Kids on both sides of the pond already went nuts for the Paddington pictures and Wonka, both sourced from beloved British children’s books. With The Magic Faraway Tree, writer and performer Simon Farnaby (The Mighty Boosh, Ghosts) tries his hand at a third British children’s lit classic. Based on an Enid Blyton series first launched in 1939, this cutesy fantasy family film is unlikely to have the same kind of stickiness stateside – it’s at once dopier and less starry than Farnaby’s previous adaptations – but there’s no denying its heart is in the right place.
Counterintuitively for a kids’ movie, The Magic Faraway Tree begins by foregrounding the experience of parents. Tim (Andrew Garfield) is a stay-at-home dad rueing his children’s tech absorption and disconnect from nature, while mom Polly (Claire Foy) is an inventor who quits her corporate job on principle. I’m not sure the dangers of screen addiction and data harvesting are the most surefire way to lock in a young audience’s attention, but it does get the Thompson family from point A, the hurly-burly city, to point B, the English countryside, where they will take a chance on Tim’s dream of growing tomatoes and bottling his own pasta sauce.
From here, the kids take over as the plot movers: surly teen Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy), video game-obsessed Joe (Phoenix Laroche), and quiet, dreamy Fran (Billie Gadsdon). Fran is the first one to stumble onto the Enchanted Wood, where faeries, pixies, and other magical folk dwell inside a ginormous tree that is the launchpad to other realms. In these jaunts to the Land of Goodies, the Land of Birthdays, and the Land of Know-Alls, The Magic Faraway Tree recalls the episodic set-piece plotting of classic children’s fantasy films like The Wizard of Oz and The NeverEnding Story – though you’ll want to dial your expectations way down from those touchstones. The otherworldly production design is competent but never quite transportive, and, with the exception of the Land of Dame Snap (Rebecca Ferguson, gleefully nasty), the film lacks the tendrils of menace that undergird more rewarding children’s entertainment.
Enid Blyton superfans will note that the schoolteacher Dame Snap was originally Dame Slap in the books, back before corporal punishment got struck from the list of acceptable forms of reprimand. The film mines the revision for a laugh, wearing this and other course corrections from the text lightly. Still, in a dispiritingly predictable turn of events, the film was met with some pitchfork wielding in the UK; the modernizations and colorblind casting of Enchanted Wood residents seem to have riled up the anti-woke crowd. Given the far smaller footprint Blyton’s books have in the U.S., I’m betting our homegrown crazies won’t bother taking umbrage. In any case, if you can’t stretch your imagination for fairyland creatures with names like Moonface, Mr. Saucepan Man, and the Angry Pixie, then you’re probably immune to magic anyway.
And there is magic here – modest, heartfelt. For children, the thrill will be in the fantastical worlds where marshmallows grow on trees and a little boy can pilot a plane. But what will buoy adults most is Garfield and Foy’s lovely and understated portrait of marriage as a true partnership.
The Magic Faraway Tree
2026, PG, 110 min. Directed by Ben Gregor. Starring Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Nonso Anozie, Nicola Coughlan, Billie Gadsdon, Delilah Bennett-Cardy, Phoenix Laroche, Jessica Gunning, Jennifer Saunders, Rebecca Ferguson.
This article appears in August 21 • 2026.
