Good morning Angels!
DW and I speant the requisite amount of moolah in TDS last week to score two tickets for NEMO (It was our first time back to the store in quite some time

)
I was off work yesterday so we dropped our 3 year old off at a friend's house and took our oldest DD to see it.
Normally DW does not attend because of the hassle of having to drop off our youngest and it hurts her back to stay in the seats for that long, but since we had two tickets anyway we just purchased the child ticket (and popcorn, drinks...) and went together.
Unfortunately, we did not make it far into the movie before DD wanted to go home.
She is 5 1/2 and has been to the movies a few times (Lilo & Stitch, Jonah, Spirit) without any incident but she was scared to death and wanted to leave.
The scenes with Bruce the shark and one other fish were too intense for her. (The animation was great for those scenes BTW.) I think it was just the factor of the screen being so large, the theatre dark, and the loud music and surround sound making it even more ominous.
So we actually left during the movie and went home. She wasn't crying or anything, but she was very adamant about wanting to leave.
I do not mean to infer that I do not think Nemo would be good for small kids; I'm sure most enjoy it, but she was already filled with seperation anxiety when he was taken from his father (No spoiler there...everyone knows that..right?) so everything else just built on it.
As a father I wanted her to stick it out since I thought she had probably already made it through the roughest parts and I did not want her to leave with the story unresolved in her mind. I thought it was important for her to see everything come out fine in the end (I assume it does)
But of course, I also didn't want to make her stay when she didn't want to and I felt guilty for even thinking about it, but I'm trying to think of which is "best" for her.
I'm sure we will get the DVD when it is released and maybe it will be a little less frightening to her on the small screen.