The Story of the Moving Image, ACMI
We went to ACMI because the NGV had been a fizzer and we still had an afternoon to fill. The Story of the Moving Image exhibition with a four-year-old — what works and why you might still need your wallet even though the exhibition itself is free.
Visited July 2026
Where ACMI, Federation Square, Melbourne. Open daily. About ten minutes' walk from NGV International, which is how we ended up there.
Cost Free, including the Games Lab and The Lens
Ages Everyone's welcome. See the note below about the film near the end.
How long we stayed An afternoon, most of it in the Games Lab
Verdict A good place to end up, not a place to head for — at this age
Site acmi.net.au/whats-on/story-of-the-moving-image-exhibition
Not sponsored. It's free.
We went to ACMI because the NGV had been a fizzer and we still had an afternoon to fill.
The Lens got him a little bit excited. You're given a card as you go in (the Lens) and you hold it against a dot at each exhibit to "collect" it. Afterwards you can use it to log in online and see everything you collected. The kiddo took this extremely seriously. It gave him a job, and a job is something that often seems to help him engage. There were also a few things to look through, which he liked, but which can also be challenging height and/or coordination wise for little kids and so, can invite a bit of frustration.
The heart of it for us was the Games Lab and he probably could have happily stayed there for the rest of the day playing a game about a frog who was a detective. Two things about that though. He hadn't really used a PlayStation-style controller before and the camera control in particular was challenging for a while. We also couldn't hear the sound, so I read every character dialogue and hint out loud. This didn't bother him and the dialogue was fun enough to read to not be too annoying for me. But it did demand active engagement from me and perhaps the other people around us didn't find it as thrilling as he did.
The other bit that he was particularly engaged with was a film towards the end — live action mixed with several animation styles. I really should look up what it was. The Lens would enable it I think! What I really wanted to mention though is that the content is .... ambiguous, and I mean that as a description rather than a complaint exactly. Some of it read as adult to me but I don't think there were any signs or warnings around ratings. There was a violence to it, and something in the register of sexual content ... I think ... I genuinely could not tell you what I was watching. He was mesmerised. He asked a lot of questions and I answered them as honestly as I could without knowing any more than he did — they're hurt and can't get up, and the other one is trying to move them, and, more than once, I know as much as you do, kiddo.
I'm not saying don't check this one out. I'm saying it isn't signposted and you may want to be standing close by to judge for yourself.
The gift shop is smallish. Worth knowing that there are a few other shops in the same complex, and they overlap a fair amount with each other and with the one at NGV International — though there are some things you'll only find at the ACMI one. Be warned about the impact on your wallet, though. The cool things are definitely not cheap.
We came away with a Cubebot. It's a wooden robot strung on elastic that holds a lot of poses and then folds back down into a solid cube. It does more than it looks like it does, it's very well made, and it turned out to be a good travel companion.
Different ages will take entirely different things out of this exhibition, and there's perhaps less there for a four-year-old than we would have preferred. But it's free, it's central, and it's indoors.
