Parents' Guide to Mia and the White Lion

Mia and the White Lion is so captivating that it has the potential to create a new generation of animal rights advocates. For tweens, there's the appeal of seeing someone their age have an adorable white lion cub as a pet. Ten-year-old Mia loves, snuggles, and plays with Charlie on her family's South African animal farm; it's pure fantasy for animal fans. In a remarkable feat, the movie was filmed over the course of three years, so everyone truly ages: Mia gets braces and grows long and lanky, Charlie morphs from adorable cub to dignified beast, and dad John (Langley Kirkland) has a beard that ebbs and flows while his own mane starts thinning. The unusual technique may have been done for practical purposes (apparently the only way to keep a child safe with a lion is for them to grow up together), but it's also an amazingly effective way to draw viewers in tighter to the family's concern for Mia.

That said, while audiences are set up to worry about Mia's safety, Charlie's may be the bigger concern. There's an alarming twist, and while the story is fictional, the reveal was inspired by a real-life event. And it delivers a gut punch with purpose, to create shock and outrage at the current state of legal trophy hunting in South Africa. Mia and the White Lion doesn't address some of the other underlying issues at play in South Africa (especially the long-lasting impact of colonialism), but it achieves what even some of the best nature documentaries can't: personalizing the experience of loving an animal at risk of extinction.