J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, both the original screenplay and the movie, captures a fantastical story that launches you back into the wonderful wizarding world of Harry Potter. Full of many new, adorable magical creatures and a mysterious dark force that haunts the streets of New York, Fantastic Beasts is fun and fast-paced, with plenty of humor and all the little nuances that make people fall in love with Rowling’s imagined world. Whether you see the movie, read the screenplay, or both, Fantastic Beasts is not something any Harry Potter fan will want to miss out on.
While I did not enjoy reading the screenplay very much, I absolutely love this story, and I think the movie is wonderfully put together. I read the screenplay shortly after I saw the movie, so when I read it I already knew exactly what would happen when, and I simply pictured the scenes from the movie over again. I usually enjoy books more than the movie in adaptations, because you can get inside the character’s head and typically find more details, emotions, and overall quality. That’s not the case with a screenplay, because even though it describes the scene and what the characters are supposed to do, you don’t get the body language, the expressions, or the true wonder of magic that the movie provides. In my opinion (and I never thought I would say this), seeing the movie is much more worthwhile than reading the screenplay, and there is no need to do both.
Fantastic Beasts is a whirlwind of an adventure, though I wished it had more connections to the Harry Potter world that we know in the main series. The story takes you back to New York City in the 1920s, following Newt Scamander and his adventures with magical creatures. Newt is best known in the Harry Potter series for writing a textbook, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, that the students study at Hogwarts. There were only about three other names mentioned that you know about prior to Fantastic Beasts, and even though it is set in a drastically different time, I think it would have been more fun and nerd-out-able if there had been more of a connection between the generations of wizards we know and love and the ones we are introduced to (like Cassandra Clare’s connections between her two series, The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices). You do, however, learn a good deal about wizarding history, and it’s very fun to see how events at this time relate to real-world history, with many muggles (or “no-majs” as they’re apparently called in America) afraid of potential witches, and everyone talking about how they fought in World War I.
Some of my favorite parts of the movie are all the little aspects of it, the small, humorous comments and goofy, awkward actions the characters make. I love all the details and intricacies of the set design that manage to make the movie appropriate to the period but also relatable to the wizarding world and the customs and inventions that they have. I enjoyed Fantastic Beasts so much that I really, really hope Rowling will give fans even more Harry Potter spinoffs in the future, whether that’s more adventures with Newt, other back stories, some set in the future, or the marauders era stories we’ve all been waiting for.
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