Is Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them OK for kids?

So, I’ve only seen one Harry Potter film and that was the release from 2002, The Chamber of Secrets. As an adult watching it, having never read the book I was impressed, but not enough to read the books or see any more films from the characters. Flash forward 14 years and the prequel to the Harry Potter stories is out. But is Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them OK for kids?

Well, let’s start out by saying that it is a very good film. I knew nothing about the plot and that fact served me quite well as the magic, beasts and characters came into their own.  The only thing that I knew about the Harry Potter universe is that a muggle is a non-magical being and that the bulk of the previous Potter films had a kid-centered family focus.

As a review, I don’t mean that as a pejorative, it’s just that from what I saw in Secrets it was aimed at children. The true power of the Potter-Universe hadn’t been discovered at that point.  After that film I know that they got more inventive, a little darker at times and much more popular. It only makes sense, as the characters in the film got older, so did their fan base.

So, is Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them OK for kids?

There are elements of the film that will be great for 8 year old children. However, on the whole, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is fine for 10 year olds and in some cases 9 year old. It’s rated PG-13 and is really on the soft side of that rating. The film is such a soft PG-13 one wonders if the producers asked for it so that audiences wouldn’t think that it was too soft.  To this point: it’s worth noting what worldwide audiences have their ‘official’ age recommendations as. ‘G’ in Japan, Netherlands 9 and 12 in the UK/Canada and elsewhere.

Our 7 year old would’ve been too bothered by some of the action sequences which are fraught with tension. For parents there isn’t any discernible instance of bad language. The lead character, Newt does say ‘bugger’ a couple of times. However, that’s only offensive if you’re in the UK and even then mildly so in the British colloquial vocabulary.

If our oldest were 9, I would’ve stopped watching Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and immediately gone home and gotten him. For that age (given proper adult supervision…..) this is a great film, jammed with humor, good/bad decisions, plus a couple solid references to Hogwarts.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is Harry Potter without the kid-centric title figure. The content in the film is A-Ok with ages 10 and up, as well as adults-who are willing to grade the film on a curve. Take the middle school and upper elementary kids, they’ll love this film and you’ll be the cool parent, just possibly enough o make them forgive you for the dreck that you thought they would’ve liked. This one is the real family deal.