There’s a reason films about growing up have galvanized the cinema’s attention for so long, and there’s a reason we keep returning back to them. Everyone has gone through it: the first steps, the juvenile ecstasies, the aching disappointments, the dawning realization of oneself as both subject and object, the slow eroding of idealism in the face of a broader understanding of social systems and the world’s inequities. Of course, there are also biological changes; changes in appearance; in perception; in ideology. It is a process equal parts terrifying and utterly exhilarating, one that, when seen in retrospect, we come to understand as the nexus of our most important and formative experiences. Reliving it all, through the vicarious access of the screen, reminds us of just how unique, awkward, and altogether miraculous it was.
With Richard Linklater’s epic growing up tale Boyhood now in theaters and earning endless encomiums, I thought it would be an opportune time to take a look back at the cinema’s greatest tales of that most universal of experiences. These films come from all over the world, span nine decades, and deal in some major way with children or adolescents.
One final note: this is an extremely personal list, naturally. It does not pretend to represent all of the great films relevant to the topic. However, because it was so agonizing having to whittle it down to a measly ten, I’ve included alongside each entry other movies I feel are similar in theme, tone, or perspective.
[tps_title]10. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2002)[/tps_title]
Miyazaki’s films are not only about children, but they are often perfect for children, a magical combination that is at its most potent in this 2002 spellbinder. Yes, it is animated, but its tale of the trials and tribulations involved in growing up – rendered, fantastically, in Miyazaki’s trademark hand drawn animation – is as astute a depiction of childhood as any other. Chihiro is our guide into a world of spirits variously malicious and benevolent, ghastly and majestic. We tag alongside her as she works through this surreal fever dream, gradually building confidence, courage, and rectitude in a series of mounting challenges. Her liminal journey, a metaphorical transition between childhood precociousness and adult responsibility, is handled by Miyazaki with great compassion and clarity. He realizes that sometimes the best way to translate the adventure of growing up is to make it into an adventure.
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See also: The Red Balloon (1956), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Persepolis (2007)
[tps_title]9. I Was Born, But… (Yasujiro Ozu, 1932)[/tps_title]
Ozu’s films are so multigenerational, it is often easy to forget just how much of a knack he had for limning the delicate vagaries of childhood. In I Was Born, But…, he presents his funniest, gentlest, most disarming portrait of the attitudes and behaviors of young children, their capacity to tease, disobey, posture, and mimic captured in wonderfully humorous fashion. He understands their wily insolence and naïveté better than almost any filmmaker I can think of: just watch as the film’s two heroes, brothers played by Tomio Aoki and Hideo Sugawara, obstinately worm their way out of going to school, or see how credulously they believe their father, a paltry office worker, is the most powerful father in town. The film parses notions of social status beautifully, nudging these kids’ awareness closer to its disenchanting truths all the time, but not so much that they don’t still find time to scratch their behinds.
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See also: Little Fugitive (1953), Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987), Millions (2005)
[tps_title]8. Kes (Ken Loach, 1970)[/tps_title]
Films concerning kids – or a kid, rather – often trend toward depictions of children who are lonely and ostracized, and whose greatest challenge is just trying to belong. Ken Loach’s Kes is something of a paragon of these films; subsequent works like My Life as a Dog (1987), Ratcatcher (1999), and The Selfish Giant (2013) would almost be unimaginable without its influence. The astonishing David Bradley is 15-year-old Billy Casper, a sullen, emotionally (and often physically) bruised boy, who when not being bullied at school only has a home life of neglect and abuse to look forward to. He finds respite in a small falcon he acquires, a relationship that allows him to nurture a passion while imagining better horizons. Loach works in his favored mode of social realism, and it is deployed to gut-wrenching effect here: stripped of artifice or treacle, the film is a raw nerve, an impassioned look at a child grasping for surcease in an unforgiving environment.
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See also: Films listed in paragraph, as well as The Black Stallion (1979), Let the Right One In (2008), and Tomboy (2011)
[tps_title]7. Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle, 1971)[/tps_title]
This spot could just as easily be occupied by Malle’s 1987 masterwork Au Revoir les Enfants, but I chose Murmur of the Heart because it is the stranger film, and therefore embodies a particular teenage condition especially well. Benoît Ferreux’s Laurent personifies that condition totally: gangly, gauche, and mischievous, he is a febrile tangle of libido and imprudence, a jazz-loving, cigar-smoking enfant terrible who parties through a series of slightly off-kilter coming-of-age rites before landing in bed with, who else, his mother. The Oedipal subtext is twisted into an irreverent comic misadventure with poignant undertones; admittedly, the results are more than a little unsettling. But such is the often surreal, sometimes perverse odyssey of adolescence, and by the end of the film, all Laurent or anyone else can do is laugh.
See also: Other Malle film mentioned in paragraph, as well as Deep End (1970) and Stand by Me (1986)
[tps_title]6. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)[/tps_title]
Malick’s breathtaking opus, I understand, is not strictly about growing up. In fact, it is not strictly about anything in particular, yet it encompasses, ecstatically, rapturously, everything. It is equally as compelled by the celestial mysteries of the cosmos as it is by a child pattering awkwardly across the dining room; as inquisitive about notions of memory, consciousness, love, nurture, and death as it is about what it feels like to frolic in the grass with your brothers, or catch the hazy afternoon light on your skin, or read a bedtime story by flashlight. Malick locates the sublime minutiae of life within a sprawling canvas of eternity, in which the act of growing up is partially to acquire the weight of awesome yet terrifying knowledge. Watching The Tree of Life, indeed, is like experiencing it all over again, for the first time.
See also: Fanny and Alexander (1983), The Long Day Closes (1992)
[tps_title]5. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky, 2012)[/tps_title]
Chbosky directed this adaptation of his own very popular teen book, and watching the end result you realize there was no better man for the job. This is an earnest, nostalgic, and warmhearted coming-of-age tale, and yet it it’s also far darker and more honest than that would lead you to believe; it’s wholly relatable, yet it subverts all of our expectations of what a high school drama should look and act like. There is no cheap sentiment here, no gratuity or raunchiness or hokey lesson-learning, but a textured and complicated study of the succor of young relationships. Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, and a spectacularly wry, funny, and sad Ezra Miller make up the hugely winning principal cast, but other players – from Mae Whitman to Nina Dobrev – ensure that the humanism and wit of Perks resonate within all of its searching souls.
See also: The Last Picture Show (1971), Dazed and Confused (1993), Billy Elliot (2000)
[tps_title]4. The Apu Trilogy (Satyajit Ray, 1955-1959)[/tps_title]
Satyajit Ray was one of the great humanists in film, a man with a generosity and an empathy that could sit comfortably alongside that of Renoir and Ozu. His Apu Trilogy – consisting of Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and The World of Apu (1959), each one a standalone stunner – is perhaps his greatest achievement. Tracking the eponymous Apu from impoverished Bengal youth to prodigious student, to husband, and finally, to father, the 342 minute entirety of this epic bildungsroman proves to be a transcendent, transformative experience, both for the resilient Apu and for the audience gifted the right to watch his journey. Nothing particularly exceptional happens to him – he plays with his sister, watches trains go by, copes with the deaths of loved ones, feels the tide of time – but Ray films with such poetry and regards everyone with such patience and respect, every minute, day, week, and year in this life feels immortal.
See also: I Vitelloni (1953), Cinema Paradiso (1989)
[tps_title]3. Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009)[/tps_title]
Spike Jonze’s massively underrated, sort-of-adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s beloved children’s book captures childhood as a state of poignantly escalating acknowledgements. Bratty entitlement gives way to longing and regret; loneliness and agitation become the catalysts for introspection; and hot-tempered frustration with family and the world turns out to be typical kid short-sightedness, ameliorated by the therapy of working out issues through imaginary means. Max Records, fittingly cast as Max, gives one of the truest and most heartrendingly realistic child performances I’ve seen, an uncanny embodiment of all the childhood fears, frustrations and revelations we come to look back upon later with bashful recognition.
See also: Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
[tps_title]2. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)[/tps_title]
Arguably the defining film of the French New Wave (it preceded Breathless, after all), Truffaut’s portrait of a misunderstood boy who takes to petty theft when society all but fails him is one of the great masterpieces of the cinema, a haunting coming-of-age miniature that finds childhood, neglected and stymied by authority, held up indefinitely on an isolated seashore. Though it sounds somber, the film is brisk, kinetic, and imbued with enormous spirit, charged by the elegant and innovative camerawork of DP Henri Decaë. But it is Jean-Pierre Léaud, finally, who makes The 400 Blows ring with heartbreaking humanity. As Truffaut surrogate Antoine Doinel, he receives the film’s passionate diversions and dispiriting skirmishes with equal pathos, conveying the juvenile head-rush of an unsanctioned trip to the amusement park before staring into our souls, dispossessed and disempowered, begging us to feel his pain.
See also: Sister (2012), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), as well as Truffaut’s continuation of the Antoine Doinel journey in Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), and Love on the Run (1979)
[tps_title]1. Thumbsucker (Mike Mills, 2005)[/tps_title]
I said it was a personal list, didn’t I? The truth is, Thumbsucker is a film I would hardly expect anyone else to place on a list of this sort, let alone at #1. Yet the effect the film had on me – at 17, when I first saw it, aged the same as the thumb-sucking protagonist – was enormous. It was an emotional wallop the kind I haven’t experienced from a movie before or since, a catharsis of total acknowledgement and understanding. Watching it was a bit like confronting my own life, staring back at me, angsty, uncertain, and frustrated, all those tempestuous teenage emotions being relit like blazing fires. Though I didn’t suck my thumb or have the refined, otherworldly features of Lou Taylor-Pucci’s Justin Cobb, it was all too real. For me, no other high school-set film quite has the same gentle yet bruising poignancy, quite displays the discombobulating whirlwind of adolescence with the same gutsiness or heartache, or quite embodies a confusion that feels so immense it could topple you over. In the end, it reaches a release that feels both fantastical and, just maybe, kind of possible. That’s enough reassurance for someone still not sure how, or in what direction, they’re growing.
See also: Ghost World (2001), C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005)
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