This is the sixth article in our examination of the AFI’s Ten Top Tens. You can read the introduction here, the first article in the series on animation here, the second article in the series on romantic comedies here, the third article on sports movies here, the fourth article on mysteries here, and the fifth article on westerns here.

Image Credit:Pam Roth

Castles and dragons.  Knights in shiny armor.  Tight corsets and bad teeth.  Dirty faces and muddy boots.  Great sorcerors and bloody battlefields. Court jesters and balding monks. These are the things that I think about when I think of the fantasy genre. In other words, the thing that comes to mind when I think of fantasy is The Renaissance Festival.

Of course, there is so much more to the genre than this narrow idea.  But the above sort of encompasses my earliest impression of what I understood of movies and the use of fantasy.  I think about Conan the Barbarian and Army of Darkness when I think about fantasy in the movies.

Here’s what the AFI says about Fantasy:

AFI defines “fantasy” as a genre where live-action characters inhabit imagined settings and/or experience situations that transcend the rules of the natural world.

This is actually a pretty good definition as it allows for something beyond my childish view of fantasy.  It includes more than just magic dust and flying reptiles, or vampires and scary things from scary things from folklore.

Here’s the AFI list:

Rank	Film	Year
1	The Wizard of Oz	1939
2	The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring	2001
3	It’s a Wonderful Life	1946
4	King Kong	1933
5	Miracle on 34th Street	1947
6	Field of Dreams	1989
7	Harvey	1950
8	Groundhog Day	1993
9	The Thief of Bagdad	1924
10	Big	1988

Fantasy is about the negation of the naturally ordered world.  Movies and the use of fantasy are a match made in heaven.  Fantasy and particularly, fantastical films, are all about escapism.  Ever notice that the greatest movies, the ones most grounded in reality, are the ones you don’t ever want to see again?  I talked about this before in the review to The Last King of Scotland.  And I also talked about it here with respects to the Romantic Comedy and the “marriage” quality of a movie.

Then, think of the best action movies, for instance.  Die Hard, in all its greatness and majesty, is hardly grounded in reality.  Seriously.  True Lies might be one of the funniest action movies out there.  Realistic? Not even close.  But it did give us the Crimson Jihad! and Bill Paxton’s wonderful silliness.  And it’s a great movie to watch as Arnold kicks some terrorist butt.  Grounded in reality?  Hardly.

The point is, one of the best practical uses for movies in society is their uselessness.  I like to think of the movies as humanity’s dreams.  Millions of them go on all the time, most of them are forgotten.  Some make a huge impression on you and stay with you for a good long time.

However, there’s something elemental in the dream that make them crucial in the mind’s ability to function.  I’m not sure what that is, and I’m not exactly sure that any neuroscientist knows either.  Probably, we’ll never know.  But we do know that there is a benefit.  And that benefit pays, just like the movies pays, in some way, for us.

Fantasies, then, are the most in-tune to the dream-like essences of the cinema.  Good ones remind us of that wonderful dream of flying over the city.  Bad fantasy movies, of course, are awkward and embarrassing, like dreams where you show up naked to work.

In the fantasy, we have to be our sharpest, our most adaptable, and our bravest, because we cannot predict what will come next.  Maybe purposefully inducing these states of unpredictability is the point of conscious dreaming, as in imaginative exercises, and unconscious dreaming.  It harkens in us the most important imperative that is easily forgettable in our everyday lives: survival.

Survival is what we are here to do.  It’s biological.  And the unpredictability created in fantasy elicits the urgency of survival that is no longer present in our comfortable, modern lives.

The AFI blurs the traditional fantasy here as seen in the Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings with the more existentially absurd like in Field of Dreams and Groundhog Day (two of my favorites from the list).

I haven’t seen The Thief of Baghdad or Harvey, so I’ll just skip those for now.  The only ones I want pulled form the list are Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life.  I don’t like these because there’s too much mid-century sap.  Not interested.  All of the others are high-quality selections.

There are still some additions that I would really have liked to see.  The first is Who Framed Roger Rabbit?  You just don’t get more fantastical then the seedy underbelly associations of Toon Town.  Hilarious!  What a wonderfully intelligent blend of animation and noir.  Roger Rabbit made plenty of money and doubled down in the merchandising as well.  I remember dumping hours and hours of my useless life into Nintendo game.  There may be a lack of significance, but the mixture of animation and live-action, and especially the enormous interaction of the two, was truly ground-breaking.

The second, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is the one I was most surprised to see absent from the list.  Ang Lee’s wonderful epic brought classical martial arts, mythology, and a different cultural perspective together into one story and told it in a completely universal way.  The photography and the art, the wire-fu, and the performances all made this hugely successful award-winner an instant classic.  It also sort of ushered the globalism of the 21st century into light in the film industry.  I really can’t think of a film that best fits the criteria for selection than this one.  Except, of course, that its principal interests weren’t American.  Not American made, so we won’t give it any props.  Oh well.

There really are loads of others deserving of proper recognition as there are with all of the other genres.  Willow, Reign of Fire, The Chronicles of Narnia (I hear), or some superhero flicks could all make a decent claim for belonging on the list.  But we have to draw the line somewhere.

Fantasy is an often overlooked genre, but it may the one closest to the real function of the cinema in its escapist value.  It may also be the one with the endless supply of ideas as there are no bounds.  Like our dreams serve the proper function of our minds, the cinematic fantasy serves to help the function of our society.  And you can use this justification to dress up like your favorite elven characters and battle the pointy-hatted wizards on your block. 

Or, you know, not.