Why Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Rekindled my Love for the Wizarding World

Imagine, a little 10 year old Hermione Granger type, stepping into her school library looking for a way to avoid going outside during break time. She goes to the new releases and picks up a shiny new copy of a book that would probably change her life; Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. She sits down and starts to read. She was transported into this new world, a world of magic (and lets face it, as a kid already into Disney she was open to this sort of thing) and she was lost.

Obviously it was me. I anticipated every book release, the later ones I was there to pick up the copy at midnight then I’d stay up all night reading the book cover to cover. I was hooked. I had all the merchandise. I skipped school to go see the first movie on it’s release day. I was a true Harry Potter kid, that was my era. I have Harry Potter to thank for my friendship with Bee, without it we might never have met. She ran a Harry Potter inspired role playing website I joined while I was going through a tough time at school and I needed an escape. I even got my mum to read the books so I would have someone to discuss them with. I feel so blessed to have been part of that phenomenon as it transpired.

I have never fallen out of love with the books, I have read them each a few times since their publication. The last time was during Little Miss’ first year (meaning I’m probably due a re-read) but somewhere around about the Goblet of Fire release, I feel completely out of love with the movies and eventually it lead to my love for the whole wizarding world to dissolve almost completely. With each movie release I felt more disappointed with what they chose to include, the casting and the terrible acting. I stopped going to see the movies the day they were released, sometimes even waiting until weeks after to see them. I had very little interest in Pottermore and it took me years to go and do the Harry Potter Studio Tour. I had no interest in being one of these people scrambling for The Cursed Child tickets even though I do feel it’ll be better on the stage rather than the badly written fan-fic that was the book. I even wasn’t that impressed with The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios but I don’t know if that was down to the fact I had fallen out of love with everything connected to Harry Potter that wasn’t the original books or because at just three LM had very little interest in it. But still, the same love I had as a pre-teen and during the book releases had gone. I no longer cared for much merchandise unless it was repping my house (Ravenclaw for anyone interested). Unlike Disney which I was falling more in love with each day, I was leaving Harry Potter behind in my childhood.

That was until I finally watched Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them the other week (yes, only a couple of weeks before it’s DVD release because I’d gotten to that point of caring so little). And I loved the movie so much it relit a fire that I long thought had burnt out. I was in love with the wizarding world again.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the movie Harry Potter fans deserved from the beginning.

I don’t want to get into movie review territory, but Fantastic Beats and Where to Find Them isn’t based on a JK Rowling story, it’s based on an additional book she wrote for Comic Relief back in 2001. It’s supposed to be a reproduction of the text book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by Newt Scamander owned by Harry Potter. Rather than a story it’s supposed to be a work of non-fiction with doodles from the trio in the margins as they would have done with their own copies. The movie by the same name is about the author Newt Scamander and his coming to the USA. Apparently this movie that was released in November last year, is the first of five all about Newt’s adventures and will eventually include more familiar characters from the Harry Potter universe.

So why has this movie caught my attention? Why do I feel it’s rekindled my love for the Wizarding World? Well that’s what I’m going to go into now.

The movie is set in the 1920s in New York City. Anyone who knows me will know that’s enough to catch my attention. The 20s in the US is my favourite era and I’m a sucker for anything set in my favourite city in the whole world, New York. The whole movie has a vintage feel to it as well what looks like a sepia overlay from Instagram. It’s well done, so well done which is something I feel like Harry Potter struggled with. The wizarding and nomaj (the US name for muggles) worlds fitted seamlessly into one another although like the world at the time this movie is set the laws and segregation between the nomaj people and wizards are a lot stricter than the ones we see in Harry Potter’s world. This was another thing I really liked about the movie, I liked that it showed the contrast between the 90s when Harry Potter lived and went to school, and the 20s when Newt was in New York.

The casting was perfect. Yes, I feel like Harry Potter suffered as a lot of the cast couldn’t live up to the perfect picture JK Rowling had painted for us, where, aside from Newt & Grindelwald, the characters were either brand new or had only been mentioned in passing (such as Tina) in Fantastic Beasts. I try to not use this as an excuse too much as I’m a huge Tolkien fan and I never really felt the casting in the movies suffered because I had a predefined image of them in my head. The casting and acting was just bad on many occasions throughout the series. Fantastic Beats and Where to Find Them felt completely different, the acting wasn’t stilted. It felt real. It felt like the stories I read and the wizarding world felt like somewhere I wanted to be once again. I loved Eddie Redmayne was Newt, he was exactly how I imaged him to be since finding out he was once a Hufflepuff. For reasons I’m not going to go into, but I conducted substantial research on the original Fantastic Beasts book once upon a time and I could hear his voice perfectly and Eddie didn’t disappoint. Tina was the perfect contrast for him, and I loved Queenie, she was EXACTLY how I imagine women in the 20s. And finally Jacob, you couldn’t help but love him.

SPOILERS

I want to go into the protagonists of the movie but it probably ruins it for anyone who hasn’t seen this so please skip over if you don’t want to find out who the bad guys are. I LOVED that the anti wizarding world nomajs weren’t bumbling idiots like how the Dursley’s were portrayed. They felt more like the religious witch hunters of Salem and it added a new dimension that the original movies hadn’t explored. It made the movie feel like it had more depth and was more for adults. I no longer felt like I’d grown out of Harry Potter. The Barebone “family” were haunting and reminded me more of how I pictured the House of Gaunt (or Voldemort’s maternal family for anyone unfamiliar with the books since they basically cut all this from the movies). Graves was a fantastic character, you didn’t know if he was just an auror who took his job very seriously or if he did have an ulterior motive. In the beginning it did look like he was just abiding by the laws but once you saw him meeting with Credence Barebone you realise there was another plot line at play.

That second plot line was something else that made this movie feel so much more than the original Harry Potter movies. On the surface it felt like it was about Newt and his escaped creatures, but as it goes on you realise there is something much bigger that Newt, Tina, Queenie and Jacob has stumbled upon and this really sets up for the next few movies. The plot with the Obscurus was classic JK Rowling and it was so well thought out that I could even imagine what could be written about those scenes. The twist with who was the obscurus (although I saw it coming when they kept making a huge fuss about obscurus children not living past 10) was clever and completely perceivable. Then the two main plot lines tied up perfectly. Newt ended up getting all his creatures back safely and the obscurus mystery was solved. But then the best bit? Graves was actually Grindelwald! I applaud the writers, it was masterfully done. The Grindelwald comments were so low key, always in the background as everything else was unfolding but they were there and now Newt is on Grindelwald’s radar which gives you an idea of what could be coming up in future movies.. after all he’s considered the most dangerous dark wizard of all time (even though he was ended by Voldemort). He was the master of the elder wand (did anyone else see Graves give Credence a deathly hallows necklace?!) he wanted Dumbledore to help him in his quest for world domination. I wonder if Fantastic Beasts will head out in that direction, because what’s a Harry Potter movie without a despicable villain?

Maybe it’s because I went into Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them expecting to be underwhelmed that I ended up being more than pleasantly surprised? Whatever it was I felt like this was the Wizarding World movie that fans deserved. Or maybe it’s because now as an adult the adventures of three school children just doesn’t appeal.. especially on a screen. Seeing more of the Wizarding World from an adult’s point of view was undeniably a wonderful experience and something I really enjoyed about the movie. It was darker, gritty and well written, and this is before I even get into how much better the acting and script were for this movie. But ultimately, maybe it’s because I had no preconceptions. I didn’t know the story and I couldn’t even guess the direction it was going to go in. History of Magic is not a real text book that I can delve into to piece together past events in the Wizarding World, until Fantastic Beasts we all knew very little about Newt, Grindelwald and very little about the American Wizarding World but this movie gave us that, and it left me wanting even more.