When I was nine years old, two friends held a joint birthday party at a local movie theater the day the very first Harry Potter film was released. I was sat in the back row, buzzing with anticipation. I’d read the book, but I still had no idea what to expect on the big screen. Moments later, a collective gasp filled the theater. I gazed open-mouthed as a silver-bearded wizard wearing a black, pointy hat emerged from the darkness. If only the generation first introduced to Harry Potter through the Fantastic Beasts prequels could have experienced the same magic.
Alas, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has a very different opening scene from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Instead, as with the rest of the Fantastic Beasts spinoff franchise, we’re introduced to a wizarding character wearing the ordinary, muggle clothing of his day. Newt Scamander is somewhat oddly dressed in a black bow-tie, befitting his eccentricity as a character, but he hardly looks like a wizard. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any Fantastic Beasts character looking half as wizardly as Albus Dumbledore did that night on Privet Drive.
Fantastic Beasts Puts Wizards In Muggle Clothing More Than Robes & Hats
Even Albus Dumbledore & Professor McGonagall Lack Their Customary Wizarding Attire
Throughout the original Harry Potter movie series, the standard attire worn by witches and wizards is a dark robe and a dark, pointy hat. Yet, Newt Scamander isn’t the only central character in the Fantastic Beasts movies to dress in Muggle clothing. In Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald, Johnny Depp’s тιтular villain wears a triple-breasted overcoat. It makes him like a historical character from the Napoleonic Wars, but it doesn’t make him look like a wizard.
What’s more, in both the second and third movies of the franchise, Jude Law’s young Albus Dumbledore shuns a wizard’s robe and hat in favor of a three-piece suit. As smart as he looks, this isn’t the embodiment of worldly wizardry we’re used to seeing in the Harry Potter movies. Even the young Dumbledore we see during a flashback scene in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is wearing his hat and robe, a detail that’s completely undermined by Jude Law’s appearance without them in Crimes of Grindelwald and Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore.
The same goes for Minerva McGonagall, another Hogwarts professor who’s never seen without her hat and robes in the Harry Potter series. Even when she’s teaching Gryffindor students how to dance in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, she removes her hat but her wizardly robes remain. It makes even less sense that she and Dumbledore would consistently don their robes at Hogwarts during Harry’s more contemporary era, but never be wearing them during a bygone age several decades earlier.
Harry Potter’s Very First Scene Proves Fantastic Beasts Wrong
The Sorcerer’s Stone Shows Wizards Wearing Robes In A Muggle Setting
It’s not just within the hallowed halls of Hogwarts school that Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall wear wizard clothing in the Harry Potter movies, either. The very first scene of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone shows them both donning their wizardly attire in a residential street entirely populated by Muggles, when they arrive outside the Dursleys’ home at number 4 Privet Drive, in the Muggle town of Little Whinging. It was Dumbledore’s appearance in his robes and hat that first introduced millions of viewers around the world to the onscreen magic of Harry Potter.
Professor McGonagall then provided the first truly spellbinding moment of that opening scene, as we watched the silhouette of a cat transform into a witch wearing a pointed hat before our eyes. This stunning visual trick couldn’t have worked without McGonagall wearing her wizarding attire. Yet, throughout the Fantastic Beasts sequels, the younger Professor McGonagall appears in the Muggle dress of the time period in which the movies are set.
The first scene of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone proves that the complete aversion of Fantastic Beasts characters to wizard clothing has nothing to do with the prequel series taking place primarily in Muggle settings. The older Dumbledore and McGonagall wear their robes and hats in Muggle streets, so their younger selves should be able to in the Fantastic Beasts films, as should Newt Scamander and Gellert Grindelwald.
Fantastic Beasts’ Costume Change Is One Reason The Prequels Feel So Disappointing
The Harry Potter Spinoff Doesn’t Look & Feel As Magical Without Wizard Outfits
Movies that take place in the wizarding world of Harry Potter aren’t just about captivating characters and compelling plots, although they also need these elements to be successful. Harry Potter films have to draw their audience in primarily through comprehensive world-building, through which they suspend our disbelief and immerse us fully in their settings. Unfortunately, the Fantastic Beasts movies undermine their ability to suspend our disbelief with a fundamental mistake, which rows back on a decade of big-screen world-building across the eight original Harry Potter films.
The Fantastic Beasts prequels neglect to include outfits specifically for witches and wizards in its costume designs, breaking with a tradition that’s been part of Harry Potter’s cinematic universe since the very start. The importance of costumes in making us believe in the magic of the Harry Potter franchise can’t be overstated, and the lack of wizardly attire in Fantastic Beasts makes the whole prequel series look and feel disappointingly mundane. Witches and Wizards look no different from Muggles, or No-Majs, as they’re called in the United States, throughout the movies, even in the case of characters carried over from Harry Potter.
When an audience isn’t convinced that they’re watching a magical world, it makes it even easier for them to disengage from the uninspiring characters and nonsensical plotlines we see in the two Fantastic Beasts sequels. If J.K. Rowling’s original wizarding world were left looking something like it does in the Harry Potter feature films, then viewers would at least buy into the settings of these prequels.
There are times when subplots within the Harry Potter movies don’t quite work, or the execution of storylines misfires, but we’re still fully onboard and immersed in Harry’s story nonetheless, because the world he inhabits looks and feels suitably magical. Sadly, it’s not possible to say the same of the Fantastic Beasts movies. While the first film is well-plotted with some wonderfully inventive magical creatures rendered convincingly with sublime visual effects, the novelty factor of watching a Harry Potter spinoff wears off quickly because the witches and wizards simply don’t compare with the franchise’s original movie series.
Harry Potter
Harry Potter is a multimedia franchise about an orphaned boy who enrolls at Hogwarts School of Wizardry, where he learns the truth about himself, his family, and the terrible evil that haunts the magical world. Adapted from the novels, Harry Potter is an eight-episode film saga that follows the journey of Harry Potter and his friends, Hermoine Granger and Ron Weasley, as they navigate the tricky world of growing up, school life, and magic. Starting from year one and moving to their seventh year, the films chronicle the students’ time at Hogwarts while unfurling a sinister plot that centers around the unsuspecting Harry. With the return of the dark wizard, Voldemort, the students and professors at Hogwarts will fight to carry on as the world around them may change forever. Harry Potter has expanded beyond the world of its films and novels with several video games, a spin-off film series тιтled Fantastic Beasts, and even attractions at Universal Studios.
Fantastic Beasts
- Created by
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J.K. Rowling
- First Film
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Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
- Latest Film
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Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
- Cast
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Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Jude Law, Mads Mikkelsen, Johnny Depp
Summary
The Fantastic Beasts franchise is a prequel and spin-off of the Harry Potter series, set in the Wizarding World. It follows the adventures of Newt Scamander, a magizoologist who travels the globe studying magical creatures. The series expands into the political and social conflicts of the magical community, particularly the rise of dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald and his confrontation with a younger Albus Dumbledore. The films focus on themes of friendship, loyalty, and the battle between good and evil, against the backdrop of a magical world in the early 20th century.
