Using examples from Swedish children’s films from different decades, this article studies the forms, the functions, and the implications of adopting a consistent child’s perspective in cinema for children. In the pursuit of depicting the world as perceived by a child, films such as Hugo and Josephine, The Eighth Day, and Zozo borrow aesthetics from art cinema, resulting in a narrative and cognitive ambiguity unusual for children’s cinema. For instance, without marking the shift from outer to inner reality, dreams, daydreams, imagination, and hyperbole are inserted into the story. Also, sound and image are occasionally asynchronous, highlighting thoughts and emotions in a sophisticated manner. Furthermore, the rendition of passing of time is often distorted by fragmentation and extension, portraying a child’s subjective sense of time. Taken together, the film techniques employed in these films form a cinematic mode referred to as a child’s expressive realism that emerged in Swedish children’s cinema in the late 1960s, at a time when novel notions of the child and child culture were developed. By combining the theoretical frameworks of childhood studies and cinema studies, the article argues that the rendering of a consistent child’s subjective perspective in film works well to highlight children’s subordinate position to adults in our culture. Consequently, it is argued, multifaceted and ambiguous children’s films carry a great potential to affirm children’s rights to both experience and express the whole range of possible emotions, as well as to acknowledge children as capable filmgoers.