By Mr Hull's Movie Guides
Watch the Trailer
What's Inside the Guide
This is a 15-page classroom-ready resource.
Three complete question sets to suit different ability levels and purposes. Answer keys are included for all three sets.
- 40 full-sentence question set, in chronological order, tracking the movie from beginning to end.
- 30-question version, with 10 questions removed from the 40-question set.
- 30-question multiple-choice set with three options per question, well suited to younger students or language learners.
This part covers two activities.
- Nine key scenes illustrated and described from the movie, covering the beginning, middle, and end, each panel including a drawing and a short sentence explaining what is happening.
- A profile of any creature from the movie, drawing it and writing about it: describing its appearance, special abilities, habitat, and daily challenges, before imagining what it would be like to swap bodies with it themselves.
A themed word search with 15 words connected to the movie. Students first unscramble 10 words and then use 5 clues to identify the remaining words before finding them all in the grid. Answers are included.
Why Watch This Movie With Your Students
Here's what your students naturally take away from the movie, whether through themes, values, ideas, or perspectives.
🤝 Empathy as a lived experience. The body-swap premise makes empathy the literal engine of the plot. Students do not just hear about understanding others. They watch two characters forced to experience it firsthand, which makes the lesson land differently.
🐦 Extraordinary world-building. The Valley is one of the most distinctive fantasy ecosystems in recent animation. The Dzo, the magical creatures that move through the background of the movie, are genuinely unlike anything students will have seen before. It sparks imagination and descriptive writing in a way few movies can.
🐾 A classic buddy story with real depth. Ollie and Ivy start as natural enemies and become something else entirely. The arc of their relationship is earned and affecting, and gives students a clear structure to follow and write about.
💬 Themes worth discussing. Fear as a community's governing principle, the scapegoating of curiosity, exile, and mistrust are all woven into the story. These are rich topics handled with sincerity, not darkness.
🎨 A gift for creative work. The creature design in this movie is extraordinary. The activity asking students to draw and write about a creature of their choice is one of the most genuinely open creative tasks in any of my guides.
📺 Available on Netflix. No need for a DVD or a school licence. If students have Netflix at home, they can rewatch scenes, revisit moments for their written work, and engage with the movie beyond the classroom.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated PG.
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- Cartoon action and peril throughout, including chase scenes and moments of danger
- Scary animal characters including wolves and tree snakes that may unsettle younger or more sensitive students
- Themes of exile and a character being cast out by their own community
- Mild emotional intensity around themes of betrayal and tribal mistrust
- No language, sexual content, or substance use of any kind
📋 A free editable parent permission slip is available for this movie. It explains the educational benefits of watching movies in class and includes a space for parental consent. → Download Free Permission Slip on TpT (Free resource)
Note for educators: Movie details and age ratings in this post are sourced from IMDb, Common Sense Media, and Wikipedia to help ensure accuracy.
How My Movie Guide Helps You Teach It
Click your subject below to see how this guide supports it:
📚 English Language Arts Teachers
🗣️ ESL and ELL Teachers
🎬 Substitute Teachers and Cover Lessons
🏠 Homeschool Parents
🌟 Supporting All Learners A movie gives students a story to follow, and the guide gives them questions to work through as they watch. For students with autism, learning difficulties, and mild to severe disabilities, that combination provides a clear focus for the lesson and a concrete way to show understanding. The format can be useful in special education and learning support classrooms, where teachers need activities that give students a defined task during viewing. Find out more about why movies work for diverse learners.
if you teach a subject not mentioned above and need curriculum-specific materials tied to your standards, this guide will not replace those. It is best used alongside your own subject materials to keep students focused during the movie itself.
How These Guides Work: From Movie to Lesson
Watching a movie is not a break from learning. It reaches students through sight, sound, and story at once, engaging the brain in ways text alone does not, and the structured work around it is what turns the viewing into a genuine lesson. You can read the research behind this on the Why Movies Work page.
- A Teacher Notes and General Directions page opens the guide with a brief overview of everything inside: what the movie is about, then each part of the guide in order with a short description of what it entails. You know what to expect from the whole resource before you hand out a single page, so you can pick up the guide cold and teach it the same day.
- Answer keys are included for the comprehension question sets, so grading is quick and you are not rewatching the movie to check answers. Some guides also include example answers for the creative and written activities.
- Print and go: classroom ready, with no additional preparation needed. Print one the morning you need it and the lesson is ready.
- Substitute and first-timer friendly. A guide can be handed to a substitute or picked up by a teacher covering the topic for the first time. Nobody running the session needs to have seen the movie.
- Differentiated comprehension sets. Most guides include two or three question sets at different difficulty levels, and most include a multiple-choice option that works well for ESL and ELL students. One class set covers your strongest readers, your strugglers, and your language learners without separate prep.
- Activities that go beyond recall. Each guide includes structured activities that ask students to engage with the movie, not just watch it, ranging from creative and written tasks to discussion and critical thinking questions depending on the guide. That variety matters in a mixed classroom: a student who freezes on a written question set may show real understanding through a drawing or a creative task, and a confident writer gets room to go beyond recall. For the teacher, it turns a movie session into work you can grade: comprehension questions show whether students followed the plot, and the activities beyond them show whether they understood it.
