Movies & TV Facts for Kids
Behind-the-scenes facts from film and TV
In 'Moana' (2016), the ocean itself is treated as a character with a personality. The animators created special simulation tools so that the water could make choices and react, rather than just behave physically.
'Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse' (2018) was made to look like a moving comic book, with deliberate imperfections like visible dots and motion blur on different frames. Animators had to break many standard animation rules to achieve the groundbreaking style.
When you hear rain in a movie, the sound was almost never recorded at the same time as the picture. Sound designers record rain separately in recording studios and add it to the film in post-production, often using recordings from archives.
Nine of the actors who played the Fellowship of the Ring in the 'Lord of the Rings' films got matching tattoos of the number nine in Elvish script after filming finished. Only one actor, John Rhys-Davies (Gimli), declined — his stunt double got it instead.
'The Wolf of Wall Street' (2013) holds the record for the most uses of the word in a non-documentary film, with 569 occurrences. The cast and crew reportedly had so much fun on set that many scenes ran far longer than the script intended.
During the making of 'Toy Story 2' (1998), someone accidentally ran a delete command that wiped out 90% of the film's data. The film was only saved because one of the animators had taken a backup copy home on her personal computer.
'Citizen Kane' (1941), directed by Orson Welles when he was just 25 years old, is frequently ranked the greatest film ever made by critics. Yet it was a box office flop when first released and its director struggled to make films for the rest of his life.
Pixar's 'WALL-E' (2008) features almost no dialogue for the first 37 minutes of the film. Director Andrew Stanton was inspired by silent films and wanted to prove that story and emotion could be conveyed without words.
James Cameron is an accomplished visual artist and drew many of the concept sketches for 'Titanic' himself, including the famous scene of Jack drawing Rose. The hands shown drawing in the close-up were actually Cameron's own hands.
C.S. Lewis was inspired to write 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' partly by a large wardrobe in his house that he and his siblings used to climb inside as children. The wardrobe still exists and is on display in Belfast.