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 'Fantastic
Beasts' fuses dark themes with plea for acceptance
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[November 12, 2016]
By Alicia Powell
NEW YORK (Reuters) - "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find
Them", the "Harry Potter" wizarding spinoff movie, had
its world premiere on Thursday night, and the cast said
they hoped the film would provide both escapist comfort
and a message of acceptance in the real world.
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 The film, the first of five, takes place 70 years before
events in the first Harry Potter books and features a cast of
new characters with magical powers. Set in 1926, it centers on
Newt Scamander, a "magizoologist" who arrives in New York with a
case full of strange creatures that quickly escape.
Just like the Harry Potter books and movies that were rich in
themes of good and evil, death and family, author J.K. Rowling
infuses the "Fantastic Beasts" story with darker topics of
xenophobia and intolerance.
"There are a few really beautiful and pertinent messages in the
film ... There is this fear of the other, this fear of what we
don't understand, a need to blame and segregate. And how hate
can grow into something that is just overpowering because of
that," actress Alison Sudol, who plays the mind-reading Queenie
Goldstein, told reporters on the red carpet in New York.
Ezra Miller, whose character Credence Barebone is shy and
unloved, said the movie has "the comfort and the escapist wonder
that she (Rowling) brings" as well as issues "to take back to
our world to get to work on."
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Rowling, who wrote the screenplay for the film, said the story was
"partly informed by what I saw as a rise of populism around the
world."
"If you have read the (Harry) Potter books you know this period
threatened to become very dystopian. You were looking at the rise of
a very dark force," the British author told a news conference ahead
of Thursday's premiere.
"Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" opens worldwide on Nov.
18.
(Reporting by Reuters Television; Writing by Jill Serjeant; Editing
by Jeffrey Benkoe)
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