Fantasy

Abstract

Fantasy films can be traced to the early years of film history and Georges Méliès, cinema’s first great fantasist, in particular. Méliès is often presented (somewhat simplistically) as embodying one of the two fountainheads of cinema, alongside the documentary realism of the Lumière brothers, placing fantasy as a vital founding impulse in film. Fantasy films represent hopes and desires for better or alternative worlds, and through the technical developments required to portray those worlds, they have contributed significantly to the development of cinema and how we experience it. For many, fantasy films are typified by formulaic products—fairy tales for children and heroic quest narratives in magical pseudo-medieval realms for adolescents—but the range of fantasy films is remarkable, taking in popular mainstream “classics” (e.g., The Wizard of Oz [1939]), big-budget franchises (e.g., Harry Potter), small-scale independent projects (e.g., Tideland [2005]), and films by prominent figures in so-called art-house cinema (e.g., Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander [1982]). That diversity and perceived emphasis on the populist and juvenile has contributed to the academic literature on fantasy film being slow to develop. Although the Freudian notion of fantasy as a psychic process to help negotiate and repress traumatic memories meant that the psychoanalytical term “fantasy” was often evident, especially in the “grand theory” flourishing across film studies in the 1970s–1990s, there was relatively little discussion of fantasy films in the sense of narrative fictions featuring worlds or events that in some way break empirically (or magically) and ontologically with the known laws of our universe. From the 1980s, science fiction and horror cinema began to accumulate a substantial literature, but the more amorphous notion of fantasy would lag far behind: scattered articles rather than sustained dialogue, despite the early and mid-1980s seeing sustained fantasy filmmaking, especially from Hollywood. Defining fantasy has been problematic (e.g., is it a coherent genre? Is it a broader impulse to move away from mimetic representations of what is understood to be empirical and ontological reality? In what way can (or should) it be distinguished from science fiction and horror?), but it has also suffered from suspicious intellectual schools of thought (Marxism not least). Perhaps inevitably, given the influx of films released in the wake of the phenomenal success of The Lord of the Rings (2001–2003) and Harry Potter films revealing a “global hunger” for fantasy, as Susan Napier refers to it in Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (Napier 2005, cited under Individual Genres), the 2000s witnessed a welcome change with the publication of several introductory texts on studying fantasy film, collections on aspects of fantasy film, monographs on individual films, and articles from a wealth of theoretical perspectives.