Fantasy

A type of film commonly associated with the fanciful worlds of fairy tales or imaginary lands, films dealing the wonders of magic and magicians, with the doings of gods, angels, elves, fairies, gnomes and other supernatural beings. Anything drawn from a completely invented world, with some element of sorcery or inventive zoology, can qualify, though the most common forms are ones based in the era of princes and princesses, swords and dragons. The genre had it's first great creators in the work of George Pal and Ray Harryhausen. Both worked in different kinds of modeling, and the creatures and effects they were able to create opened the horizon for imaginative cinema. Now it was possible to film fairies, animated skeletons, and giants with a modicum of realism. In movies like Tom Thumb, and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, George Pal's Oscar-winning effects revolutionized film by combining live action with elements of animation. Harryhausen, working in a more mythological vein, did much the same thing later on with his beautiful work on The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and others. Frank Oz and Jim Henson helped bring fantasy into the '80s with their puppet creations in The Dark Crystal. As CGI effects became the standard in the '90s, entire dragons were created out of thin air, as in Dragonheart. Many well-known directors like Terry Gilliam (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) have tried to instill the genre with some poetry and magic of a more adult nature, but a large portion of fantasy is aimed at children and pre-teens.

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