Disney has been colonizing the minds and hearts of children for many years now, decades. All of us have been colonized by different stages and generations of Disney, and inevitably, some of the movies aren’t as flawless as you recall but has the same effect on parents and children just equally. With Disney, we are all blinking rapidly. We are all in the mercy of one big cinematic formula that knows the synaptic shortcut to both your childhood memories and tear ducts. The nostalgia section – gets to be delivered at our doorstep.
The same goes for almost all fantasy films. Who doesn’t enjoy the warm fuzzy feeling while watching a feel-great film about survival? When life gets you down, it gets you really good and who do you turn to – a good old television. It is a place where we are feasting on losing ourselves in the worlds of lost and found! As we self-quarantine and keep our social distance, we take a ride in great pick-me-ups films. It’s a strange phenomenon indeed. As we are thinking about the possibility of catching COVID-19 has us all by the balls we are going to feast on doomsday movies, fantasy characters, just like children, this is like comfort food.
So there is a one, Artemis Fowl: The Secret World
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089630/
directed by British actor and director Kenneth Branagh. By all means, Branagh is not comforting food, feel-good kind of guy, but it does get away with it, in children’s fantasy film, with, of course, occasional flashes of humor. Here, we have the different skills of each fairy and the organization of the underground society, and it is all very much like a real society. Even if again a trace of a hidden occult in children fantastic films comes forwards, and it is something that I do not generally like, in the adult mind, we are thinking about a fairy in real life too, that is from a certain point, evoked by different substance abuse.
Branagh is a classically trained actor who moved into directing via Shakespearean dramas. He has already proven his ability to fit inside studio-mandated, franchise-designed boxes, from the humor of Thor to the confident story in Murder on the Orient Express. He even appeared in a Harry Potter film, though whatever lessons are in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. While I am remembering him via completely other kinds of films, not to mention theatre productions, but this is it, his way of surviving and coping with reality, via fantasy films for children.
There’s a magical world, a priceless artifact with great powers, a motley crew of unexpected friendships, faceless villains, in all fantastic kids stories. What, exactly, does the artifact do? Who, exactly, is the meanie pulling all the strings? I think that we all know that, secretly.
Artemis was initially a bad guy who learned how to be better by interacting with fairies — as they’re real — and growing up in the process. Now we can see all this with different eyes when we grow up, but let us enjoy in children’s version or Branagh’s version. The character-building in the film may be something that lacks a bit: he is turning young Artemis into an adventure and on a most basic level, he follows Artemis after he discovers that his dad is actually a criminal mastermind who has spent his entire life ripping off important artifacts, so he ends up helping out the underground fairy world, a true magical weirdo in the midst of some sort of revolt.
This is a contemporary fairy-tale, not at all like the good old time Disney we and our parents had, but I guess there is no point in going back in time. Let’s not call upon calls for another apocalypse. This is yet a film for kids, with a good old fantasy fairy world and let us not be too judgemental. People are now sick of the society that we are living in, and genuinely sick of apocalyptic forms of screen “porn“, and at the same time, people are scared to let go of certain structure because they’re afraid of the unknown; we do not know what’s coming come next? Even if the film has flaws, we would enjoy it for the sake of old Shakespearean Brannagh that we all know.