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The Joy of Imagination and Childhood Whimsy Fuels The Magic Faraway Tree

Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree books were written in the 1930s and 40s, and watching their first film adaptation many decades later, you can really tell. It’s style and language of fantasy are very quaint, derived more from children’s fancy and fairy tales than the more sophisticated storytelling that came about in the wake of The Lord of the Rings. There is a real charm to those kinds of stories -At the Back of the North Wind, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and perhaps the big one Peter Pan. But it is hard to imagine them connecting now in quite the same way.
Writer Simon Farnaby and director Ben Gregor make their best attempt though. And Farnaby has experience translating old British children’s literature through his involvement in the Paddington movies (he wrote Paddington 2 -the best received of them) and Wonka. And certainly The Magic Faraway Tree has a similar earnestness to it, unbothered by the cute or saccharine elements of its premise, using smart but kid-friendly humour as a means of diffusing it and rendering its story more palatable. It’s a winning formula and for the most part works well enough here, though the story’s whimsy and thin plotting can be overpowering at times. What could you expect after all with a chief character unironically called ‘Moonface’?
The movie comes at these old stories from a very modern angle –our twenty-first century dependence on technology, specifically amongst children. Tim Thompson (Andrew Garfield) is very disillusioned by this –his three children constantly have a screen in front of them. When his inventor wife Polly (Claire Foy) discovers that the smart fridge she designed has had a camera installed on it by her company she resigns her job, and seeking a more simple existence she and Tim uproot the family from their city life to an old country farmhouse near where Tim grew up, and where the kids are devastated to learn there isn’t even any wifi. As they struggle to adapt to this new agrarian environment where Tim is determined to grow a tomato business, youngest daughter Fran (Billie Gadsdon) is invited by a fairy Silky (Nicola Coughlan) to the Magical Faraway Tree in the middle of the woods, a home of several fantastical characters and a gateway to other magical lands.
The Tree itself is very charming –a whole community existing within its enormous boughs and immense branches. And these denizens are not the typical assortment of fantasy creatures, apart from Silky and a nameless Angry Pixie (Hiran Abeysekera). Rather they are more nebulous magical entities like the Tree's egotistical self-proclaimed leader Moonface (Nonso Anozie), its washer Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning), and the Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns) named for the fact he is covered in saucepans. This kind of wit balances out the whimsy of these characters and the worlds they traverse, accessible via a harrowing stairway up into the sky, and including things like a world made of candy and another where dreams will come true. For the most part Gregor and Farnaby strike the right kind of tone for this, playing into the cutesiness while subverting or wryly commenting on it just enough without veering into outright deconstruction or self-mockery. There are aspects that lean a bit too much one way or the other, such as a sequence of back-to-back fart jokes or some of the smartass remarks made by eldest sister Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy), whom Fran eventually brings to the tree alongside their brother Joe (Phoenix Laroche) and who is the film's resident avatar of teenage cynicism who will inevitably be won over by the magic.
Beth is in general set up to be a brat, the most stubborn and frustrated about the family move -which given the suddenness and the conditions of their new lodgings, she is fairly justified. But her attitude is that of disgruntled youth, bereft of the imagination and wonder of her younger sister. Thus she is handed the central arc of the movie. It is not a wholly clean arc, the steps of her character development a little bit too rushed to be believable, and she is a very one-note character to start with. The young Bennett-Cardy isn't able to do much with her performance even as she is late in the film confronted with a consequence of a thoughtless choice. In fairness, none of the kids are all that impressive -they perfect hollow avatars for the film's intended audience. But other performances make up for it. Garfield and Foy, though absent from the magical adventures, play their parts with a child-like delirium as though they were. They are earnest perhaps to a fault, making for very rash impressions of parenthood, but suiting the overall tone fairly well. Anozie also knows acutely how to play this type of children's character, as does Rebecca Ferguson as a minor villain called Dame Snap, helping herself voraciously to the scenery. Coughlan though is the movie's sweetest charm, a ray of sunshine through the entirety of her screen-time.
The movie is packed with amusing little scenes, eccentric characters, and even heartfelt moments with the family and their tomato business at home; but it is a movie that is notably thin on plot and conflict. This perhaps may be related to the style of the source material -British children's fiction of that time could be quite spare. Yet the Paddington movies have each manufactured strong narrative centrepieces around Paddington's desires and his effect on people.  This film attempts to have one via Beth's dissatisfaction in the countryside, aligned with a stern grandmother played by Jennifer Saunders endeavouring to coax the family away. However, the tension in this and even the sense of stakes feel like an afterthought, and the episodic nature of the adventures of the Faraway Tree result in a very anticlimactic climax sequence and a resolution that is altogether too easy -the kids and their friends face no real challenge.
Still, there is something very charming about the movie's overt wholesomeness. It pulls none of the usual kids' movie tricks as it plays out at a leisurely pace and speaks to children without condescension on their own level of comprehension. Moreover, it has a real love of imagination and refuses to make 'sensible' its gonzo world and characters. Maybe it asks a little much of kids' complicated feelings around a family move, but it is probably right to emphasize the importance of play and imagination away from devices (having a firmer handle on this theme than the far more popular Toy Story 5). As antiquated as some aspects of its fantasy might be, children need something like The Magic Faraway Tree these days. Doubtless that is why it was made.

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