My daughter just turned 5, and has started to express an interest in live action movies. We watched Tarsem’s “The Fall” a few weeks ago, which is wholly inappropriate for kids, so consider my judgement flawed. She had a hard time following the plot.
I’m thinking about stuff like the new dolphin movie coming out, or Fly Away Home from the mid-90s. But there’s got to be stuff that’s less cheesy that she could also enjoy. Thoughts?
Why not ease her into it with WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?
or Mary Poppins
or Wizard of Oz.
My daughter is 6. She loves Wizard of Oz, Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, Jack and the Beanstalk (this was a live action movie that is only a few years old), Ella Enchanted, Enchanted, Neverending Story, Pippi Longstocking, Secret Garden, Little Princess, Little Hosue on the Prairie and probably tons more that I’m not thinking of.
She’s also a big fan of the Harry Potter series, Chronicles of Narnia, and Star Wars (original trilogy). She’s seen the first Lord of the Rings and loved it, but hasn’t asked to watch the others yet.
She started watching many of the above movies at age 3 or 4, so it’s not just been recent!
If you’re not insisting on live-action, Miyazaki’s a good bet for enjoyable, family-friendly animated movies that don’t suck:
[ul][li]My Neighbor Totoro[/li][li]Kiki’s Delivery Service[/li][li]Ponyo[/li][li]Spirited Away[/li][li]Castle In The Sky (if she can make it through the whole thing - it’s pretty long!)[/ul][/li]She’s probably too young for Howl’s Moving Castle or Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, but maybe in 3-4 years…
Don’t you remember any of the movies we saw as kids?
[ul][li]The Neverending Story (avoid the sequels, though!)[/li][li]E.T.[/li][li]The Dark Crystal[/li][li]The Princess Bride[/li][li]Flight of the Navigator[/li][li]Labyrinth[/ul][/li]… and if you’re not trying to avoid the cheese too much:
[ul][li]Inspector Gadget (Matthew Broderick) and, if you must, Inspector Gadget 2 (French Stewart)[/li][li]Any of the Herbie or Witch Mountain movies[/li][li]Disney’s Apple Dumpling Gang[/li][li]A Spaceman in King Arthur’s Court (AKA The Unidentified Flying Oddball)[/li][li]Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang[/ul][/li]There are some more recent films not yet mentioned above that might fit the bill as well:
[ul][li]Nanny McPhee (and its the sequel)[/li][li]Arthur and the Invisibles[/li][li]Night At The Museum (and its sequel)[/li][li]Mystery Men (two Ben Stiller movies in a row?)[/li][*]Jumanji and Zathura, which are basically the same story (both written by Chris Van Allsburg, the Polar Express guy)[/ul]
You mean the movie where a cute little toon gets tortured to death with a vat of solvents?
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[ul][li]Mystery Men (two Ben Stiller movies in a row?)[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Doesn’t Captain Amazing get turned inside-out in that movie?
Labyrinth seems like a good suggestion, though.
My son, who was six at the time, is probably the only person in the world to have ever declared Mystery Men the best movie ever. Still, he’s a boy - little girls probably wouldn’t think Paul Reubens’s super power is quite as funny.
My four-year-old daughter loved it.
Here’s another one I just thought of: The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark, starring a young(-ish) Elliott Gould and a (very) young Ricky Schroeder.
I remember seeing this as a kid and thinking it was pretty neat, and read that Gould considered it one of the finer movies he’d been in… less crass than M.A.S.H., I guess.
I loved, loved, loved Spirited Away, but I question whether it is a good movie for a five-year-old. I think it may be a touch on the scary side - if I showed that to my son, he’d have nightmares for a week. 
Old Yeller
Where the Red Fern Grows
Any of the Herbie movies. (Not the remake with Lohan, the originals.)
Cat in the Hat
Possibly Ghostbusters.
Any of the Beethoven movies.
Not sure how it might rate on the cheesiness scale, but Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey might be suitable.
I’d like to show Ghostbusters to my kids - they’ve enjoyed the animated The Real Ghostbusters - but there’s some language in there that isn’t really appropriate for a 5- and 7-year-old. I was twelve when it came out, so I figure my oldest has about five years before he’ll be ready to see it.
I don’t know how well they’d hold up over the years, but I also thought about The Gnome-mobile and Darby O’Gill and the Little People. My memories of those movies are vague to say the least. They may rate too high on the cheese-meter.
I can’t believe I forgot Pete’s Dragon, either. I had the LP that went along with the storybook.
What about all the girly horse movies, like Black Beauty or Flicka? How does the OP’s daughter feel about horses?
Where is the OP in all this, anyway?
Still here 
I’ll check out the horse movies. My wife watched Mary Poppins with the oldest, who apparently was bored out of her mind. I also dusted off my Star Wars set, based on RachelChristine’s suggestion, but we haven’t gotten around to that yet.
When I was a kid there were a whole bunch of movies aimed at me. Herbie, Benji, Lassie, and other one-word names ending in the “e” sound. The Incredible Journey, Escape to Witch Mountain, The Cat From Outer Space, Pete’s Dragon…
Thepopular theme seemed to be anthropomorphised animals and objects. Well, that’s an idea that hasn’t changed much in the intervening years.
It doesn’t end with an ‘e’ sound, but it does end with an ‘e’ (and is only one word, to boot) - how about the live-action Popeye starring Robin Williams as the eponymous sailor and Shelly Duvall as Olive Oyl? My brain seems to register faint feelings of happiness at having seen that movie as a child.
And a very attractive Genevieve Bujold.
Who, a couple years earlier, had been in Swashbuckler, an underappreciated pirate movie that’s good for kids. Teach them there were pirates in the movies before Captain Jack Sparrow.
Other recommendations: 7 Faces of Dr. Lao and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
I forgot about all those Disney live action features: The Boatniks, The Apple Dumpling Gang, The Cat from Outer Space, No Deposit, No Return, The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Ugly Dachshund, Snowball Express, The Barefoot Executive, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Now You See Him, Now You Don’t, Hot Lead and Cold Feet, Charley and the Angel, Blackbeard’s Ghost, The Love Bug, That Darn Cat!, Monkeys, Go Home!, The Million Dollar Duck.
"That’s no torpedo! It’s a salami!"
That movie actually came out before I was born, but I do remember seeing it. Maybe we could also add Annie (1982), although that might not fly if Mary Poppins was such a flop.
Oh, and it’s motion-capture CGI rather than live-action (pretty close? We all loved Avatar, didn’t we?), but Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are releasing a new Tintin movie around Christmas time this year.