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If the children’s books of Enid Blyton have fallen out of fashion in classrooms and libraries — largely due to the racism and regressive gender politics throughout the British author’s oeuvre — they remain ripe for
rehabilitation through adaptation. The BBC has churned out seven series of “Malory Towers” since 2020; in 2023, “The Famous Five” got a glossy TV makeover under the unlikely direction of Nicolas Winding Refn. Though big-screen success has largely eluded the Blyton brand up until now, “The Magic Faraway Tree” changed that in the spring. Based on Blyton’s series of fairy-folk fantasy adventures, Ben Gregor’s amiably sparkly, necessarily modernized film wound up outgrossing Pixar’s “Hoppers” on U.K. screens back in March; whether or not American kids concur when the film releases Stateside this weekend, two sequels have already been greenlit.
For the nostalgically inclined, the film’s domestic success reps a victory for old-fashioned family entertainment with old-fashioned family values. It is, after all, a story of a disconnected urban brood whose move to the countryside forces them to put down their phones and engage with both the natural and magical worlds — and, in the process, with each other. As commendably as “The Magic Faraway Tree” celebrates the virtues of wonder and imagination, however, the film is not itself all that wondrous or imaginative: Alongside Blyton’s source text, its creative DNA jumbles elements from the most recent film adaptations of “The Secret Garden,” “The Chronicles of Narnia” and, especially, the “Paddington” films, with which it shares a screenwriter in comedian Simon Farnaby.
Farnaby’s signature blending of English folksiness with slightly off-kilter humor has made him a go-to for upscale children’s films. (He also wrote 2023’s “Wonka” to agreeable and profitable effect.) But the balance is a little off this time: “The Magic Faraway Tree” is sweet, even a bit twee, and unfailingly nice in a way that will draw early sighs of relief from parents jaded by more obnoxious family fare. But it’s surprisingly unfunny: A general gaiety of tone only goes some way toward covering a shortage of outright laughs, with several running jokes settling for a smile the first few times, and less than that as they continue. For all her popularity, Blyton was a wholly mirthless writer; turns out there are limits to how much you can punch up her insipid prose.
Still, it’s hard to take against anything this polite and cheerful and eager to please. The movie trots along like an obliging corgi pup; TV director Gregor and DP Zac Nicholson give it a gilded mark of quality. It helps to have actors who believe in it, too. As Tim and Polly Thompson, a middle-class London couple who at some point lost their wide-eyed ideals to the corporate rat race, Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy bring more care and specificity to the anchoring grown-up figures than most kids’ movies ever do: He’s a dopey art-school romantic adrift in the role of house-husband; she’s a gifted inventor too earnestly principled to get ahead. When she quits her job, leaving the family flat broke, he resurrects an earlier dream of farming tomatoes and becoming a pasta-sauce merchant. (This scheme might have seemed more fanciful before the current English summer.) And off to the country they go.
Initially, at least, Tim and Polly are more likable than their three sullen, variously tech-dependent children, all startled to be relocated to a derelict, electricity-free barn in the middle of nowhere. Teenager Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy) is the most vocally exasperated; game-addicted Joe (Phoenix Laroche) goes into a more passive state of device withdrawal. But the youngest, Fran (a gradually winning Billie Gadsdon), who has recently become mute for reasons oddly unexplained in the script, is more open to her bucolic new environment: Early on, she catches a glimpse of friendly fairy Silky (Nicola Coughlan) in the nearby woods, and goes exploring.
What she finds is the huge, gnarled specimen of the title, dripping in iridescent flowers and transportive promise; after uttering the dully prosaic mantra “I believe in magic” three times, she’s whisked up into its sky-scraping branches. There, she’s befriended by Silky and an assortment of other elfin oddballs, including supercilious ringleader Moonface (Nonso Anozie), disco-dancing laundress Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning) and the Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns), who, well, wears a lot of saucepans. (Some gags here are complete non-starters.) The tree also acts as a portal to other candy-colored fantasy realms: one where wishes can be granted with barbed consequences, another where Rebecca Ferguson stomps around villainously in a precarious wig, and so on.
All this scattershot world-building and world-visiting allows for some colorfully diverting vignettes, in which production designer Alexandra Walker and costume designer Ann Maskrey get to show off their giddy, gaudy wares. But Farnaby’s script never fashions an entirely satisfactory narrative from these: The family’s fate is eventually woven into these parallel-universe goings-on, but despite the threat of financial ruin, the stakes never feel urgently high, and there’s little palpable peril, in part because the mood is so consistently sunny. That could make “The Magic Faraway Tree” a comforting repeat watch for certain children, but the film’s own sense of adventure is too safeguarded for it to approach classic status. Then again, some might have said the same about Blyton’s books in their day, and here we are.
