NEW YORK — Weeks of quarantine with children have a way of burning through a movie collection.
Even with the libraries of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, Disney Plus and others, there are plenty of households that have already had their fill of “Frozen” and overdosed on “Onward.” In the best of times, the canon for kids movies can feel limiting. Disney overwhelms.
But there’s a wider world of movies out there for young ones. We’ll assume they’ve already accrued a solid foundation of some of the essentials: “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “The Iron Giant,” Pixar, the Muppets, et cetera. So here’s a few slightly further afield options — all available to stream, rent or are free — that your kids might not have seen.
• “Fly Away Home”: The outlines of this 1996 film, with Anna Paquin and Jeff Daniels, suggest a familiar and schmaltzy kind of family movie, but it’s handled with such grace that it rises above the ordinary. Also, the geese are really great. A 13-year-old (Paquin) moves in with her estranged father (Daniels) in rural Canada after the death of her mother. She adopts an abandoned nest of goose eggs, raises them and teaches them to fly south for the winter. Available to stream on the Criterion Channel. The director, Carol Ballard, and the cinematographer, Caleb Deschanel, also crafted a movie of sweet child-animal camaraderie in 1979’s “Black Stallion,” which is streaming on Amazon Prime.