The young magizoologo Newt Scamander arrives in New York from England with a suitcase full of fantastic creatures who collected and saved in many years of travel and research. Without wanting to, but exchanges the precious cargo with that of Jacob Kowalski, pastry chef and No-Mag (is the American name of Muggles), which free creatures inadvertently, violating the Statute of Secrecy and putting Newt in trouble. It is 1926 and the country is in great turmoil: the dark Gellert Grindewalt is unobtainable, something mysterious sowing chaos and destruction in the streets of the city and the fundamentalists of the witch hunt more and more fervent. The magical world and that of No-Mag are dangerously close to going to war.
You have to be a little creatures’ magic, as JK Rowling, to jump out of a bestiary of a few pages, designed as textbook for young students of Hogwarts, a pentalogy that, at least according to the first chapter, has nothing of cast of the saga potteriana but only a magnificent continuity of vision and invention happiness. In this context, David Yates has not, however, a minor role: its magical universe frequenting the writer has probably done the best translator in circulation for the cinema, especially the episodes darkest and disturbing, as it is this, in which once again it demonstrates the wisdom to know how to balance the need not to sweeten the theme and elegance not to indulge nell’orrorifico of habit.
Denso internal citations and clues that will intrigue fans, as well as allusions to historical figures (Deliverance Dane) and even reminiscences and purely cinematic flavor atmospheres, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them that’s not why a closed film to newcomers . On the contrary. It could not be otherwise: in the first place because, just like Newt, we are all new to the world that meets and friends that you will (no longer a trio, but a quartet, adult, equally successful) and, secondly, because the film is in his theme, an invitation to reconsider their prejudices and clandestine nature, and do not fear diversity. Not only Newt is surprised that the US does not provide for it, as it already does in Europe, mixed marriages between wizards and No-May, but above all the film tells, in his darker, more powerful heart, what terrible consequences may have to punish someone for what it is, where crowds and traumatic force can unleash in a child feeling rejected, rejected, not loved.
Scamander, who saves the creatures that terrorize those who do not know, it nourishes and protects it, and mainly works to teach others wizards how to care for them, has the mind of the young enlightened teacher, who knows that we must put at height child, playing with him, talking his language. It is no coincidence, then, that to say the word “school”, he, Tina and Queenie sospirino of nostalgia. This will also be a film for an older audience, but not for those who have at least a little ‘nostalgia for that time, childhood, when there were no barriers between the walls of the house and the friends of the world and imaginary animals.