(If you plop high fantasy onto our own Earth, you end up with low fantasy.) 2001’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is a perfect example of high fantasy in film. The worlds are similar to ours, but there a few things you can do there that you can’t here-namely magic. Think of Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Westeros from Game of Thrones. This is a world that looks much like Earth but operates a little differently-even if it is internally consistent as its own system. High fantasy’s hallmark is the presence of a secondary world. (The name comes from a 1971 essay by author Lloyd Alexander titled “High Fantasy and Heroic Romance.”) High fantasy is what most people think of when they think of the genre. So, let’s look at some fantasy sub-genres that have helped shape what we think of when we think of “fantasy.”
“The Cabbage Fairy” (1896) is one of the earliest fantasy films. However, it wasn’t until the 1960s that fantasy films became more frequent staples.
In it, a fairy strolls through a garden and plucks infant babies from cabbages, and presents them to the camera.
MEDIEVAL FANTASY MOVIES MOVIE
The earliest fantasy movie is likely Alice Guy‘s “ The Cabbage Fairy,” filmed in 1896. Protagonists can often be small parts in much larger machines that pit epically powerful forces against each other. Typically speaking, fantasy also takes the battle between good and evil as a central theme. From there, the genre breaks down into many sub-genres-we’re only going to cover a few here to help you get your head around your particular project.Īs a genre, fantasy is part of the larger speculative fiction family, where it lives with its cousins, science fiction and horror. This might be supernatural, otherworldly, alchemical, divine-you name it. As entertaining as that sounds, we all have work to do, so let’s establish a rough idea of what we mean when talking about “fantasy.”Īt its most generic, fantasy involves magic-however it manifests. Like every other narrative genre, fantasy overlaps with its neighboring categories, so we can split hairs about what is and isn’t fantasy all day. So what, technically, is “fantasy?” The term itself can mean anything, so does a fantastic story or movie just need a little razzle-dazzle? Not quite. It’s one of the world’s oldest recorded narratives, prominently featuring an epic battle between good and evil-and plenty of magic. The Epic of Gilgamesh, recorded in ancient cuneiform, is roughly four thousand years old. evil have recorded the development of the human story all over the world. Cultures across the planet were explaining photosynthesis and meteorology and medicine and just about everything else with tales of magic-the key element of the fantasy genre.įrom the Epic of Gilgamesh to the works of Homer to the Panchatantra, fantastic stories about good vs. There were forces at work in the world that shaped how people lived their lives, and there wasn’t much else to do at night except tell ourselves stories about it.Īnd, this was happening everywhere. Mysterious or confusing events often had only one explanation-magic. Monsters and fairies and capricious beings of all kinds inhabited the forests, caves, and rivers we depended on for food and shelter. There was a time when the planet was a magical place.
MEDIEVAL FANTASY MOVIES FULL
Our earliest recorded narratives all contain elements of fantasy, and it’s safe to assume that the oral traditions that informed these ancient tales were themselves chock full of fantasy. So you want to make a fantasy movie? Here’s what you need to know about working in the genre.įantasy is old.
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