Warner Bros. has unveiled a brand new trailer for the highly anticipated adaptation Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Based on J.K. Rowling's ancillary Harry Potter encyclopedia/Hogwarts textbook of the same name, the film takes place in 1926 and stars Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander, a magizoologist whose briefcase of fantastical creatures comes loose while in New York City, setting into motion a series of events that threaten the Wizarding World community. Rowling makes her screenwriting debut on the picture, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows filmmaker David Yates directing, and one can clearly see Yates' stylistic fingerprints all over this sucker, which is for the better at the end of the day.
Having some sense of stylistic uniformity between Yates' run of Harry Potter movies would usually signal - at least to me - a lack of originality, but considering the fact that this is an entirely new series of characters in the same world, I can see the benefit in this case. It certainly helps that the film looks gorgeous, and that the world looks to be teeming with imagination, from design to wardrobe to performance. Most of the footage focuses on Redmayne's magizoologist, but there's plenty of scenes with the likes of Dan Fogler, Katherine Waterston, Jon Voight, and Carmen Ejogo that look enticingly bombastic and imbued with an exhausting level of visual detail. So, for the time being, I'm moved to ignore the fact that the film will just follow the same stylistic template as Yates' Harry Potter sequels, and keep up hopes that Yates will find other ways to give Fantastic Beasts its own unique flavor. We'll know for sure come this November, when the film arrives in theaters.
Watch the new Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them trailer below. The film also stars Waterston, Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Samantha Morton, Voight, Ron Perlman, Ejogo, Jenn Murray, Faith Wood-Blagrove and Colin Farrell. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them opens in theaters on November 18th.
Here's the official synopsis for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them:
“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” is an all-new adventure returning us to the wizarding world created by J.K. Rowling. Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne stars in the central role of wizarding world magizoologist Newt Scamander, under the direction of David Yates, who helmed the last four “Harry Potter” blockbusters. The film opens in 1926 as Newt Scamander has just completed a global excursion to find and document an extraordinary array of magical creatures. Arriving in New York for a brief stopover, he might have come and gone without incident…were it not for a No-Maj (American for Muggle) named Jacob, a misplaced magical case, and the escape of some of Newt’s fantastic beasts, which could spell trouble for both the wizarding and No-Maj worlds.
