«Fantastic animals», a new saga in the wizarding world

Cinema Wednesdays - Jonas Follonier

We are back in the same fictional universe as the saga Harry Potter. Except that this time, the story takes place in New York in the 1920s—seventy years before the young wizard’s adventures. The American city is rocked by a series of inexplicable disasters. The wizards, just like the audience, quickly realize that these events have a magical cause. Thus, there is a central conflict in this spin-off series from’Harry Potter: the conflict between magicians and non-magicians.

A political backdrop

Among «non-magicians» (called «Muggles» by the British), anxiety and mistrust reign. The Salem Faithful sect is even fighting to exterminate wizards. As for the American Congress of Magic, the motto is simple: we must not reveal ourselves, in order to avoid a war with non-magical people. The setting of the first episode written by J. K. Rowling is therefore primarily political; historical allusions to the fate of the Jews, the witch hunts, and totalitarianism are, of course, present.

Amid the atmosphere of the interwar period, actor Eddie Redmayne (A marvellous history of time, The Danish Girl) plays a young man who is passionate about magical creatures and whose goal is to compile a catalog of them: Norbert Dragonneau, one of the characters mentioned in Harry Potter. In New York, where magical creatures are not allowed, Norbert faces two problems: finding the creatures he let escape from his suitcase and convincing Congress that they are not responsible for the attacks on the non-magical world.

After Harry Potter, difficult to do as well

Another character making the link with Harry Potter deserves our full attention: Gellert Grindelwald, a dark wizard who has been missing for two years. A former ally of Albus Dumbledore, with whom he planned to seize control of the world, this character—who will undoubtedly play a crucial role in the new film series directed by David Yates—doesn’t appear until the end of the first installment, following a very clever plot twist. Portrayed by Johnny Depp, Grindelwald doesn’t quite inspire the same terror as Voldemort, but he is nonetheless just as fascinating.

That instinctive urge I had to compare Fantastic animals to Harry Potter shows just how daunting the challenge is for J. K. Rowling: to do, if not better, then at least as well as she did with her global hit. In fact, two main audiences stood out at the screening I attended: one generation—my own—whose childhood was steeped in the world of’Harry Potter, and another generation, ten years younger, who know little or nothing about this world and are discovering it with their own eyes. Fantastic animals.

Provisional results

So if we are to objectively assess what emerges from this first film, the first thing to note is the quality of the casting (Eddie Redmayne is a better actor than Daniel Radcliffe), the well-crafted interactions between the magical world and the Muggle world, and a score by James Newton Howard that’s somewhat inferior to those by John Williams or Alexandre Desplat (fortunately, the main theme from’Harry Potter is taken up again at a few points), and finally a magnificent tableau of magical creatures.

In short, J. K. Rowling’s imagination, combined with David Yates’s talent as a director, makes the viewer—just like the character Jacob Kowalski—say: «I don’t think I’m dreaming: I can’t even imagine all this.» And that is the undeniable power of fantasy cinema—or, to be more precise, of magical cinema.

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Photo credit: AlloCiné