Movies & TV The Magic Faraway Tree The Magic Faraway Tree is Uneven But Often Charming (slaps top of Magic Faraway Tree) This baby can hold so much WHIMSY! By Leah Schnelbach | Published on August 24, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share I suspect that when the filmmakers were working on The Magic Faraway Tree, at some point a person carrying a comically large, brightly colored bucket labelled “WHIMSY” tripped, the bucket sailed through the air, and every drop of that WHIMSY spilled straight into the movie. Which is my perhaps overwrought way of saying that this movie was at times a little too much, at least for me, though I’m guessing kids will accept it as it is. The Magic Faraway Tree is an adaptation of the massively popular (but sometimes contentious) Enid Blyton books that were published between 1939 and 1951. It’s directed by Ben Gregor and written Simon Farnaby, late of Paddington 2 and Wonka, who also plays a small role. Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy play Tim and Polly Thompson, earnest parents who are frustrated with modern life, screen addiction, and the increasing sense that their kids’ childhoods are slipping away too fast. Their kids are Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy), who might already be an influencer; Joe (Phoenix Laroche), who wants nothing more than to live in his favorite Minecraft-esque videogame; and Franny (Billie Gadsdon), who hasn’t spoken in ages. Before I go a word further I need to say that all three are excellent actors. Bennett-Cardy has a difficult role as the screen-addled Beth, but she makes Beth’s harder moods appropriately infuriating, and also gives the girl real depth as she gradually warms up to the magic of the forest. Laroche doesn’t get quite as much to do, but he’s hilarious. And Gadsdon has to carry a lot of the film’s heart, and does it without ever being saccharine or false. The other thing I need to say here at the top is that this movie is beautiful. The family’s initial home is cold, grey, steel, chrome—but when they move out to the country everything explodes with color and light. The Tree itself looks enchanted even before anyone says any magic words, and the various fantasy lands the kids visit have their own unique tones and moods. By the end of the movie, the homes—whether they be human, fairie, or pixie—all look warm and lived in. Even when the plot got a little shaky I didn’t want the story to end, because in a time when so many movies seem to be shot through lenses dipped in used dishwater, this one feels like a hug. As for the plot: when Polly impulsively quits her tech job after she finds out her bosses have installed spyware in a smart fridge she invented, she and Tim take it as an opportunity to start over in the country. The two elder kids are not pleased, but Franny immediately takes to the slower, quieter pace. Literally on their way to their new home (a ramshackle barn that lacks both running water and electricity, much to Beth and Joe’s horror) Franny has caught the attention of a faerie, and soon she discovers a whole Magical world within the titular Faraway Tree. The Tree is home to Silky (Nicola Coughlan) a fairy who is so named for her silky golden hair, Moonface (Nonso Anozie), who hates humans and wants nothing to do with them; Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning), who… washes stuff constantly; the Angry Pixie (Hiran Abeysekera), who is angry, and a pixie; the Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns), who wears saucepans as clothing and as a result can’t hear very well; and Mr. Watzisname (Oliver Chris), who seems to be some sort of medieval knight, but can’t remember his name, hence “Watzisname”. Now if reading this list has already met your whimsy quota for the week, I get it, but I will say that the characters are fun and the performances are terrific, with most of them leaning toward prickly rather than cloying. My issues with the film are more about its structure. Nicola Coughlan is great as Silky, but the plot rushed her a little through what I think was supposed to be a stronger character arc. (But I’m going to use this as an excuse to mention that she was INCREDIBLE in Caitríona McLaughlin’s production of J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, which also stars Siobhán McSweeney [who co-starred in Derry Girls as Sister Michael], and Éanna Hardwicke [who played Roy Keane in Saipan]. I’ve seen the Nation Theatre Live simulcast twice now, and if it plays anywhere near you you should go—but leave the kids at home for that one.) Nonso Anozie is fantastic as Moonface, but here again, we learn a lot about what’s driving him at the end, when there isn’t enough time to really sit with it. The rest of the Denizens of the Tree are all great, and I wish we spent more times with each of them, but apparently there are already Magic Faraway Sequels greenlit, so maybe my wish will be granted soon. As if the Tree itself wasn’t enough magic for one enchanted forest, each day a new “Land” comes to rest in the cloud above the Tree, e.g. The Land of Goodies, The Land of Birthdays, The Land of Spells, etc. Dame Washalot spins a wheel to see which Land has parked, and Franny and the rest can climb a rather terrifying ladder and explore whatever’s up there, as long as they come back before the wheel turns again, lest they get stuck in the Land for an unknown amount of time. The Lands are all fun, and are probably the parts of the film that create the magic that it’s always reaching for—“extremists” march around the Land of Goodies protesting all the sugar, the Birthday Elves are all decked out in fabulous neon jumpsuits and roller skates, and when the kids visit the Land of Know-Alls, some of the Know-Alls in question are the good, classic British comedy kind of royalty. The kids’ adventures in these Lands play out alongside the more human complications at home as Tim tries to get his tomato sauce business off the ground, and both parents worry about paying for their new farm and keeping Polly’s tyrannical mother at bay. I’ve never read the Enid Blyton novels the film is based on, but from my research it seems like they’ve updated the stories quite a bit, I think for the better. Pitting the Tree and its magic against the siren call of screentime makes things feel a little more urgent than they might have, and the kids seem like modern, 21st Century children who grew up in the city and are now trying to adapt to a new way of life. Tim and Polly get a real plot of their own, which I liked—the movie gives time to the idea that the two of them have been together since college, and gave up a lot of dreams to build a life for their family, only to realize that it had all gone wrong somewhere and none of them were really happy. I also have to mention the two villains. Dame Snap, played by Rebecca Ferguson, and Polly’s mother, played by Jennifer Saunders, are both fabulous as kids movie villains so often are. The confrontation between Grandma and the rest of the family might be the best scene in the film, and all the actors play the hell out of it. And the movie does some fun stuff without how Dame Snap has been updated from her role in the books, too—she used to be Dame Slap back when it was socially acceptable to hit children, and I think it’s safe to say she misses the good old days. But having said all of that, I need to talk about where this movie falls short, and where I hope the sequels will improve. Having just bitched about The Last House for its miraculous quick-growing vegetable crop, I feel I must mention that here, too, vegetables grow WAY TOO FAST. But at least here they’re growing on legit farmland and we see people building an irrigation system and a greenhouse, and there’s magic. Andrew Garfield is, unsurprisingly, really really good, but this time his extremely emotive self is maybe a little too emotive, at points, for this meringue of a movie. There’s a version of The Magic Faraway Tree that has more of Tim’s story woven into it to balance the kids’, and in that version his performance perfect (and I think the movie itself has more weight) but as it is the story is so skewed toward the kids that checking in with the adults sometimes feels a little clunky even though I like everything they do. I’m also a stickler for a certain amount of realism in my whimsy. The Thompsons move into a barn, it looks like a barn, they call it a barn—but then it turns out that there are multiple bedrooms that look like finished normal bedrooms in a regular house. (We don’t see Joe’s but we do see Fran’s and Beth’s.) BUT Tim and Polly sleep in like, a horse cart with a mattress in it (???) that’s sitting in the center of the main part of the barn. I guess they sacrificed having their own room rather than, say, making two of the kids share, but I wanted to know more of the layout. Also what is the plumbing situation, because they complain about not having running water at one point, but everyone seems clean, none of the kids complain about using an outhouse (and they absolutely would have) and Andrew Garfield’s magnificent mane is, yes, magnificent, but it isn’t washing itself. The bigger issues are structural. First of all there are simply too many themes and plot points—I don’t want to give them away, but I counted eleven separate story engines, when the movie needed to pick three or four and explore them. The Magic Faraway Tree has the problem a lot of films and TV series do now: a character states a problem, we’re shown the problem, five minutes later the problem is resolved. This utterly saps the tension from the story, and especially in a kids’ movie you have to to let tension sit, to allow the children watching the possibility that it won’t be OK. Hilarious to think that a film that’s explicitly about the need to drop the screen and go outside might be employing the Streaming Era’s rule of re-stating the plot intermittently in case the audience are on their phones. I saw Paddington in Peru in a packed weekend morning screening, and while it doesn’t quite reach the heights of the first two films, it’s a fun, touching movie. In that film, Paddington and the Browns travel to Peru to look for Paddington’s Aunt Lucy, who seems to have left the Home For Retired Bears without telling anyone. They mention that she’s gone missing at the beginning, establish the tension, and check in on it a couple times, but the movie is largely given over to shenanigans and action sequences. Right at the beginning of the last act, they get to the place where Paddington expects to see Aunt Lucy, and she isn’t there. At this moment a child’s worried voice rang out through the theater: “Where’s Aunt Lucy?” The characters didn’t need to look into the camera and explain that Aunt Lucy is supposed to be here, but she isn’t. They didn’t stop the action to have a conversation a scene earlier to remind everyone that the point of the movie was to find Aunt Lucy. They trusted the kids to invest in Paddington’s concern for his Aunt, and to care about her despite the fact that she’s not onscreen for most of the film, and, given my crowd at least, they did—the whole place applauded enthusiastically when the film ended, even the two tweens sitting next to me, who spent some of the movie talking to each other, and all of it seemingly more focused on their dragon’s hoard of junk food than the movie. I mention this because Simon Farnaby co-wrote Paddington 2, an instant classic and one of the best films of the 21st century, and The Magic Faraway Tree could have been closer to that level, I think, if they’d allowed the plot to breathe a little more, and just tweaked the structure a little. As it is a lot of the resolution gets crammed into a very short period of time, so the tension can’t really sink in enough. Toward the end we realize that there have been three other entire stories unfolding underneath the main one: one of them is about Moonface’s hatred of humanity, one about Silky’s desire to make human friends again and come out from under Moonface’s thumb, and the third is about Tim and his own fractured childhood. These are all good ideas to explore, but I really wish that they’d threaded those plots through the movie even more, because then the ending would have landed better. By way of another example: I probably go back to The Neverending Story too often, but I didn’t know until the credits rolled that The Nothing would be defeated. It seemed for all the world like Atreyu had lost, that Bastian had failed—because they did. Atreyu did lose, he knew it, and he fought Gmork anyway. Bastian did fail. He didn’t rename the Childlike Empress quickly enough, and the two of them had to start over from darkness. Am I still scarred by that? Hell yes. But I think about that fight with Gmork at least once a week. I think about the possibility of picking myself up and starting over after a failure. Children need to see stuff like that when they’re small, so they can see that problems are real, and can seem terrible, but also that they’re solvable. They have to be able to practice screwing up and starting over in their fiction so they can handle the stressful things they run into in life. The Neverending Story sets the stakes high, and dealt with the consequences. The stakes presented in The Magic Faraway Tree are actually high, but the movie only sometimes treats them like that, and the conflicts and resolutions often feel a rushed, like the filmmakers don’t want the children in the audience to be too freaked out. The ticking clock doesn’t really start until halfway through the film, when we needed to hear those ticks from about ten minutes in. I guess what I’m getting at is that if you’re looking for a fun diversion for your kids for a few hours, you’ll all probably enjoy The Magic Faraway Tree—I just think that if it went a little darker and a little weirder it could have been a classic.[end-mark] The post <em>The Magic Faraway</em> Tree is Uneven But Often Charming appeared first on Reactor.