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Along with science fiction, fantasy is the genre with the most creative potential. Unbound by any rules of reality or even the physical world, fantasy movies can transport us to magical realms or bring incredible and impossible characters into our own. All the possibilities can be overwhelming, and prohibitively expensive to realize, so it’s no wonder that many fantasy films fall short of their high ambitions. There are those select films, though, that are flawless.
In online hyperbole, flawless refers to films whose ambition and strengths are so exhaustive and overwhelming that it makes it impossible to perceive a single flaw. Perfection isn’t reality, even when we’re dealing with the fantastical, but the theory of relativity still applies. What makes these films perfect or flawless is how transportive they are. These fantasy movies take us on a flight of fancy and enchanted by their worlds so completely that we fully engage with and believe in them. When we watch these ten fantasy films with a single flaw, we believe in the land of Oz, in Middle-earth, and that a talking cartoon rabbit could live among us.
‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939)
Is there a more iconic fantasy film than this 1939 adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s wonderful world? The Wizard of Oz has so permeated our culture that its individual elements are recognizable to those of us who have never actually sat down and watched it. If you happen to be one of those people, it’s high time you did yourself a favor and watched this immaculate masterpiece. It’s a Technicolor dream filled with memorable characters, tuneful songs and legendary production design.
Even if you haven’t seen it, you know the basics. Kansas farm girl Dorothy (Judy Garland) is taken from her sepia-toned home and dropped into the bright and colorful Oz, courtesy of a tornado. With the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) intent on vengeance after Dorothy’s house lands on her sister, the young girl sets off on a quest down the yellow brick road to meet the wonderful Wizard of Oz and get back home. On the way, she meets a brainless Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), a heartless Tin Man (Jack Haley) and a Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr). The Wizard of Oz has cast a timeless spell with its movie magic on audiences of all ages for generations.
‘Fantasia’ (1940)
If there’s any studio synonymous with fantasy, it’s Disney. The storied studio has given us numerous fantasy classics of both animation and live action for decades. From their first feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the recent Encanto, they’ve transported us into magical kingdoms and enchanted forests. Many films from the House of Mouse could be considered flawless, and everyone has their personal favorite, but there’s something uniquely special and perfect about Fantasia.
This groundbreaking anthology film features eight distinct animated segments, each set to a different piece of classical music. Every single piece, as conducted by Leopold Stokowski, has now become inexorably linked to its animation. It’s impossible to hear The Sorcerer’s Apprentice without imagining Mickey Mouse animating mops, or Night on Bald Mountain without conjuring up a mental image of that big horny boy, Chernabog. Fantasia is a timeless, elegant film of fantastic music and imagery that is flawlessly executed.
‘Wings of Desire’ (1987)
Religion has often provided the framework which fantasy stories are built upon. Judeo-Christian figures have often influenced many characters in fantasy works, whether as mere inspiration or direct translations. God, Satan, demons and angels have all played parts in films that don’t directly correspond to any one specific structure of faith, but more often as a way to tell deeply humanistic stories. It’s a Wonderful Life, Heaven Can Wait, and even Dogma aren’t strictly proselytizing but advocating for human compassion. So too is Wim Wenders’ perfect Wings of Desire.
This 1987 romantic fantasy film set in Berlin follows two angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander), as they observe humans. Damiel finds himself enamored with Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a human trapeze artist, and longs to become mortal to experience all the sensations that the human experience has to offer. Wenders paints a portrait of humanity, using Berlin as a backdrop and showing us the canvas of life as it can be observed or experienced. To exist in a world of black and white or one of color. It’s an existential film that ultimately affirms the beauty of life and all its flaws.
‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ (1988)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is an act of childhood wish fulfillment where cartoon characters share the same space as living, breathing humans, and it wraps it all in an engaging, hard-boiled noir mystery that’s a love letter to Hollywood and the Golden Age of animation. It’s a technical masterpiece for how convincingly it blends its animated characters with the real world, even more so than more recent films with more advanced technology have been able to. That’s a testament to director Robert Zemeckis, animation director Richard Williams, and the underappreciated lead performance of Bob Hoskins.
Eddie Valiant (Hoskins) is a hard-drinking private eye who’s hired to take some compromising photos of the wife of popular toon star Roger Rabbit (Charles Fleischer). Soon he’s wrapped up in a plot involving murder, corruption and the ultimate control of Toon Town. The film uses the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit as simple inspiration to tell a Chinatown-esque noir story that uses toons as an allegory for minority communities. It features characters from both Disney and Warner Bros. in an act of corporate cooperation that would be impossible today, and was only accomplished thanks to the immeasurable clout wielded by producer Steven Spielberg in 1988. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a flawless film for how it accomplished something that can likely never be replicated.
‘Babe: Pig in the City’ (1998)
The original Babe, based on the novel The Sheep-Pig by Dick King Smith, was a charming film that won over audiences and critics to such great effect it was nominated for seven Academy Awards. Its sequel, Babe: Pig in the City, was a much darker and surreal urban odyssey that baffled everyone when it was released but has since developed a very deserved and devoted cult following. Like many other films from director George Miller, the man responsible for Mad Max who also produced and shepherded the first film, it’s a visually astounding adventure filled with madcap action, loony characters and surprising pathos.
As the title suggests, the film trades the country farm for the big city, as Babe (E.G. Daily, taking over for her Rugrats costar Christine Cavanaugh from the first film) accompanies Mrs. Hoggett (Magda Szubanski) into a surreal metropolis cobbled together out of every major international city. There, Babe runs afoul of a criminal clown, thieving chimpanzees, and overzealous animal control. It’s a wild, wonderful ride that trades the first film’s gentle charm for zany and often macabre hijinks, but it’s just as delightful and never fails to provide flawless entertainment.
‘The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring’ (2001)
There’s no modern film franchise more quintessential than Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal The Lord of the Rings. As a colossal production that took incredible risks in making the films back to back to back, the results far exceeded expectations and set a new standard for filmic fantasy that truly hasn’t been matched since. Featuring the combined efforts of a massive international crew and the seamless blend of traditional visual effects techniques with groundbreaking CGI, the films fully immersed audiences in Middle-earth from the very first frame of The Fellowship of the Ring.
This first film of the trilogy does a masterful job of introducing the uninitiated to Tolkien’s densely populated world and deep lore without ever becoming boring or overwhelming. We quickly learn the history of the One Ring and its journey to the Shire, where we meet the beloved Hobbit heroes before they set off on a fateful journey toward Mount Doom. It’s a flawlessly designed world, inhabited by engrossing characters and an enthralling plot that never gets bogged down with worldbuilding. Jackson and his crew make it all seem so effortless when it obviously took a tremendous amount to accomplish, and which no filmmaking team since has been able to with such success.
‘Spirited Away’ (2001)
Few directors who work in animation have provided audiences with as much magic as Hayao Miyazaki. The director’s work within his Studio Ghibli is simply unparalleled. My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, The Boy and the Heron — any one of these films would be considered the greatest achievement in any other filmmaker’s career, and Miyazaki was behind all of them. Every fan of the director has a favorite film of his (Porco Rosso), but if there’s one that’s the most universally celebrated and undeniably a flawless masterpiece, it’s his singular fantasy adventure Spirited Away.
Inspired to make a film for young girls, Miyazaki’s film focuses on ten-year-old Chihiro (Rumi Hiiragi/Daveigh Chase) who goes on an Alice-like adventure when she and her parents enter an apparently abandoned resort town. After her parents are transformed into pigs, Chihiro finds herself stuck in the magical world, working at a bathhouse for an evil witch. It’s a spirited, supernatural fairy tale of uncommon maturity and beauty. Miyazaki has often been labeled by Western critics as the Disney of Japan, but that comparison diminishes the unique wonder and deeply rooted folkloric fantasy that his films evoke. He’s as flawless a filmmaker as we may ever get, and Spirited Away is his greatest film.
‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ (2006)
A filmmaker every bit as idiosyncratic as Miyazaki, Guillermo del Toro has been an equal gift to cinephiles with his immaculately crafted and richly detailed films. While the director is most directly associated with the horror genre, fantasy is often at the periphery. It came to the forefront for his dark masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth, which melds the menace of two worlds into one grim fairytale. Employing the filmmaker’s signature mix of practical and digital effects, the film has few visual equals within the genre, and the dark tale it weaves seems like a pure distillation of del Toro’s dreams.
In 1944 Spain, young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) has moved into a new home with her mother and stepfather, who is a vicious captain of the Armed Police Corps under the Francoist regime. While he wages a campaign of violence against the Maquis, Ofelia discovers a secret world of magic and mystical creatures. She meets a Faun (Doug Jones), who believes her to be the reincarnation of a fabled princess and gives her a series of tasks that will allow her to reclaim her rightful throne. There’s a spellbinding quality to the film that pulls us through its often bloody narrative, expertly intertwining the war-torn violence of reality with the macabre beauty of the fantasy. Pan’s Labyrinth is Guillermo del Toro’s most flawless film and one of the greatest fantasy movies of the 21st century.
‘Where the Wild Things Are’ (2009)
Spike Jonze is another director of specific talents. His films combine a kind of gritty banal reality with whimsical concepts in a style unique to him. Each film in his filmography is instantly recognizable for his aesthetic but also completely singular in its approach. There’s the magical realism of Being John Malkovich, the metafictional narrative of Adaptation and the soft retrofuturism of Her. He engages with each film at his level and brings a distinct vision to it while still maintaining the necessary emotional core. Nowhere is that more apparent, or more successful, than in his uncompromising adaptation of the classic children’s fantasy book Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.
The slight narrative of the forty-eight-page book is expanded upon by Jonze not in plot but rather in character. We come to understand the nature of wild boy Max (Max Records) and each of the Wild Things that inhabit the strange fantasy world that he escapes to. The Wild Things are brought to vivid life through the magical work of suits created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, augmented with seamless CGI to give emotive motion to the faces. The film captures the spirit of Sendak’s book better than possibly any adaptation ever has, and the emotions are only deepened. Compare this flawless film to something like the crass and hollow adaptation of Harold and the Purple Crayon, and it becomes clear that childlike wonder is not something that can be created through pure capitalism.
‘Kubo and the Two Strings’ (2016)
There’s something about stop-motion animation that lends itself to fantasy more than any other medium. The unique motion and handcrafted qualities inherent to it give an ineffable atmosphere to every movie. It’s obvious in classics like The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach and especially so in the films by studio Laika, who have been behind modern masterpieces like Coraline, ParaNorman and the flawless fantasy Kubo and the Two Strings. Inspired by Japanese culture and art, the film is a flawlessly animated epic about an orphaned boy’s quest to defeat his evil grandfather. Told with the loose logic of a tale from folklore or myth, the film is the perfect marriage of medium and narrative, and massively underappreciated in the genre and among Laika’s stellar output.
Kubo (Art Parkinson) lives with his mother in the mountains above a village. He is the son of a missing samurai warrior and has the ability to animate origami figures with his music. He is also the grandson of the mysterious Moon King (Ralph Fiennes), who stole his left eye when he was an infant. When his mother is attacked, Kubo must embark on a quest to reclaim his father’s armor and defeat his grandfather, joined by a magical Monkey (Charlize Theron) and a giant warrior Beetle (Matthew McConaughey). As the directorial debut of Travis Knight, Kubo and the Two Strings is a work of clear passion and skill, combining incredible animation with a story of lyrical beauty to flawless fantastical effect.
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William Smith
Almontather Rassoul
