Peppa Celebrates Chinese New Year

This feature hits the mark as a way to understand the holiday and why it's so important in Chinese culture. The live-action story follows a couple and their two children welcoming out-of-town grandparents to celebrate. During the course of the day, they talk and sing about the importance of marking the Lunar New Year with family, taking joy in cleaning up, and how to do crafts like making paper-cut designs and cooking dumplings. The elation of receiving a red envelope and participating in the dragon dance, and the spectacular fireworks display are all depicted with wonder, making the excitement relatable to a child. For the preschool set, it's ideal: bright, colorful, musical, and simple but thorough. Young children tend to prefer animation, so the film smartly breaks up the live-action storyline with a Peppa Pig animated short that introduces new characters the Panda twins. This format provides comforting familiarity to children who watch the Nick Jr. series and will keep them engaged longer. Still, 80 minutes is a long time for little ones to sit still (and for parents to endure).

While Peppa Pig is a British production, Peppa Celebrates Chinese New Year was intended for the Chinese market and then offered to American audiences as an afterthought. The film doesn't always connect with a Western sense of humor. And, as brilliant as the film is for kids who speak/understand Mandarin, it's not going to work as well for those who don't. The dialogue is entirely in Chinese; while English subtitles are provided, the words change at a pace that's too quick for newer readers -- and many English-speaking Peppa fans aren't yet reading at all. But the movie could be a great tool for kids who are studying Mandarin. Since Mandarin subtitles are displayed above the English ones, it offers a good opportunity to practice comprehension and truly appreciate what the Chinese New Year is all about.