Have you, an important grown-up, been kept awake at night trying to remember a key detail from the The Magic Faraway Tree movie (which sweets captured Fran in the Land of Goodies? What did Beth wish for in the Land of Birthdays? Where can one buy a massive barn for 20 grand?) Well fear not, you can probably find the answer here. (Or my 3 star review is here.)
The ending of The Magic Faraway Tree
Oh no, a pasta disaster. On the morning of the grand opening the family find the tomatoes in the greenhouse diseased and dying. Devastated, Tim asks the children to spread the word the event is cancelled.
Beth decides she needs to fix this as it was her wish in the Land of Birthdays that caused it. The children head to the enchanted wood. They need the Land of Spells but it isn’t at the top of the ladder. The Land of Know-alls is, and they ask for help on how to get to other lands. The Know-alls have a “land hopping machine” (a biplane) in the next room, so Joe flies Beth, Fran, Moonface, Silky, Mr Watzisname and Saucepan Man to the Land of Spells. They find a growing spell they could use on the tomatoes, but the stall owner will only sell it for something priceless. Fran, with her siblings and friends joining in, sings The Family Song, and the seller gives them the spell.
Flying back, the plane comes down on a castle forecourt in the land of Dame Snap. They are all taken into her schoolroom, but the group all get themselves sent to Detention, which turns out to be in an iron cage. Mr Watzisname is sitting on a plate of old vegetables. Moonface doesn’t want to help as he says the children will forget them as all human children do. However when he realises their dad Tim is the same Timmy who used to visit as a boy, he agrees to. He places a potato between the bars of the cage then uses a tiny bit of the growing spell. The potato bursts the bars open and they escape to the biplane pursued by Dame Snap. They fly back to the tree safely.
Back at the house the locals are arriving for the pasta sauce launch as the children never told them it was cancelled. The children rush back with the spell whicht transforms the rotten tomato crop into huge luscious tomatoes. Everyone at the opening loves the pasta sauce. Tim, talking to the Italian head of the world’s biggest tomato sauce pasta sauce firm, finds he can finally speak Italian.
Silky, Mr Watzisname and Saucepan Man watch from the edge of the wood. Moonface watches Tim from the garden – Tim realises but when he turns around he can’t see his old friend. The fairy folk all head back to the tree while the locals, the Thompson family and their friends dance.
Mid-credits scene: Granny stomps off from the party, and the farmer and his wife, with perfectly normal voices, laugh together at how they enjoy fooling newcomers with fake accents.
In the Land of Goodies (Moonface, Saucepan Man, Silky and Fran)
The Magic Faraway Tree – full plot recap
Polly Thompson comes home from work dejected. An inventor, she had designed a new smart fridge which her family have been testing at home. However the fridge only “knows” what people want as there is a hidden camera recording the kitchen. She wanted the camera removed, her bosses refused – so she resigned. Unfortunately the company are demanding their flat and their car back.
Her husband Tim looks after their three children, and makes tomato pasta sauce. He thinks back to his golden childhood in the countryside, playing alone on a cornfield with a small toy yellow biplane. We are in the present day, though Tim has an inventive, 1950s-style make-do-and-mend approach, creating a bag out of oven gloves. Tim and Polly’s three children, Beth, Fran and Joe, are meant to put their screens into the bag before dinner but rarely do.
He has been noticing that their children are slipping away. They come to the table with screens and Fran is completely silent. He and Polly talk about their dreams from the past and how they could run away and start again, the whole family. Soon they are on an old train, rattling into the countryside, the children warned not to tell Granny (Polly’s mum). Tim gives the children books to read which they don’t appreciate; Fran’s is about fairies. They disembark at an old station but there are no taxis so they have to walk. En route to their new home, Fran, lagging behind, sees a pretty purse on the ground and spies a young woman in the trees. She hands back the purse.
Their new home is a rickety old barn with no electricity, no WiFi and lots of cobwebs. The £20,000 payment to the farmer they are buying it off is deferred until the end of the tomato season. The farmer and his wife, broadly accented West Country folk, arrive and feign ignorance at the mention of WiFi though they do warn the children not to go to the wood as it is apparently enchanted. That night the children are freezing. Tim tries to encourage family bonding by singing The Family Song but the children go to bed instead. Polly tucks Fran in who finally says something – that she met a fairy. Polly is delighted.
During the night the woman from the trees arrives at the open window; it is Silky, the fairy from earlier. She has with her the tiny Angry Pixie. She makes him climb in and deliver an invitation to Fran to visit them in the enchanted wood, and to bring a gift. He is unwilling but she says she will give him a popcake.
The next morning Polly is trying to get the stove to work but there is a hen roosting on top of it. Tim is starting to clear land outside for his tomatoes.
Beth writes to their granny, that they have moved to the countryside and she hates it.
Meanwhile Fran goes off to explore and to find the enchanted wood. Following the instructions in her invitation, she says out loud “I believe in magic” three times, and the glade around the tree transforms into a colourful, sun-dappled magical place. A seat is lowered on ropes, and it carries her up to climbable branches. She passes the Angry Pixie’s tiny home before reaching a larger house, and explores. Moonface and Silky appear. Moonface is suspicious of her but she gives him the present, a child’s bat with a ball attached on a string which he can’t master. Fran narrowly misses being soaked by Dame Washalot.
A new land is at the top of the tree, the Land of Goodies. The group dance to some funk music before going up the ladder, which reaches ever higher through the clouds. At the top the land is filled with sweets, including huge flying saucers whizzing around. They try the famous popcakes. They are warned by the land’s controller not to be greedy but Fran piles her basket high with sweets. A warning sounds, indicating that the land is about to move away, but Fran hasn’t tried the marshmallows and goes to nab one from the marshmallow tree. It grabs her for her greed. As she is being admonished the others quickly rush back and pull her free, everyone getting back to the ladder just in time. Her new friends send her home down the Slippery Slip: the slide down the centre of the tree.
Fran goes home to find her parents frantic about her absence (ironic as Polly and Tim keep telling the children to find something to do outside).
In London, Granny – who is orange, and so rich and so posh she turns down an invitation to lunch with the King as she doesn’t like him – receives Beth’s letter.
Fran persuades Joe and Beth to come with her to the wood. All three go, Beth reluctantly. In the clearing she initially refuses to say the magic words but soon does and they all go up the tree. Beth is rude to Silky, demeaning the fairy’s obsession with her appearance and that her name is based on her silky blonde hair. She also mocks Silky for thinking she and Beth could be friends. Beth gets soaked by Dame Washalot then refuses to go up to the new land, the Land Of Birthdays.
Dame Washalot washes Beth’s soaking jacket and returns it tiny and shrunken. The others are up in the Land of Birthdays, which is operated by rollerskating elves dressed in satin shellsuits. They offer a birthday wish to each visitor. Silky is delighted at becoming a proper tiny fairy with wings. Joe becomes his favourite computer game character but soon finds his new form stops him eating pizza. Fran gets a new voice but it is unfortunately male and Scottish. Saucepan Man asks for his saucepans to be removed. They then find out the changes are permanent.
Beth, talking to Dame Washalot down the tree, realises her siblings are probably making stupid wishes, and decides to go up to the land to help. Dame Washalot gives her a sack of the elves’ washing to take up.
At the top Beth quickly makes a wish for the elves: that her father’s tomato crop will fail and they can all go home. Then she goes in and discovers the others can’t be turned back to how they were. She demands the elves reverse the spells on pain of not getting their clean washing back, but the elves say the only option is for the group to go down to the basement, where Mr Oom Boom Boom lives. He is an art dealer and has bought an old “backwards” door – go through that and incant the spell backwards and it will be reversed. It takes a lot to get him to agree to let them go through – in the end he takes Silky as payment, lying to them that Santa has asked him to find a fairy to go on the top of his Christmas tree. Silky, still tiny and winged, is now happy as she is and doesn’t want to change back, and agrees to being sent to Santa.
The others go through the door to a room where everything is backwards, and say their spells in reverse, emerging back to normal. However Mr Boom Boom, who has put Silky in a small box, is posting her not to Father Christmas but to the evil Dame Snap. The group realise what is happening and incapacitate Mr Boom Boom with a metal bucket over his head. Silky manages to reverse her spell declaring that actually she likes herself as she is. They rush to leave the land, and back in the tree Beth and Silky are now friends. Beth tells Silky to stand up to the men in the tree more, while Silky gives Beth a flower to wear in her hair.
The children leave down the Slippery Slip.
Granny turns up on her helicopter. They are also now getting electricity and WiFi, thanks to their inventive mother. Beth is online with her friends. Tim shows Granny, who is never proud of her daughter, the amazing designs and creations Polly has come up with since they got there: an irrigation system and a huge greenhouse. Granny is unimpressed as all these things have been invented before. She drops Beth in it by telling everyone Beth wrote to her and then offers to have Beth stay with her, saying she can go to school near Granny.
Beth is online with her friends when the WiFi drops. The electricity has gone out and she goes downstairs to investigate. There’s a sort of “pulling back the curtain in the Wizard of Oz” moment as she finds her dad hidden on a stationary bike, cycling to power the generator.
Polly sits the children down and goes through the dream binder from their student days, dreams for the future illustrated by them both. She also explains more about their dad’s background: he grew up just over the other side of the wood. His father died young and Tim and his mother had to move to London, where he went to art college and met Polly. As she sits with her three children, flicking through the book, she says they never do things like this usually.
It makes the children, including Beth, more keen to pitch in, and they all help advertise the pasta sauce grand opening around the village. It is to be in four weeks. Then Silky sends an invitation for the children to visit the Land of Dreams. They decide to go but after they have helped their parents. They don’t go, and the fairy folk are miserable, talking about how human children always grow up and forget them.
But then, disaster. On the morning of the grand opening they find the tomatoes in the greenhouse diseased and dying, filled with maggots. Devastated, Tim asks the children to let the villagers know the event is cancelled.
Beth decides she needs to fix this as it was her wish in the Land of Birthdays that caused the crop to fail. She says she needs two hours, and the three children head over to the enchanted wood. At the tree Silky stands up to Moonface. Beth’s only hope is The Land of Spells but it isn’t at the top of the ladder. But the Land of Know-alls is, and they might be able to help tell the children how to get to other lands. It turns out the Great Know-All (made up of several know-all heads) can help – it has a “land-hopping machine” (a biplane). Joe flies Beth, Fran, Moonface, Silky, Mr Watzisname and Saucepan Man to the Land of Spells. Once there they investigate a market, finding a growing spell they could use on the tomatoes, but the stall owner will only sell them the spell in return for something priceless. Fran suggests to her siblings they sing The Family Song. Initially Beth and Joe refuse so Fran starts singing it on her own. Soon her siblings join in and then their friends. It’s a great performance and the seller gives them the spell.
Flying back, the plane loses height as it’s tired. It comes down on a castle forecourt, on a land they haven’t visited before. It is the land of Dame Snap. They are all taken into the schoolroom, where Dame Snap bemoans that she used to be called Dame Slap until the inspectors stopped her (her school is now, ominously, not inspected at all). The group realise they can get detentions for bad behaviour and Beth points out that it should be easier to escape a detention than the schoolroom under the dame’s eye. One by one they are sent out, finishing with some impressive farting from Saucepan Man, Moonface etc.
Unfortunately the detention spot turns out to be an iron cage. They sit there glumly, Mr Watzisname offering the plate of old vegetables that he finds himself sitting on. Moonface doesn’t want to help as he says the children will forget them as all human children do. It is only when, talking to the children, he realises that their dad Tim is Timmy, a boy who used to visit the tree (and who was a good friend of Moonface) that he agrees to help. He places a potato between the bars of the cage then uses a tiny bit of the growing spell. The potato bursts the bars open and they escape to the biplane just in time, though the plane is still asleep.
Dame Snap comes running out to stop them and screams loudly, which wakes up the plane, and it takes off. She screams again and the plane tips over the edge of the castle forecourt. She thinks she’s got them but the plane reappears and flies overhead, and back to the faraway tree.
Back at the house the locals are arriving for the launch as the children never told them it was cancelled.
The children rush back with the spell and set it going.
As the locals walk up to the greenhouse, Tim is trying to stop them, but they open the door and see the place filled with massive healthy tomatoes. Polly and Tim hug the children, including Beth. Everyone at the opening loves the pasta and sauce, leaving donations and buying jars. Even the Italian head of the world’s biggest tomato sauce pasta sauce firm (in a white suit like the Man from Del Monte) has turned up. As he and Tim converse, Tim finds he can finally speak Italian (it has been a running joke throughout the film that Tim, who has Italian heritage but has never been there, can’t speak Italian, relying on what his dad told him – that at some point he would simply know how to speak it).
Silky, Mr Watzisname and Saucepan Man watch from the edge of the wood. Moonface is actually in the garden watching Tim. Tim realises he is there and says Moonface’s name, but when he turns around he can’t see his old friend. He is too old to see magic anymore.
The fairy folk all head back to the tree while the locals, the Thompson family and their friends dance.
Mid-credits scene
But wait! There is a mid credits scene where Granny stomps off from the party, furious that the pasta sauce endeavour is a huge success. And the farmer and his wife, with perfectly normal voices, laugh together at how they enjoy fooling newcomers with fake accents.
Read my 3-star review of The Magic Faraway Tree or my article: Magic, modernity and meaning in the Faraway Tree