Travels with Family Films - by Dea Birkett

It hasn’t been Christmas cards but holiday brochures that have been dropping through my front door by the dozen this week. I confess to plopping every one straight into the recycling. Does anyone really read these huge tomes of tiny pictures and complicated graphs of how to calculate the cost of your fortnight in the sun? I don’t. My kids certainly don’t. And, increasingly, they’re having a louder and louder say in where we go away.

Their influences aren’t glossy brochures but TV, books and, in particular, films. We’ve just seen Disney’s latest slick offering – The Princess and the Frog. The film was fine, but the setting was fab. All the love action happens in New Orleans, with very wicked Voodoo-practicing shamans and flighty Southern belles. Now the eight-year-old twins just want to pack their bags and head for Bourbon Street, hoping to meet a member of the Royal Family disguised as a small green amphibian. And I want to go there, too. Not to meet a Princess, but because I still carry the film’s soundtrack of trad jazz in my head, warming me up along the cold streets.

It was the same when we saw Pixar’s Up!. We all wanted to jump on a long haul flight to Venezuela, and search out Angel Falls that the film so dramatically featured. I hope this film-led holiday choice doesn’t apply to everything we see. On Boxing Day, we’re off to watch Where the Wild Things Are. I wonder where that will take us.