Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

seen on 28 November 2016

J.K.Rowling's new venture into her magical world traces an episode in the life of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), who, by Harry Potter's time, is known as the author of a textbook with the same title as this film. At this stage of his life Scamander is a young maverick, earnest, bumbling, but with a mission to understand and protect fantastic beasts rather than destroy them. He arrives in New York in 1926 at the height of a conflict between magicians and ordinary people, and at a time when the wizarding world is reeling under the chaos caused by Grindelwald.

The situation allows for pointed tensions which parallel racial prejudice fuelled by paranoia or by religious-style bigotry, while following Newt and the mishaps caused by his escaping animals. He is aided by the two Goldstein sisters, the initially sceptical Tina (Katherine Waterston) and the heart-of-gold Queenie (Alison Sudol) and by a would-be baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), a 'non-maj' or muggle who is inadvertently tangled into the story. The darker side of the story centres round a creepy setup headed by Mary Lou Barebone (Samantha Morton) and her son Credence (Ezra Miller), while Colin Farrell provides the inevitable severe side of the wizarding world as Percival Graves, who is not all he seems to be.

It's all good fun, competently directed by David Yates (veteran of several of the Harry Potter films), but of course it lacks the sense of wonder generated by discovering for the first time the world Rowling has imagined. This means that the effects have to be bigger and the jokes a bit more diffuse. Indeed they are - but at one or two points the integration between effect and live actor looks decidedly amateurish. Furthermore, the restitution and repair of New York after the mayhem has to be somewhat perfunctory. It is always an easy get-out for fantasy situations when the wand is waived at the end to make everyone forget what they have seen. The device is more localised, and at the same time more integrated into the plots, of the Harry Potter books, but here seems too pat, while the partial exception implied for Jacob is a typical Hollywood feel-good moment that flies in the face of the severe logic that the magical world must remain hidden at all costs.

More films are projected but at this stage it is not clear that the world will be waiting for them as it did for the original Potter instalments.