Muzzy is the internationally acclaimed BBC language course for children. It uses animation to create a cartoon world of humorous princesses, benign monsters and colorful mishaps to engage viewers in an effortless use of the language. Muzzy is a child-paced immersion in story and sound that introduces vocabulary, proper sentence construction and accent, relationships and "thinking in another language" in a kind of fractured fairy tale that easily bears repeat watching. It's aimed at toddlers to tweens, but unstuffy adults will love it, and learn from it, as well. Muzzy comes in many languages and now offers as many as five of them interchangeably in one program. French is one of the original languages of the series, which is distributed by Early Advantage.
Little Pim DVDs were created by the daughter of the founder of the Pimsleur audio language programs. Julia Pimsleur Levine, a documentary filmmaker and mother, worked with a neuroscientist to develop an infant-to-young-children language immersion course. Little Pim is a cartoon panda who teaches in a mix of animation and live action in five-minute segments. Small students of French watch panda-introduced videos of children in a series of recognizable everyday activities. Each DVD covers 60 words and phrases typical in toddler talk---the child learns French expressions right alongside primary language learning, with lots of repetition and time for parent interaction. This one is definitely for baby linguists, but parents who watch and guide their little ones in the panda adventures will pick up some very basic French, too.
French in Action is 52 half-hour video lessons for the rank beginner. Created by Dr. Pierre Capretz, former director of the Language Laboratory at Yale, the course is total immersion in practical day-to-day activities delivered in full-speed colloquial Parisian French. It teaches the sound and feel of the language with the aim of getting the student to speak well enough to be understood. A textbook, workbooks and audio cassettes clarify grammar, structure and pronunciation skills. But you can just work through the videos in order several times until you have mastered them---older kids, teens and adults will find it pretty painless. If you want to translate Moliere, you'll need a more formal language course. But if you want to get around Paris, this could do it. The course is a bit expensive, available from a number of online vendors, but it has been broadcast free on PBS several times and can be found, lesson-by-lesson, on YouTube.