (1977)

Watership Down (1978)

The Return of the King (1980)

A Christmas Carol (2009)

Big Hero 6 (2014)

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM CATEGORY: Teens and Up[1]

Roger Rabbit (1988)

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

Batman and Mr. Freeze: SubZero (1998)

“Final Flight of the Osiris” (2003)[2]

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Coraline (2009)

A Matter of Loath and Death (2008)

Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010)

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

Batman: Gotham by Gaslight (2018)

ANIMATED SHORT FILM CATEGORY

Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983)

The Prince and the Pauper (1990)

The Wrong Trousers (1993)

Presto (2008)

The Ballad of Nessie (2011)

Hawaiian Vacation (2011)

[1] This section of the list is safe to watch for a family where the youngest child is still a teenager or a young adult can watch with a teenage younger sibling. In the U.S.A., we tend to associate animation with children, and while the best animated children’s films have jokes that adults watching them with children will appreciate, there are also animated films that are actually more for adults than children. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) is one such film, even though it was inspired by a children’s book of the same name by Roald Dahl (1916-1990). Some of the dialogue, such was when Rat tells Mr. Fox that Mrs. Fox was the “town tart” may go over the heads of very little children, but may segue into conversations with a nine-year-old child for which the nine-year-old child is not ready. The films in this section of the list all have a level of violence or sexuality or scariness that makes them inappropriate for children.

[2] This is one animated short from the anthology film The Animatrix (2003) that is set between The Matrix (1999) and The Matrix Reloaded (2003). I did not like the other short films in the anthology.

The Field Museum of Natural History in March, 2018

The Field Museum of Natural History’s entrance pavilions are at opposite ends of Stanley Field Hall, which has a north-south axis. The two porticos (porches) are each reached by two successive flights of stairs.

Both porticos of The Field Museum of Natural History are flanked by two small porches, which each have two caryatids (columns in the shape of maidens). On the facade, the wings are adorned with a colonnade of attached fluted Ionic columns. The building’s fluted Ionic columns have volutes (spiral-scroll-shaped crowns).

Each portico of The Field Museum is tetrastyle in antis with double-ranked fluted Ionic columns capped by volutes. An entablature crowned by a pediment rests atop the columns. The continuous frieze in each case is relatively plain. The wave-themed acroteria that crown the pediments are borrowed from the Palace of a Fine Arts, which housed The Field Museum until 1920 and now houses the Museum of Science and Industry.

The Field Museum of Natural History isn’t “just” a museum. Visitors can watch scientists at work through windows at the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice DNA Discovery Center’s Pritzker Laboratory.

Mrs. Charles (Laura) Schweppe, a daughter and co-heiress of John Graves Shedd, the former partner of Marshall Field I who succeeded him as president of Marshall Field & Company, and who, under the guidance of Stanley Field founded the Shedd Aquarium, donated an exhibit of 100 bronze sculptures by Malvina Hoffman to The Field Museum. They represent every race, nation, and tribe in the human family (more or less). On January 9, 1933, the first group, Unity of Man, went on display.

In addition to the four figures Henry Hering (1874-1949) made for the corners of Stanley Field Hall, he also made the twelve plaster round lion head shield escutcheons that line it. These are replicas of the marble round lion head shield escutcheon he made for the pediment of the facade of The Field Museum of Natural History.

Christmas at Chicago’s Union Station

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a POLAR EXPRESS display in the Great Hall of Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a closeup of the THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is the headlamp of THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Union Station Company rail car loaded with super-size gifts is part of THE POLAR EXPRESS mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Union Station in downtown Chicago has emblems of Amtrak, Metra, and historic railroad companies whose routes they now operate like Burlington.

Cinemas sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) Helped Design

This is the Pickwick Theatre Building, an Art Deco movie palace and office building erected in downtown Park Ridge, Illinois in 1928.

The architects were Roscoe Harold Zook and William F. McCaughey. Sculptor Alfonso Iannelli, who also worked on the Adler Planetarium, contributed to this building.

In recent years, the Vlahakis family, who’ve owned the building for 50 years, have been able to turn the building into a multiplex by adding smaller theaters around the original auditorium. The latest one, with a screen four times the size of the one in the auditorium, will open in time to screen INFINITY WARS in May, if all goes well.

The Catlow Movie Theater is a cinema that opened in downtown Barrington, Illinois in 1927. The Tudor Revival style of architecture is not confined to the facade of the cinema. As with the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge, Illinois, sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) played a role in the design and decoration of The Catlow Movie Theater.