The Magic Faraway Tree

Even in her own time, Enid Blyton was not the coolest or most respected children’s author, but her Magic Faraway Tree books tap into childish fancies like almost nothing else. The problem is that there isn’t a plot among them. Mostly cute things happen, with frequent stops for sweeties, cakes and new toys. This cinematic adaptation needed magic of its own, then, and works as well as it does thanks to Paddington screenwriter Simon Farnaby, who finds gentle wit and an emotional centre even when the sugar rush threatens to nauseate.

Things starts promisingly. Polly (Claire Foy) resigns from her corporate job on a point of principle (involving a fridge voiced by Judi Dench), and she and her husband Tim (Andrew Garfield) decide to risk it all on a pasta sauce business in the countryside. Their older children – Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy) and Joe (Phoenix Laroche) – are appalled, but the near-silent youngest sister Fran (Billie Gadsdon) blossoms in the new environment, especially after an encounter with a fairy, Nicola Coughlan’s perfectly pitched Silky. Yes, their new home is on the edge of an enchanted wood where a gigantic magical tree houses a host of extraordinary characters and provides a portal to adorable worlds as they float past. Led by Fran — in the tradition of Narnia’s Lucy — the kids are soon visiting lands filled with sweets, birthday cakes and other delights, shepherded by an eccentric band including Silky, Nonso Anozie’s rather pompous Moonface, and Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns), a bloke dressed entirely in kitchenware.

The added character beats for the Thompson parents provide the backbone of a narrative — will this dysfunctional family learn to work together? — but even Farnaby struggles to reconcile such sincerity with the wacky characters in the woods, who resist all attempts to suggest real depth or substance. For every moment with Polly making a gentle attempt to get through to her kids, every laugh-worthy line, there are two bits involving weirdos with outrageous hair.

Director Ben Gregor sensibly doesn’t desaturate the ‘real’ world to make the VFX-bathed enchanted world shine brighter, but does make some odd design choices: the Land Of Birthdays — the one every kid remembers from the books — is now dark and rather grim, while the reform school of Dame Snap (Rebecca Ferguson, hastily crammed into the last act) is bathed in sunshine. Then again, some counter-intuition is necessary to leaven the tweeness of Blyton’s books; the film blithely refuses to question the idea, regressive even in the 1930s, that all an unhappy kid needs is some fresh country air. Still, even a family that’s at odds for no real reason needs to come back together, and there’s a sweet optimism in showing that it’s possible.