With the Harry Potter film franchise done and dusted, Warner Bros needed a new way in which to exploit their most successful franchise, beyond rides, studio tours and merchandising. That opportunity came with Rowling’s agreement to write a screenplay adaptation based on a ‘textbook’ mentioned in the Potter novels and written as a special edition small format book for Comic Relief in 2001. With director David Yates returning to the wizarding world, could a new spark of magic be found, or would this release end up as a damp squib?

When magizoologist Newt Scamander steps off the boat into 1926 New York on a quest to return a particular magical creature to its native environment, a series of random encounters will cause him more trouble than he could have anticipated, as he crosses paths with a very dangerous wizard indeed, set on using a young wizard for his own destructive ends.

Remember when Peter Jackson announced that The Hobbit would be split into a trilogy of movies? The uproar that greeted the idea that a 310 page book was to be turned into an epic three-part, almost 8 hour movie marathon was something to behold. Kudos then to Warner Bros, who had the brass neck to announce a multi-part movie series based on a fairly throwaway 128 page book that actually had no story.

The first question that one has to ask is – is this really needed? There’s an argument either way of course – on the one hand, the Harry Potter saga was about the boy who lived, and we’d done all that. Harry had defeated Voldemort and we’d seen him live happily ever after and settle down with his first true love to have kids of his own in a world free from the influence of the Dark Lord. On the other hand, the books and movies of Harry Potter had created a fascinating world full of potential story threads – especially ones set in the past that might give some additional breadth and depth to certain characters and events.

The fact Fantastic Beasts… based on a ‘textbook’ rather than a novel could also be seen either as a strength or weakness. In the plus column, it gives the opportunity for a lot of narrative room, whereas in the minus column it leaves us with no real structure or characters to be immediately marketable. I’ll happily admit that even as a confirmed fan of the books and the movies, I went into this one at the cinema unconvinced.

What I ended up with, however, was a very pleasant surprise. That freedom granted by this not being based on a novel gets fully explored. The fact that it’s set in America with a mostly American cast is actually a great opportunity as far as that exploration goes – after all, we have seen plenty of what contemporary British wizards and witches look like, but America is never mentioned once in either the Potter books or the films. Having it set in the twenties – as a prequel of sorts – only helps with this.

What’s really striking though, is that this is a film that’s clearly been written and produced with the widest possible audience in mind. If you’re a fan like me who’s read every book and seen every film in the Potter universe so far, there’s plenty of little mentions and winks plus a lot of familiar-feeling stuff to draw you back in. If you’ve only watched the movies, there’s enough here to keep you comfortable and not alienated and if you’ve never seen or read anything related to Harry Potter in your life, well I’d argue this still stands up as a decent action romp that’s family friendly while retaining a darker edge.

Key to Fantastic Beasts’ charm is the casting. Redmayne as Scamander delivers much the performance you expect, all rumpled hair, side of mouth mumbling and earnest, mournful looks. It’s difficult to think of a more perfect choice of actor for Newt, a wizard who stands fairly far apart from his fellows when it comes to magical creatures. There was always a danger that he might just end up being a shorter, thinner Hagrid, but fortunately Rowling’s writing and Redmayne’s performance combine to make him quite different from the Hogwarts groundskeeper. Where both seem to have a certain blind spot for the dangers represented by large magical beasts, it in fact transpires that Newt’s interest is – dare I say it – a little more humanitarian. Recall Hagrid’s reaction to his dragon being taken from him and put in the wild in a colony of other dragons – Hagrid has a fascination for magical creatures as pets. Newt has a need for them to be understood but also left in their own environment. As much as he studies them, there’s the impression that the ones he keeps with him is for their own protection and a temporary solution rather than because he wants to.

The real star of the show though, is Scamander’s unwitting partner in hi-jinx, Jacob Kowalksi, played by Dan Fogler. Fogler’s gift for physical acting is evident and well-used in every frame he’s in. His sense of comic timing is perfect for the role, and what could so easily have turned into a simple bumbling straight man opposite Redmayne’s manic Scamander instead becomes a loveable and beloved companion on the narrative journey that the movie takes. Yes, you can argue that he’s a slightly sappy character, and that his budding relationship with Queenie is the very essence of the sort of thing comedies have been throwing at us for years, but there’s a real warmth and genuineness to the character that endears him to the audience. We need that ordinary character in a story like this – someone who will react as we the audience do to the extraordinary sights, sounds and creatures which appear on screen, and it helps enormously if that character is someone to whom we can easily relate as well.

The rest of the cast do their job well enough. Catherine Waterston’s Tina Goldstein is a pretty average example of the ‘works hard at her job to cover her social awkwardness’ trope character and sister Queenie, played by Alison Sudol is similarly a sort of archetypal wide-eyed beauty with a heart of gold type, there mainly to provide a love interest for Jacob while Tina makes eyes at Newt. Both actresses do their best with what they have to hand, but unfortunately that isn’t much. On the villain side, there’s Colin Farrell in one of his rare decent dramatic turns as Rupert Graves/Grindlewald. The issue with Graves mainly is that the character is written quite two-dimensionally, acting in fairly basic and generic ‘bad’ ways and being so obvious with his manipulation of Credence that it’s slightly infuriating that the young unsuspecting magic user doesn’t realise it, making it harder to sympathise in spite of Ezra Miller’s committed performance in the role. This is very far away from Miller’s other big screen genre role as The Flash, to the extent that I only recognised him properly in this re-watch. Samantha Morton as Madam Barebone, Credence’s abusive adoptive mother and head of a movement dedicated to hunting down and killing Witches and Wizards, is much as you would expect from Samantha Morton. There’s an instant dislikeable quality to the character, and a genuine undercurrent of loathsomeness mixed with scariness. The intensity of the stare and the starkness of the delivery combine to make a truly unsettling character and it’s only a shame that we don’t get to see more from Morton in the role.

The creatures themselves are every bit as fantastical as the title promises, and show a good amount of imagination in both appearance and behaviour. The stars are inevitably the cute ones. Pick the Bowtruckle (a sort of anthropomorphised stick insect) is both a handy dramatic device as well as an adorable companion for our hero and the Niffler, with its duck-billed platypus-like appearance and penchant for mischief and stealing anything shiny it can reach, screams ‘merchandising opportunities’ from every pore. Larger creatures like the Occamy (with its odd ability to shrink and grow to fill whatever space it occupies) and the Thunderbird are all impressively rendered and worked into the story. I will say that on this re-watch I have noticed that Buckbeak way back in Prisoner of Azkaban looked a little more real interacting with Harry than Frank the Thunderbird looked here when being petted by Newt, but in fairness this film necessarily has a great many more shots of creatures and people interacting with them to contend with.

All told, it barrels along rather nicely, with our hero getting into various scrapes and using a combination of his magical ability, natural charm and winning way with the creatures under his care to get through them all. It’s a nice contrast from the Potter films to have a central protagonist who is so genuinely unassuming and shy – Newt never actually looks people in the eye, never seems about to brag (even when he has something to brag about) and doesn’t seem to possess any sort of temper or anger in himself at all. The contrast with Harry couldn’t be more stark, and it helps to again differentiate the story that’s being told so that it doesn’t just end up being Harry Potter: Redux.

Mainly, if it has an issue, it’s that although Fantastic Beasts… is pacy and funny and exciting, narratively it doesn’t ever really feel like it’s going anywhere. Graves’ cultivation of Credence and hunt for the Obscurius (an oddly specific type of magical creation which is seems peculiar we haven’t heard of in the novels or films before now) never feel quite like they are main movie villain narrative type stuff, and the rest of the time Newt is either trying to capture creatures that have escaped him or dealing with the different attitude of American wizardry to various things and the bureaucracy that goes with it. It feels almost like the two narratives are running parallel with one another and then just happen to cross paths in the third act more by happenstance than anything else, and although there is deeper reasoning behind this, as laid out in particular by the sequel, in this film in and of itself it does have a tendency of making things feel a little random and disconnected.

But thanks to that likeable cast and the adorable creatures, it never really matters, because one thing that the film does is never leave you bored. It’s much darker than the Potter films were in many ways, understandable given that at least part of the target demographic must be fans who grew up reading the books and now are young adults who want something a bit meatier. With its themes of abuse, betrayal and manipulation this definitely fits that bill, but fortunately the film is never too far from another comedic sequence involving Newt and one of his creatures to lighten the mood.

Whether it will achieve the same sort of success as its parent franchise remains to be seen – certainly this entry did brisk box office business but it will be the reception of future entries, as the sheen of novelty wears off, that will determine whether this can live up to its legacy. For now, we have a new hero and a whole load of interesting characters around him to follow, and that’s good enough for me.