Like science fiction, the term “fantasy” is loose and means many things to many people. Like sci-fi there are tons of sub-genres of various types as well. There’s high fantasy and low fantasy, soft fantasy, contemporary fantasy, sword and sorcery, Bangsian fantasy and fairy tales. You could even consider superheroes as part of the fantasy genre, though like most people I put that as it’s own separate genre. The point being that we all have different definitions of what constitutes “fantasy”. For example I’ve seen Albert Brooks’s masterpiece Defending Your Life listed as fantasy because it deals with the unknowable afterlife. For whatever reason, that doesn’t make sense in my mind as “fantasy”, even though I can logically understand why someone would consider it as such. So there might be a movie or two here that you don’t consider fantasy, I’d love to hear from you, what’s your own list? What do you consider to be fantasy or not?
There is also such a wealth of cinema to mine in the fantasy genre that I have split my initial list into two lists, this one covering live action movies, and next week's list covering animated movies.
Honorable Mention: The Neverending Story
Just missing the list is this classic from my childhood. Not a great adaptation of the book, which is a terrific fantasy novel, but a fine movie all its own. A triumph of set design, costumes, practical and visual effects, but not as successful in narrative (which is where its deviations from the book show, as the book is a cycle, which is where the title comes from), it's still a movie that deserves a place on this list.
10. Paperhouse
A type of movie that doesn't even really exist anymore, but should, 1988's Paperhouse is the best kids horror movie ever made. It's about a little girl named Anna (Charlotte Burke, who sadly only made this one movie and gives one of the great child performances here), an English girl suffering from glandular fever. She one day draws a picture of a house, with a sad looking boy in the window, only to find herself transported there in her dreams. This dream world has a strange logical nature to it, such as when we see the boy named Marc in the house, whom Anna meets and invites outside to play, but finds that he can't walk. Of course he can't, Anna didn't draw him any legs (nor any stairs for her to come up to him). This starts to take a dark turn when we watch Anna draw someone and then angrily cross out their face when she doesn't like it. What ramifications will that have? What horror did she just impulsively create? Anna also gets told by her doctor about a paralyzed boy patient she has named Marc. Is the fantasy world bleeding into the real world? Are Marc and Anna entering each other's dreams? What is happening? Director Bernard Rose took great inspiration from movies like Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter to create a dreamlike horror film that isn't predicated on blood or gore, but on psychological tension and the vulnerability of childhood and dreams. I've seen Paperhouse called "the thinking person's Nightmare on Elm Street". It's so effective because of the atmosphere that Rose creates as a filmmaker, where often the "real world" stuff can feel as dreamy as the fantasy stuff. Looking back I am very surprised that Rose didn't go on to a huge career. He was a prominent music video director in the 1980's, and although he has made some movies that have followings, like the horror film Candyman, he never became the star I would've anticipated he'd be after starting his career with this masterpiece. Sadly, Paperhouse has never been released on DVD in the US, but I bet you can find it on iTunes. Please do.
9. The Red Balloon
I remember as a child being fascinated by silent passages in movies. I am still to this day intrigued by completely visual film making. I think this all started with French director Albert Lamorisse's sweet 1956 masterpiece The Red Balloon. It was shown throughout American elementary schools from the 60's to the early 90's (and should still be shown to kids today, if you ask me), and I was one of the many children that the movie made a huge impression on. It's the story of a young kid who finds a balloon caught on a light post on his walk to school. He frees it and soon finds out the balloon has a mind of its own, which it uses to follow him to school and play games with him and be the friend that he so desperately needs.
Of course, one of the calling cards of the movie is its script. It won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, despite having lines of dialog in the single digits. It's nearly silent (and could've been completely had Lamorisse wanted to do so), and is all the more magical for it. It's a simple movie, but one that plays to our recollections of childhood and the feelings of finding a new friend. The Red Balloon is one of the great gifts of cinema. Its magic realism and understated brilliance has kept me coming back to it over and over again through the years. It gives me that wonderful fuzzy feeling inside that you just get from so few movies. Or, as critic Owen Gleiberman so wonderfully put it, "More than any other children's film, The Red Balloon turns me into a kid again whenever I see it...to see The Red Balloon is to laugh, and cry, at the impossible joy of being a child again." You could easily class The Red Balloon as "soft fantasy", as it's not a world of elves and dragons or anything, but a movie about a sentient balloon is definitely fantasy.
8. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
The best movie by Terry Gilliam, a filmmaker I don't typically much care for. But when I watch this movie, I miss Heath Ledger more than ever. He reached great heights with his Oscar-winning performance in The Dark Knight, which was his final completed performance, but not technically his final role. He died midway through re-teaming with his The Brothers Grimm director (and former member of Monty Python) Terry Gilliam in this dark comic fantasy. The role Ledger left behind was that of a mysterious stranger who joins up with the supremely odd theatre troupe of the title character. Thanks to the story, one involving a magic mirror that allows people to enter into a world of imagination partially controlled by Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer, at his best), Gilliam was able to recast Ledger's role during the sequences inside the Imaginarium. He recast it with three great actors who wanted to honor Ledger's memory, and took on the roles without payment (all three deferring their money to Ledger's daughter Matilda). Gilliam has said that many actors (including Tom Cruise) offered their services, but he wanted to "keep it family" with actors whom Ledger had befriended in his life, therefore the casting of Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell to complete the role.
Gilliam has always been known for his distinct imagery (often in a fantasy setting), but is a filmmaker I usually find short on story and character. Here, he is not. As I said, I've not typically been a fan of Gilliam’s, even his celebrated visuals, but this movie made me reconsider (I’ve since revisited much of Gilliam’s work and found that my dislike of his non-Monty Python movies hasn’t changed just because I love this one). Although the CGI isn't perfect, we're not always convinced that the actors and the effects are occupying the same space, the overall feel and impact of the images works the way I assume Gilliam wants it to. And that’s because of the amazing and dreamlike imagery in the Imaginarium. The fact that we don’t believe the effects actually ends up elevating the dreamlike state of those scenes.
7. Midnight in Paris
Owen Wilson plays the lead role of hack screenwriter Gil Pender. He churns out crappy Hollywood movies but yearns to write a book and be important and worthy like his literary heroes. He's in Paris on vacation with his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams), they tagged along with her parents who are there on business. While the clock strikes midnight one night, a car pulls up and a jovial group of people pull Gil in with them and take him to a party. At the party he sees a guy who looks mysteriously like Cole Porter singing songs to adoring listeners, and meet a couple who introduce themselves as the Fitzgerald's, Scott (Tom Hiddleston) and Zelda (Alison Pill). Scott takes a liking to Gil and offers to take him along to a bar they're going to to meet up with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll). Gil finds himself magically drawn into the world of 1920's artistic Paris, a time and place he'd dreamt of his whole life. He runs across Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), Luis Bunuel, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Picasso, Matisse, and TS Elliot, among others during the few extraordinary nights he's able to return to this magical place. He also happens to run across the beautiful Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who has Picasso, Hemingway, and legendary bullfighter Juan Belmonte fighting for her affections. Gil falls for her just like the others do as he dreads the inevitable end of his miraculous journey through 1920's Paris.
Owen Wilson is one of the better actors when it comes to playing the traditional "Woody Allen" role. He has a bit of Allen's neurosis, while also keeping his strangely laid back charm, and some shades we've not seen from him before. His ability to portray Gil's hopeless romanticism, while those around him try to destroy it, is essential to making the movie work. Wilson's Wedding Crashers love interest McAdams is pitch perfectly hateable as Gil's relentlessly unsupportive fiancee. Marion Cotillard is as luminous as Paris itself, making it unsurprising that so many of these artists are inspired by her as their muse.
The script is Allen's strongest since Sweet and Lowdown, the sweetness and romance fully coming through without being forced in the slightest. The gorgeous photography by ace cinematographer Darius Khondji brings an extra amount of warmth to the movie that fits in nicely with the unassuming romanticism Allen's going for. I also like Allen's comments on coming to terms with the times you live in and not getting bogged down in the nostalgia of the past, because the people in that time probably didn't think everything was so great, and idealized an era previous to them. Even with a little bit of intellectual comments on nostalgia, it's still hard not to think of this movie as simply one of the sweetest love stories I've seen in a long time, and always glad to see one of my favorite filmmakers working at such a high level.
6. Harry Potter series
The Harry Potter books are among my favorite pieces of art in existence. I first starting reading them when the fourth book came out and have read the whole series so many times I stopped counting (I stopped counting after it reached a dozen). I was more excited to see the first movie in theaters than I’ve ever been to see any other movie. And I like it. Didn’t love it, but liked it. Over the course of the next 10 years, as all 7 books were made into 8 movies, the series really became a touchstone for a generation. Although the best of the movies isn’t as good as the worst of the books, the movies have a lot of issues and problems, a couple of the movies are poorly directed, there are too many changes made in adaptation that don’t make sense, etc. Still, I love this series enough that if I don’t feel good, I will throw on one of the movies and enter again into this wonderful world that JK Rowling created for us. I didn’t have the heart to just pick one movie to represent the whole series and just thought “fuck it, it’s my list and my blog, my rules, I’ll just pick them all.” So I did.
5. Fellowship of the Ring
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I had to force myself to finish the Lord of the Rings books. While I admire J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagination and dedication to creating his world, he gets too caught up in showing off what he’s creating and neglecting to tell the story that we’re actually wanting to read. If Gimli and Legolas are running through a field, I absolutely do not want 2+ paragraphs about the history of that field and all the battles fought there and blah blah blah, because none of that shit affects the story I want to read. There is no narrative flow to the novels because Tolkien has to keep having these asides that have no bearing on our story, but just show off how much work he put into this world building. So when the books are pared down to make movies, Peter Jackson stripped away all that fat to make what the books were at their heart, an action adventure story in a fantastical setting. But even Jackson wasn’t perfect, as the second and third movies both have way too many issues for me to care as much about the series as a whole. But our entry point, Fellowship, is an extraordinary movie in nearly every way. It’s epic and emotional and funny and exciting and everything it should be. Ian McKellan, Viggo Mortensen, Elijah Wood, and the whole bunch. Everyone fits their role perfectly and even though it doesn’t have a real conclusion, it’s still the only one of the three movies that feels like a total narrative. It’s the only one I ever fee compelled to go back and watch. And when it’s over, I don’t have any desire to watch the other two. I’ve seen Two Towers and Return of the King twice, and that’s enough. I’ve watched Fellowship at least 5 times and will continue to watch it again and again. It’s one of the great fantasy movies ever made. 4. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
One of the handful of funniest movies ever made, Holy Grail is a right of passage for every teenager (especially boys, as girls don't seem to respond to Monty Python quite as well, on average). It's not often you see a successful fantasy comedy, but this take on the Arthurian legends is probably the most quotable, and quoted, comedy of all time, and with good reason. Everything Python ever did was messy, with some bits that work and others that don't, but they were never as consistently hilarious as in Holy Grail. Surprisingly well shot on a shoestring budget, it's a good old fashioned "let's throw everything we can at the wall and see what sticks" kind of comedy, with musical numbers, animation, failed musical numbers, storybooks, narrators, and many more techniques showing up on the episodic quest for the Holy Grail. And none of that even covers the characters, sequences, and lines that have entered pop culture over the past 35+ years.
There's much debate among Python fans as to whether this or their subsequent movie, the controversial Biblical tale Life of Brian, is superior. For me it's easy. Life of Brian obviously benefited from the Pythons experience making this movie, as it's more professional looking and was made on a significantly higher budget. It's a good movie, with many hugely hilarious and wonderfully quotable lines. But it's no Holy Grail. Holy Grail is the best comedy of the 70's, period.
3. The Princess Bride
There are probably only two movies as quotable as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and this is one of them (the other is the great This is Spinal Tap). Based on the book by ace screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men), which he adapted to the screen himself, it's a movie that I can remember exactly where I was when I first saw it, and I was only 5 or 6 years old. It's been one of my most watched movies since then, and that's a very common story for the movie's many fans.
The casting is perfect, not a single character could've been played any better. Cary Elwes and Robin Wright make a wonderfully idealic couple in Westley and Buttercup, but of course everyone knows this movie belongs to the supporting characters. Mandy Patankin has said that people still to this day come up to him on the street (multiple times a week) and say "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." and he never gets tired of it. Wallace Shawn is inconceivably good as Vizzini, and Billy Crystal and Carol Kane are hysterical in their brief time. Chris Sarandon is wonderful as Prince Humperdink, and his sidekick Count Rugen is played with surprising coldness by comedy genius Christopher Guest. The biggest surprised to me when I watch it, even after nearly 30 years of seeing it, is the wonderful performance from Andre the Giant as Fezzik. It's not like there are many giants in the world that could've acted the part, and reports are that he could do hardly any of the physical things the role required (he had enormous back pain at the time, to go with his enormous size), but his ability to imbue Fezzik with warmth, humor, and a certain way of reminding us he was still big, strong, and scary. And of course there's Fred Savage as the spoiled sick little brat, and Peter Falk as his grandpa reading him the story. Both perfect.
It's a storybook movie that actually feels like a storybook, and is a movie that I hold other such fantasy movies up to in comparison, whether they're comedies or not. Because The Princess Bride is so perfect, it's one of my "sick movies", something I always watch when I'm down or sick, it's so easy to watch because it makes me feel so good to see it again. To spend some more time with these characters and the terrific writing. And it's one of those rare movies that I loved as a kid, and go back and watch it as an adult and love even more.
2. The Wizard of Oz
Another one of those magical childhood movies that you go back and revisit later in life, hoping it holds up after the years, and find that it's better than you ever thought it was. Oz is a wonderfully realized place full of magic, mystery, impeccable sets and makeup, a wonderful star turn from Judy Garland, and maybe the greatest villain in movie history. I was floored on my last viewing by how transported I was by this movie. There's not a ton to say about it, since it's probably one of the most written about, studied, beloved movies in cinema history. I've seen it countless times since I was a kid and yet it still holds magic and wonder for me.
1. Pan's Labyrinth
Guillermo del Toro had shown promise with some of his earlier films, most particularly in the comic book adaptation Hellboy, and his ghost story The Devil’s Backbone. But he had never melded his extraordinary talents as a visual stylist with some storytelling craft as well as he did with his 2006 masterwork Pan’s Labyrinth. He wrote a simple story about a young girl escaping from her hellish life into a fantasy world that may not be any less brutal, but tells it with an elegance and assurance that he’d only hinted at before. The effortless flow of the story makes the simplicity all the easier to enjoy, with the only character who isn’t really a defined good guy or bad guy being the Faun who opens up this alternate world to our young heroine.
Movies with children as the lead characters can often get bogged down in “cute” moments from the young actors who fail to give much in the way of a real acting performance. Pan’s Labyrinth is not one of those movies. Premier among the movie’s many pleasures is the central performance from Ivana Baquero as Ofelia. The rest of the cast is littered with wonderful performances as well, but Ofelia is our guide and needs to be something truly special. Baquero is most certainly that. The film’s detractors often point to the simplistic nature of the movie as a negative, usually pointed at Sergi Lopez’s villainous Captain Vidal as the biggest offender. So what? So he’s obviously the bad guy, and he’s a really, really bad guy. He’s not even the most memorable villain, as the infamous Pale Man sequence has demonstrated. Regardless, do we denigrate The Adventures of Robin Hood because Claude Rains is so wonderfully hissable, or the Harry Potter movies because Voldemort is one-sidedly evil? No, we enjoy the obstacle for our heroes to overcome. And the movies are better for it.
The feeling that often stays with me after watching Pan's Labyrinth is one of a beautiful melancholy. The Javier Navarrete score is gorgeously haunting, and fits the movie perfectly. The rich cinematography from Guillermo Navarro, as well as Del Toro’s developing compositional brilliance, leaves us with some stunning images. One thing I would like to address that Del Toro purposefully leaves open to a bit of interpretation is whether or not this fantasy escape is all happening in Ofelia’s head. There’s a shot near the end where Vidal runs into Ofelia talking to the Faun, but he can’t see the Faun. Del Toro has said he meant this as adults aren’t as in tune with the fantasy world as children, more than that the fantasy world doesn’t exist. And that’s the way I’ve always looked at it as well. I’m more one who believes in the fate of the fig tree as an indication of what was real and what wasn’t. What is very real though is that this is one of the great movies I’ve ever seen, definitely my favorite fantasy movie.
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