When J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book came out in 1997, the main character was a 10-year-old, and his adventures were appropriate to kids that age: he went off to magical wizarding school, made friends, survived bullying, played sports, broke some rules and learned some secrets, and eventually found out that his mom’s love protected him from the scariest things in his world. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone had its dark and creepy elements, but it was fundamentally a book about and for children. But over the course of the next 10 years and the next six novels, Harry Potter and his friends grew up, alongside the series fans who first latched on to Rowling’s work in grade school. Characters fumbled through teenage romances. Friendships formed and collapsed. Physical and emotional torture and outright murder became fundamental elements of the series. And as Harry himself endured an angry, troubled adolescence, the story’s stakes kept rising around him.
The new movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the first full-length Harry Potter franchise story that leaves behind childhood adventure and teen angst, and expressly deals with adult characters living in an adult world. And there has to be some appeal in that for longtime series fans: in theory, it’s a sign that the series has continued to mature with them. With the original Potter books, Rowling created a vast and elaborate setting, but then had to bend it all around the narrative needs of one Chosen One stereotype. Harry’s fight against the evil wizard Voldemort affected their entire magical world, but putting a teenage magic-school dropout at the forefront of a vast and complicated war often meant reducing the Potterverse to one hero, his friends, and a useless backdrop of frightened bystanders and fumbling, impotent bureaucrats. The effort to keep Rowling’s world Harry-sized kept making it seem smaller and dimmer than it should be. Fantastic Beasts, which takes place decades earlier and moves the action from Britain to New York, should be the series’ chance to move out of Harry’s skinny shadow.
And to some degree, it does. Fantastic Beasts is a cluttered film, for various reasons — one is the wearying effort, so common to current franchise films, to set up a huge ongoing narrative at the expense of the current one. Fantastic Beasts is planned as the first of a five-film series, and it’s easy to see all the loose threads being thrown out for later films to pick up. But the movie, scripted by Rowling and directed by Harry Potter film series veteran David Yates, often feels like it’s overcrowded because Rowling is celebrating the freedom to expand her setting past the borders of Harry Potter’s experience and his immediate story needs.
Eddie Redmayne starts as Newt Scamander, a shy, fumbling, potentially on-the-spectrum Brit visiting 1926 New York City on a mission involving his fascination with magical animals. (The series sprung out of a charity spinoff chapbook Rowling wrote in 2001, as a fictional “magizoology” textbook used by Harry Potter and his classmates. It’s a taxonomy of fictional magical critters, several of which crop up here.) Newt wants to attend his magical suitcase full of CGI creatures in peace, but a chance encounter with non-magical wannabe baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler, in comedy-relief-witness mode) and anti-magic fanatic Mary Lou Barebone (Samantha Morton, in possibly her most simplistic, thankless role ever) sets some of his charges free, and he has to recapture them all, pokémon-style.