Your Kids Probably Know Patrick Stewart's Voice Better Than His Face
There is probably a child in your house who knows Patrick Stewart without knowing his face. He was a deer, a pharaoh, a pig, an egg-shaped alien king, a pirate-flavoured storybook and, once, a statue of Shakespeare. Family films put that voice to work for three decades, often in parts so short you would only catch him in the credits.
So this one is for parents who want to hand him down, and for grown-ups about to discover that the scary king from a childhood favourite was Jean-Luc Picard all along. We ranked the family films and narrations by one test: how well they work on a sofa with kids tonight. (His Professor X, his stage work and his video-game voices are covered elsewhere in this issue.)
The one adults should revisit
Children watch The Prince of Egypt for the plagues and the Red Sea. Watch it again as an adult and the scene that lands is the quiet one, where Stewart's Pharaoh Seti tells the boy he raised, voiced by Val Kilmer, that the Hebrews he ordered killed were "only slaves." Stewart plays it as a loving father calmly explaining the way the world works, and that is exactly why it chills. Ralph Fiennes gets the bigger arc as Rameses, but Seti is the reason the film's grief makes sense. It is our pick for the parent who wants to see what Stewart could do in a few minutes of screen time.
The one to watch with kids
The Pagemaster is the answer for ages six to ten. Macaulay Culkin plays Richard, a boy who lives by safety statistics, trapped in a library where the books come alive. Stewart voices Adventure, a swashbuckling book who looks like a pirate and talks like one, alongside Whoopi Goldberg as Fantasy and Christopher Lloyd as the Pagemaster himself. Bonus for the Trekkie parent: Leonard Nimoy turns up as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so Picard and Spock share a film that most fans never clocked. Its real subject is a scared kid learning to be brave, which is a fine thing to put in front of a scared kid.
The ones to skip, and the one to keep away from kids
Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return (he plays Tugg, a tree carved into a ship) and Spark: A Space Tail (the Flagship Captain) were both box-office bombs with Rotten Tomatoes scores under 20 percent. He is not the problem in either; the films are.
And a warning for anyone browsing his credits by poster: The Plague Dogs is animated, based on a Richard Adams novel, and features Stewart in a small role. It is also about animal research cruelty, and the later DVD carried a PG-13 for "emotionally distressing scenes." It is a serious film for adults. It is not a family night.
Where to start tonight
Small children: Bambi II, then let them ask who the voice was. Ages six and up: The Pagemaster, and point out the pirate book. Teenagers and parents: The Prince of Egypt, and wait for Seti's quiet scene.
