Fantasy Film

What it is

Fantasy film is cinema of the impossible made literal: wizards, dragons, talking beasts, cursed swords and whole invented worlds put in front of a camera. Its stories come from myth, fairy tale and, increasingly, from fantasy novels and games. What binds it together is less a plot than a promise: that the screen will show you something that cannot exist and make you believe it for two hours.

That promise has always depended on technology. Written fantasy needs only words; filmed fantasy needs a way to put a Dragon on screen that does not look like a puppet. The genre's history is therefore a history of effects breakthroughs, stage tricks, stop-motion, animatronics, rotoscoping and computer graphics, each of which briefly made new kinds of fantasy possible.

Origins

Fantasy is almost as old as film. In the late 1890s the French stage magician Georges Méliès began filming fairy tales such as Cendrillon (1899), using stop-trick cuts and double exposures to make people vanish and transform. The silent era produced grand spectacles: Fritz Lang's two-part Die Nibelungen (1924), drawn from the Nibelung legend that also runs through the Eddas, and Douglas Fairbanks's The Thief of Bagdad (1924), out of the Arabian Nights.

Sound and color brought Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and MGM's The Wizard of Oz (1939), fairy-tale fantasy aimed at families. After the war, effects artist Ray Harryhausen turned mythic adventure into a stop-motion showcase, from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) to Jason and the Argonauts (1963), whose sword-fighting skeletons inspired a generation of effects artists and filmmakers.

Evolution

For decades, fantasy was a minor genre. The 1970s offered the Arthurian satire Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and, on television, Rankin/Bass's animated The Hobbit (1977). The following year Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings used rotoscoping to put half of Tolkien's epic into theaters.

Then, in the early 1980s, as Dungeons & Dragons became a craze, came a boom. John Boorman's Excalibur (1981) brought Malory to the screen with operatic intensity; John Milius's Conan the Barbarian (1982) turned Robert E. Howard's pulp hero and Frank Frazetta's paperback covers into a hit, and a wave of cheaper Sword & Sorcery imitators followed. Fairy-tale fantasy flourished beside it: The Dark Crystal (1982), The Last Unicorn (1982), The NeverEnding Story (1984), Jim Henson's Labyrinth (1986), The Princess Bride (1987) and George Lucas and Ron Howard's Willow (1988). Several underperformed at the box office and found devoted audiences on home video.

Computer graphics finally closed the gap between page and screen. Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings (2001–03), designed by Tolkien illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe, combined New Zealand landscapes, miniatures and digital armies. The Return of the King won all 11 Oscars it was nominated for, including Best Picture, and became only the second film, after Titanic, to gross more than $1 billion worldwide. The Harry Potter films (2001–11), adapting J. K. Rowling's novels, ran alongside it, and studios rushed to adapt Narnia, His Dark Materials and more. Jackson returned to Middle-earth with a three-film Hobbit (2012–14). After a notorious flop in 2000, the game that had fed on fantasy film finally got a well-received movie of its own in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023).

How to tell it apart

Fantasy vs science-fiction film. Both show the impossible, but science fiction explains it with technology and extrapolation, while fantasy accepts magic on its own terms. The boundary blurs in science fantasy: Star Wars has spaceships, but also knights, a mystical Force and a farm-boy hero straight out of fairy tale.

Fantasy vs sword-and-sandal. The Italian peplum boom that followed Hercules (1958) filled the screen with musclemen, gods and monsters, but set them in a version of the ancient Mediterranean. Critics sometimes lump 1980s barbarian films into "sword and sandal," often as an insult; the useful distinction is that sword-and-sandal is mythologized history, while Sword & Sorcery and high fantasy build invented worlds.

Fantasy vs horror. Both deal in the supernatural. Horror uses it to frighten, and the monster is the point; fantasy uses it to create wonder, and the monster is an obstacle on a quest. Labyrinth's goblins are mischievous; a vampire film's vampire is the threat.

Fantasy film vs fantasy television. A film has two or three hours, so adaptations compress; The Lord of the Rings cut Tom Bombadil. Television's long serial form let Game of Thrones keep sprawling casts and slow-burning politics that cinema could not.

Where to start

• The Thief of Bagdad (1924): silent-era spectacle and the ancestor of the swashbuckling fantasy adventure.
• Jason and the Argonauts (1963): Harryhausen's stop-motion masterpiece.
• Excalibur (1981) and Conan the Barbarian (1982): the two poles of the 1980s boom, myth and muscle.
• Labyrinth (1986) and The Princess Bride (1987): fairy-tale fantasy at its most beloved.
• The Lord of the Rings (2001–03): the genre's summit, and the reason studios take it seriously.
• Honor Among Thieves (2023): a tabletop game's worldview, from owlbears to failed plans, translated to film.