We are starting young this year with a series dedicated to films for children that adults can also enjoy (most of which have been vetted by our resident two-year-old). Assembling the films of artistic geniuses such as Charles and Ray Eames, and admired directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Nick Park, our series explores the wonder and joy of children’s cinema.

To kick things off, we present a special presentation of Parade, a rarely-screened short film by the maverick American designers Charles and Ray Eames. Though best known for the sleek modernism of creations such as the Eames® Lounge Chair and Ottoman, the Eames couple made over 125 films, most of them involving toys.

Although the Eames’ “idea films” are more widely known — Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, for example, was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1988 — their first few films were all “toy films.” Parade, which highlights the duo’s eclectic design taste with its ensemble of miniature characters, stages a festive pageant in which dolls and toy robots prance around a toy city. Charles believed that it was not “an overstatement to say that without a film like Tops [about the art of top-making and spinning] there would be no idea films.” As with most of their creations, a sense of play defined their innovations.

“Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are precursors to serious ideas.” CHARLES EAMES

The Eames’ “toy films” were acclaimed upon release and won awards at festivals in London, Edinburgh, London, Melbourne, and San Francisco, among other cities. In 1970, when Charles gave a talk at the American Film Institute, he left an indelible impression on a young Paul Schrader, who went on to pen a paean about the genius of Eames’ films titled “Poetry of Ideas.” He wrote: “In film, the Eames aesthetic introduces a new way of perceiving ideas into a medium which has been surprisingly anti-intellectual…. He is able to bring innovation to an art which in the area of ideas is only spinning its wheels.”

Husband-and-wife team Charles and Ray Eames defined much of mid-century American design through the work of the Eames office. The Eames House and the furniture they populated it with remain staples of modern architecture and furniture. Their films, which they considered a natural extension of their work, were the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in the ‘70s; around the same time, Charles said that his films were “either a logical extension of some immediate problem we are working on, or it is something we have been wanting to do for a long time and can’t put off any longer.” Their toys, which they made because they wanted them for their grandchildren, are available for purchase via the Eames Office.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Parade is a film created by Charles and Ray Eames of the Eames Office in 1952. © 2025 Eames Office, LLC. All rights reserved.