We’re all drowning in content—so it’s time to highlight the best. In her column, published every Friday, critic Clarisse Loughrey recommends a new show to watch. This week, it’s Disney’s belated sequel to the 80s adventure classic, Willow.
My parents never showed me Willow. Or Labyrinth. Or The NeverEnding Story. Or The Dark Crystal. Maybe they harboured some secret resentment towards the 80s. I’ll never know. But it was a slightly odd experience to approach Disney+’s Willow series—a new, robust nostalgia project from the studio that loves nothing more than to mine cash from people’s childhoods—entirely from the outside. I saw 1988’s Willow precisely half an hour, and one tea break, before I pressed play on its follow-up.
I’ll say this: the loveliness of the Willow series represents something beyond its source material, which was never even that much of a box office hit. I still felt wistful, not for the original film, but for the undefinable feeling of limitlessness that good fantasy storytelling can provide. It made me think back to when I was 12, cocooned under my duvet, devouring some dog-eared copy of The Lord of the Rings. Of all the stories that reframed my concepts of good and evil, of who has the power to become a hero. Of the first time I played Dungeons & Dragons, and the giddy thrill of defeating ancient evil with the mere roll of a dice.
Willow is by no means a flawless, or even uncynical, piece of work. As with all legacy sequels, you can almost hear the creak of old parts being dragged into new formations. The original film followed Willow Ufgood (Warwick Davis), a Nelwyn sorcerer living out in the farmlands, sent off on a noble quest to shepherd a baby, Elora Danan, prophesied to bring about the downfall of the evil Queen Bavmorda. He finds unlikely allies, among them Madmartigan (Val Kilmer), a rogue with a heart of gold, and the independent-minded Princess Sorsha (Joanne Whalley), the daughter of Bavmorda whose change of heart sees her fall for Madmartigan. If you haven’t already guessed from that distinctly Han/Leia dynamic, the film’s story comes from George Lucas himself, who then handed the project over to Bob Dolman to write and Ron Howard to direct.
The series must conjure up a new reason to send Willow—older, wiser, and now perfectly positioned as the reluctant mentor—on another noble quest to save the kingdom. But it’s Madmartigan and Sorsha’s son, Airk (Dempsey Bryk), who’s now in peril, kidnapped by monstrous forces and taken somewhere across the Shattered Sea, beyond the edges of the map. His sister Kit (Ruby Cruz), at the beckoning of Sorsha (Whalley, making a return appearance), sets out to enlist Willow’s help and find out what happened to her father, who seemingly disappeared without a trace many years ago. She’s accompanied by Jade (Erin Kellyman), the soon-to-be first female knight; Dove, a scullery maid and Airk’s paramour (Ellie Bamber); Graydon (Tony Revolori), Kit’s betrothed; and Thraxus Boorman (Amar Chadha-Patel), a prisoner who knows the way. Elora Danan, of course, will prove to be an essential key to the mystery—but no one knows what happened to her, and her memory has passed into myth.
The narrative here seems almost arbitrary. There’s only so much talk of prophecies, leather-bound history books, and long-forgotten battles that I can take before it all degrades into nothing but white noise. But writer Jonathan Kasdan, son of Star Wars’ own Lawrence Kasdan, clearly understands the template he’s working with. These characters are all archetypes that still feel like individuals, not unlike the disparate collection of bards, clerics, and paladins that make up the average D&D team. There’s a queer romance at the heart of this story that feels, unusually for Disney, neither painfully ambiguous nor overtly tokenistic.
We meet strange characters along the way, played by always-welcome talents such as Ralph Ineson and Hannah Waddingham. The dialogue reads, for the most part, as modern. Less successful are the bizarre corporate punk covers that play over the credits, including a jarring take on Metallica’s Enter Sandman. There’s something quite lovely about Davis’s performance, too, in the matter-of-fact way he delivers high talk of old magic, and the authentic chemistry he shares with his onscreen daughter, Mims, played by his offscreen daughter Annabelle Davis. When he mentions that, the last time he saved the day, he “then went to go get pissed”, you can’t help but strap in for the adventure yet to come.
But I’m thankful mainly for what Willow might herald in the future. Though it bears the same bleak, dark cinematography of all contemporary television, its tonal lightness reflects the promising resurgence of true high fantasy, finally unshackled from the controversy-seeking impulses of Game of Thrones. Netflix’s The Witcher went part of the way there—though it still takes pride in its mud-splattered brutality, it always has a sense of humour about itself. Next year, we’re getting a fully-fledged Dungeons & Dragons film with Chris Pine. Hopefully, more like it will be around the corner. I’m ready to feel again like I did when I was 12, lost in a world my imagination could only dream of.
