2023-07-04 18:18:34
In the 21st century, fantasy for children and youth, both literary and cinematographic, has experienced a boom, with extensive sagas that seek to rewrite classic fantasy and adapt it to new generations. In the end, in all of them what we find is a repetition of the same schemes, but with enough variations to sound new. Nothing against it. Anything that encourages the new generations to delve into the pages of a book will always be welcome. It’s not like it’s a new strategy either. what were they doing Hans Christian Andersen or the Grimm brothers if it was not to give a new shape to the popular tales collected from the oral tradition?
Based on the homonymous novel by Tom Holt, The Magic Gate It comes to add to this tradition, with the particularity that its tone is openly anachronistic, closer to the youthful fantasy of the 70s and 80s than to today. Holt He is a clearly referential writer, who knows his classics and whose work sometimes arises as a response to a title from our legacy or the postmodern fusion of various references. The Magic Gate It was the starting title of a seven-part saga, of which the first comes to us now in film format.
KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR
After the production we find the mythical The Jim Henson Company, which also explains the film’s openly extemporaneous touch and where, as a striking element, we don’t have two child or adolescent protagonists, but two young people already entering their twenties and looking for their first job adventure. Interpreted correctly and even nicely by Patrick Gibson y Sophie Wilde (We particularly find the work of the second more interesting), we are dealing with two characters who, already by themselves, offer particularisms that place them outside the ordinary world in which they operate.
The company for which they begin to work as interns, JW Wells & Co., also has striking peculiarities, such as not being clear what the company does or the bizarre nature of the people who work there. There is an inherent criticism of the bureaucratic system or liberal thought, which reminds us of the literature of Michael Ende or Roald Dahl and which dominates the first half of the footage, where the different components of the story are presented, but keeping the unknown as to what What really happens in those offices.
FOLLOWING THE RABBIT HOLE
For a contemporary audience and especially for children or young people, this part may be the harshest, being used to other films where these situations are resolved more quickly, for fear of maintaining the mystery and losing the viewer. The Magic Gate it doesn’t rush revelations, relying on its story and characters. Also, not having child or youth protagonists can mean another element against them, since it makes it difficult for the film’s target audience to better empathize with the two protagonists.
Once the film puts its cards on the table, the film speeds up its pace and offers a display of fantasy that drinks from the past, but without falling into the nostalgia so in vogue in the cinema of recent years. As always, the work of The Jim Henson Company He is excellent in makeup and prosthetics, as well as in creating that particular microcosm of the office building.
The staging of Jeffrey Walker is correct and even inspired on several occasions, although it is the artistic production, as well as the role of popular actors such as Sam Neill o Christoph Waltz and less known as Miranda Otto, Rachel House, Jessica Gouwthat the tape holds imaginatively comfortably.
WELCOME TO FANTASY
The Magic Gate It is an honest, entertaining and ingenious film, with no other intention of transcendence than that of giving its audience an entertaining time, and which is aware of its modesty compared to proposals with a much larger budget. Still, with modesty and honesty, she comes out on top where others have been stumped by their high expectations. The magic door Poster
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