Alert! Classic Kids/Family Movies that are New to Netflix

Just in case you haven't seen or heard Netflix is streaming three classic kids/family movies that you might be interested in.

-Babe

-Balto

-Balto 2: Wolf Quest

An Animated Movie About the Nuts and Bolts of an Unjust Society: 20th Century Fox's "Robots"

This post contains affiliate links.

Call me weird, or whatever other adjective you like, but I really love it when movies or TV shows make a broader social/cultural/political point. Yeah, I want to be entertained, but most of the time I also want to feel like I've walked away from a piece of media with a little more perspective on life. That's why I love that Doctor Who practically screams about the value of the everyday person and that Marvel's Agents of Shield uses Daisy/Skye's powers to symbolically discuss how people relate to their own emotions. I was thrilled, then, to re-watch Robots (I was a young teenage last time) and discover that, despite being an animated movie with the requisite eight-year-old humor, it is solidly about socio-economic issues (such as corporate responsibility, the flaws in the medical industry, etc.). I'm recommending it this week because its totally entertaining, but still uses an imaginary setting to help its viewers better understand the world they live in. In this post, I'll begin with a synopsis of the movie and then dive into a couple of the topics I found most interesting.

Synopsis 

This 2005, 20th Century Fox movie (Rotten Tomatoes) follows Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor ), a poor robot with a huge dreams – to sell his latest invention to Bigweld Industries, a corporation owned by Bigweld (voiced by Mel Brooks), who is dedicated, above all, to making every robot's life better. However, when Rodney gets to the city, he finds that Bigweld has retired and a young executive named Mr. Gasket (voiced by Lowell Ganz) has taken the company's reigns. Mr. Gasket's aim is not to help disadvantaged robots, but rather turn them into scrap for profit. Rodney and his friends, including Fender (voiced by Robin Williams), Piper (voiced by Amanda Byne), and Lug (voiced by Harland Williams) must stop Mr. Gasket's nefarious plot before they all go to the chop shop.