The estimable Simon Farnaby got hall-of-famer status for co-creating the film Paddington 2, an achievement which by common consent is basically up there with the moon landing and the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Now this screenwriting powerhouse of British movie entertainment has adapted and modernised Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree books from the late 1930s and 40s – all about a huge enchanted tree whose branches are a canopy of magical wonder.
The result is a thoroughly likable and sweet-natured family fantasy film for the Easter holidays, with acres of innocent jollity and eccentric quirkiness.
This film distils the Blytonesque spirit of adventure and outdoorsy fun – it comes from that lost time in which climbing trees was something that children all naturally did – and transfers it to a new world in which all generations are longing to escape electronic devices and AI.
But Barnaby and the director Ben Gregor graft in a new dimension of comedy and flights of fancy with black-belt character turns from a terrific cast (including Farnaby himself as a comedy farmer) and some grade-A gags.
Acres of eccentric quirkiness … Nicola Coughlan, Billie Gadsdon, Phoenix Laroche, Nonso Anozie, Dustin Demri-Burns in The Magic Faraway Tree. Photograph: Entertainment Film Distributors
I laughed out loud when Nonso Anozie’s conceited character Moonface irritably tells the hard-of-hearing Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns) to “get help” – with catastrophic results. And Mark Heap’s appearance as the loud-voiced Mr Oom Boom Boom is a kitemark of broad comedy quality.
The film has touches of Narnia and the Shire – and with its love of sweets and silly contraptions, there is a happy memory of Roald Dahl’s Caractacus Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Certain silver-haired generations may even remember BBC TV’s The Goodies and the Beanstalk.
Claire Foy plays Polly, a brilliant electronics engineer who gets fired from her job for refusing to allow the firm’s new “smart fridge” to spy on its users. So she, her househusband Tim (Andrew Garfield), and their children Fran (Billie Gadsdon), Joe (Phoenix Laroche) and the older, grumpier and more smartphone-addicted teen Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy) are turfed out of their flashy but soullessly gadget-oriented London flat and have to move to the countryside where Tim grew up, where they rent a tumbledown barn and Tim hopes to grow tomatoes and market his own artisan pasta sauce. It is in this ramshackle barn that Farnaby’s farmer detonates an outrageous gag about the wifi.
Tim tells the kids to steer clear of an enchanted wood … but feisty Fran naturally explores and finds the amazing “faraway tree”, whose woody vastness encloses a mysterious group of beings including fairy Silky (Nicola Coughlan), the Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning) who controls access to a fabulous place in the sky that changes according to her spinning wheel of fortune, and the hapless Mr Watzisname (Oliver Chris).
But can Tim and Polly convince the children’s stern grandma (Jennifer Saunders) that all this is good for them? And there is the issue of what they will do when they encounter the evil Dame Snap, played by Rebecca Ferguson with an extraordinary asymmetric hairstyle, like a diagonal beehive so weighted to one side that she virtually has to lean over to the other to keep upright – so no wonder she has a twisted attitude. There is an awful lot of unpretentious enjoyment to be found in the foliage.