Why expanding kids’ cinematic knowledge isn’t always a good thing:
(My nephew, Sheldon, is seven years old now, and my brother just sent me these comments on their recent Lord of the Rings viewing.)
Sheldon has really enjoyed the background features. I think it is opening a new world to him, in that movies are made, not simply captured from real life. We had one bad experience though . . . they talked about the cave troll in the first movie and said they deliberately wanted it to be stupid and pitiful, not evil. [Director] Jackson said he told the guys designing it to imagine that it had a mother, who had a meal set out for it and was waiting for it to return home. Well, Sheldon apparently took all that to heart, because the next time we watched the movie, he went into a lot of grief when the cave troll died. He’ll never be able to watch that scene again as a triumph of good vs. evil.