Since just about cinema’s early days as a storytelling medium, fantasy has been one of its most prolific and successful genres. Like any genre, fantasy films rely heavily on strong writing; and like any screenplay, a fantasy script relies heavily on having compelling characters. Thankfully, over the course of history, there have been many fantasy masterpieces with deeply interesting characters.
However, it’s one thing for a character to be iconic, cool, or simply compelling in a general way; and it’s a whole other thing for a fantasy character to be interesting. We’re talking about characters with clear wants and needs, with engaging but plausible internal contradictions, with an active sense of agency, and with core fears and motivations. Over the years, there have been many a fantasy film which have had not just one, but an admirable number of characters who are nothing less than fascinating.
10
‘Edward Scissorhands’ (1990)
Nowadays, in spite of how hit-or-miss some of his 21st-century oeuvre has generally been, Tim Burton is almost universally recognized as one of Hollywood’s most prominent dark fantasy filmmakers. Back when the 1990s rolled in, however, he was still a director with only three movies under his belt. His fourth feature film was Edward Scissorhands, whose commercial and critical success further established him as an auteur to look out for going forward.
This is the moving story of an unfinished artificial humanoid who has scissor blades instead of hands, who’s taken in by a suburban family and falls in love with their daughter. It’s an absolute triumph of quirky character design where Edward is a deeply engaging “Frankenstein’s monster” archetype, Kim is one of the most interesting female characters in Burton’s filmography, and the many people who populate the movie’s parodic suburban world are as amusing as they are uniformly compelling.
9
‘Princess Mononoke’ (1997)
Hayao Miyazaki is not only universally recognized as the king of anime filmmaking, he’s also often praised as one of the greatest Japanese filmmakers in history. For proof of why, one needn’t look much further than one of his greatest masterpieces: Princess Mononoke, an action epic that’s among the most wonderfully-written historical fantasy gems in film history.
There are plenty of reasons why Princess Mononoke is wonderfully written, from its profound thematic layeredness to its being one of the fantasy movies with the best lore, and its fantastic character writing is not to be underestimated either. From San to Ashitaka to Lady Eboshi, the many characters who populate the world of Princess Mononoke are so morally complex and thematically charged that they’re nothing if not deeply, irresistibly interesting.
8
‘I Dream in Another Language’ (2017)
Latin America is the cradle of magical realism, a form of low fantasy that treats subtle supernatural events as normal, mundane occurrences in otherwise pretty normal worlds. And as far as magical realism cinematic masterpieces go, it doesn’t get a lot better than Ernesto Contreras‘ I Dream in Another Language, one of the highest-rated Mexican films of all time on Letterboxd.
It’s one of the best international fantasy movies of all time, with some of the best writing of any Mexican movie of the last decade. It’s the tale of two elderly characters who are the last remaining speakers of an Indigenous language, but haven’t spoken in decades after they fell out in their youth. Each one of the story’s characters is full of fascinating contradictions and thought-provoking comments on Indigeneity, communication, and queerness.
7
‘Ratatouille’ (2007)
Written and directed by Brad Bird, Ratatouille is one of those rare animated films that are perfect from start to finish. On the surface, it seems like a fairy tale of deceiving simplicity, built on the naturally silly premise of a cooking rat who controls a human chef by pulling on his hair. Under that surface lies a surprisingly complex and touching story about passion and the democratization of art.
People who think that family cinema can’t have characters as nuanced and interesting as those of fantasy cinema made for adults clearly haven’t seen Ratatouille, which has some of the most compelling characters of any animated movie in the history of family cinema. With Remy as a subversion of the “cute animal helper” trope, Linguini as a hard-hitting representation of the accidental hero, Ego as a deconstruction of the cynical critic, and the rest of the supporting cast being just as compelling, it’s no wonder why this has aged as such a perfect modern classic.
6
‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ (2006)
Guillermo del Toro is widely considered one of today’s masters of dark fantasy, and there’s pretty much no question as to what the crown jewel of his filmography is: It has to be Pan’s Labyrinth, arguably the best dark fantasy movie in film history. This Spanish-Mexican co-production is dark fairy tale storytelling at its cinematic peak, simultaneously functioning as a scathing critique of authoritarian violence.
Any film about the historical trauma of war and fascism needs interesting characters to make those themes work, just like any fantasy movie needs interesting characters to make its supernatural world believable, and Pan’s Labyrinth succeeds at both of those things. Both our heroes and our villains are intricately detailed in equal measure, powerfully reflecting the story’s themes.
5
‘The Green Mile’ (1999)
Rarely—if ever—has history seen a director better at adapting Stephen King stories than Frank Darabont, whose The Green Mile is far and away one of the greatest low fantasy masterpieces of not just the ’90s, but the entire 20th century. It’s a three-hour-long epic with characters so emotionally engaging that not a single second of that daunting runtime ends up feeling like a dead spot.
From the towering John Coffey serving as a marvelously complex Christ-like figure and Percy being one of the most detestable sadist villains in the modern history of cinema.
It’s both a gritty, dark-toned historical prison drama and a beautiful magical realism tale, a story of redemption and remorse that critiques the American justice system in a range of deeply thought-provoking ways. From the towering John Coffey serving as a marvelously complex Christ-like figure and Percy being one of the most detestable sadist villains in the modern history of cinema, The Green Mile is full of interesting characters played by a bunch of immensely talented actors.
4
‘Spirited Away’ (2001)
As if any more proof were needed that Hayao Miyazaki is the king of anime filmmaking, there’s also the movie that’s most often praised as his mangum opus, the winner of the second-ever Academy Award for Best Animated Feature: Spirited Away. It’s not only one of the best-looking movies of the 21st century, but also one of the best-written fantasy films of all time.
That incredible writing includes, of course, richly nuanced and deeply interesting characters. Chihiro and her coming-of-age journey are the stars of the show, needless to say, and more than enough to justify the price of admission. Add to that the profound thematic significance of characters like No-Face and Yubaba, and it becomes abundantly clear why this is regarded by some as the single greatest animated film of all time.
3
‘The Lord of the Rings’ Trilogy
Before the turn of the 21st century, no one would have blamed any fan of J. R. R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings, arguably the single greatest fantasy epic in the history of literature, for thinking that it was impossible for a movie adaptation to live up to the source material’s legacy. Enter Peter Jackson, who took Tolkien’s Legendarium and made in his Lord of the Rings trilogy the greatest fantasy trilogy in film history.
The Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King are all three among the greatest fantasy epics in the history of cinema, easily making this one of the most consistent movie trilogies of all time. The runtime of nearly 10 hours (over 11 hours if watching the extended editions) gives us plenty of time to explore these surprisingly complex and irresistibly interesting characters, all among the most iconic in all of fantasy cinema.
2
‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (1946)
Frank Capra was an auteur well before the term “auteur” was coined, a filmmaker who was constantly way ahead of his time and never afraid to challenge the strict censorial rules of the Hays Code that ruled during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Case in point: It’s a Wonderful Life, a masterpiece that’s a Christmas classic just as much as it is a life-affirming statement against suicide and in favor of community, family, and self-love.
It’s one of the best American fantasy movies of all time, with some of the most interesting character writing that was ever seen during Hollywood’s Classical period. Considering that it’s one of the most complex character studies of the era, it’s unsurprising that characters like George Bailey, Mary Bailey, the angel Clarence, and Mr. Potter are all among the most riveting characters of this period of Hollywood history.
1
‘Star Wars’ (1977)
It’s quite likely that not even George Lucas himself could have possibly predicted just how much of a pop-cultural juggernaut the Star Wars franchise would end up becoming, even after 1977’s A New Hope became the highest-grossing film in history at the time. And if the franchise ever became as big as it did, it’s largely because it has several of the most iconic, interesting, and masterfully written characters in film history.
Of course, Star Wars is one of the most fun movies of the 20th century, a blockbuster masterpiece that never pretends to be arthouse in any way. Indeed, its characters are generally archetypal on the surface, all in favor of the story being a reflection of Joseph Cambell‘s Hero’s Journey—but each and every one of these unforgettable heroes and villains is also a masterclass in how to write an archetypal character. Luke, Leia, Han, Darth Vader—there’s no shortage of characters in A New Hope that are among the most interesting in film history.