Modern magic and old magic collide in The Magic Faraway Tree, a fight-back against the present day where tech and screens are winning the battle.
For its young viewers The Magic Faraway Tree is about setting aside “modern magic”, the devices which often keep children alone and indoors and also stunt their own creativity. The film shows Beth, Joe and Fran escaping the real world and learning lessons about how to live in the magical realm.
It’s an entertaining way of teaching them the opposite: that modern children are hemmed in by “modern magic” (WiFi, electronic devices, gaming) and need to get outside into the real world but using their imaginations, to look outwards with all the fun, freedom, mistakes and dangers that entails.
Their father Timmy grows up and forgets Moonface, Silky and the rest. His vague feelings of that idyllic childhood (until his father died) pull him back, but he knows he and Polly are losing their children as computer games and iPads capture their attention. He needs to take them to the place where they can truly experience a kind of magic, before it’s too late.
When they do move away, the further from London and into the countryside the Thompson family go the thinner and more porous is the line between magic and reality.
iPhones, iPads and computer games are all discarded as an old-fashioned train takes them to an equally olde worlde station to disembark. The children watch the Gs on their WiFi go down from 5 to 3 and lower as modernity recedes. At the barn Joe asks if they are in the past: “I don’t understand, have we gone back in time?” They finally have the space (and boredom!) to experience magic.
It’s a film about what should be children’s reality; in the flashbacks to Tim’s childhood he is playing on his own in a cornfield with a toy biplane, a plane we see again later when the children fly to the Land of Spells and Dame Snap’s castle to save the tomato crop. It’s an indication that Timmy and the children’s imaginations created it all; it is not that only children can see magic people but that only they have the creativity to fully live this life.
There are further parallels between the magical and real worlds: Polly’s sharp and hyper-critical mother and the nasty Dame Snap both fulfil the same role, constraining the children’s dreams, and driving them to break out from such forceful opposition.
Venturing out into the real world helps children face up to (mild) peril, meet different types of people living different lives, make mistakes and learn from them, or if possible put things right. (Beth and Silky both learn from and grow from each other’s input despite a shaky start; Later, Beth has to fix the destroyed tomato crop, which she does with the help of her siblings and new friends.)
That this is actually about reality is reinforced by the mid-credits scene, which pokes fun at parents thinking an escape to the past from a digital world is the only answer, or indeed could work. The farmer and his wife turn out not to be broad-accented yokels who’ve never heard of Wi-Fi, but are merely putting that on for gullible and superior incomers. Earlier, Tim is found by Beth, in a scene that recalls Dorothy and her friends going “behind the curtain” to discover the real Wizard of Oz, cycling hard to power the generator for their WiFi. Joe the expert gamer may find out to his cost the perils of being turned into his favourite character in the Land of Birthdays, but thanks to the long hours spent gaming he can also fly a plane, which ultimately saves his family’s business.
Likewise Granny’s riposte to Polly’s inventions for the house and Tim’s tomato crop, when she cuttingly points out that everything Polly has built had already been invented. The homemade irrigation system, and massive greenhouse, are all part of a trajectory that got us to where we are, and when Polly tries to invent something entirely new outside of this it doesn’t work (the tomato-sauce powered tractor).
It’s an indication that the message that modern tech is an evil that children must be kept from is simplistic. Rather it is how and when it is used, and given to children.
Read my 3-star review of The Magic Faraway Tree or my Magic Faraway Tree ending and plot recap.