‘Fantastic Beasts’ manages to be mostly fun and charming

Welcome to the world of Harry Potter — post-Potter. Or actually, pre-Potter, because “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” is set in a time before Harry Potter was born. In the 1920’s, to be exact, and in America.

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“Fantastic Beasts” happens to be the name of a textbook our beloved Harry Potter studies at Hogwarts, and this movie tells the story of how this book came to be.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

The Fantastic Beasts author is a young man named Newt Scamander, played winningly by Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne. He calls himself a “magizoologist,” because his self-assigned task is to catalog and collect endangered magical creatures, which he does with the help of a bottomless suitcase.

After a transatlantic voyage, he arrives in New York with his mysterious suitcase full of fantastic beasts. But troubles begin almost immediately upon landing – some creatures escape his suitcase.

That escape is problematic on many levels. It puts the animals at risk, he himself could face deportation, and most importantly, it threatens to expose the entire underground wizarding community in America.

He spends most of the movie trying to corral the missing creatures, defending himself from capture by either the police or his angry fellow wizards, and in the meantime, solving the mystery of a rampaging invisible force that’s destroying huge swaths of NYC.

There’s a lot of backstory to catch up with here, maybe too much, but thankfully, “Fantastic Beasts” has a light enough touch that it doesn’t entirely bog down the movie.

Directed by David Yates, who did the final four Harry Potter films, the movie takes great delight in presenting completely fanciful creatures — a mischievous blue-furred platypus, a huge rhinoceros with body-parts that light up, spectacularly colorful flying dragons, and a scampering long-haired something or other that looks like a motorized mop with big eyes.

And of course, we have a one wide-eyed muggle, called a “no-maj” in America (short for no magic), who befriends Scamander and gets to see wonders no other no-maj can.

Occasionally, a serious social critique can be felt lurking on the horizon, whether it be the hint of fascism on the continent or strained social relations in America.

But for the most part, the politics is handled obliquely and doesn’t interfere with the pacing of the film. What does interfere with the pacing is an unnecessarily lengthy finale.

Despite its overblown climax, “Fantastic Beasts” manages to be mostly fun and charming. It may, in the end, prove to be too slight and inconsequential to launch an entirely new franchise — it’s the first of a projected five-film series — but for this first installment at least, Eddie Redmayne brings the magic.