THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO
50
FROM THE MAKERS OF
greatest
AND
fantasy films ever!
GAME of THRONES Winter is here!
• Season SIX secrets revealed • behind the scenes access • every episode reviewed The ultimate guide to fantasy £9.99
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Fantastic Beasts
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Warcraft
PLUS! The most exciting fantasy books released this year
GAME OF THRONES SEASON 6
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21 things you need to know
21 things you need to know about
GAME OF THRONES Season Six
The greatest fantasy saga on TV has outgrown its source material – we look ahead to the most unknowable season of Game Of Thrones yet… Words: rob power
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Game of thrones
top 10 moments These were so hard to whittle down we almost had to blindfold ourselves and point at our master list with a stick. Here are the ones we found most worthy... Words: jayne nelson
Daenerys Frees The Unsullied
The Battle Of Hardhome
Jaime Tells His Story To Brienne
‘And Now His Watch is Ended’ 3.04
‘Hardhome’ 5.08
‘Kissed By Fire’ 3.05
The White Walkers launch a brutal assault on the wildling town of Hardhome. It’s hard to know which bits of this battle are the most exciting: the pressure building at the wall as the creatures pile up behind it; the giants stomping on humans; poor Karsi coming face-to-face with a group of undead children before being killed and reborn as a Walker herself… So. Much. Tension.
Jaime Lannister is a bad guy, a murderer and a rapist. But nothing’s ever simple in Game Of Thrones, and here’s a moment of vulnerability from the Kingslayer, as he tells his new sort-of-friend Brienne how he earned that bloody nickname. Amazingly, he was actually saving lives. “My name is Jaime,” he insists. Quiet, masterful character-building: a signature of this show.
Daenerys has had a moral wobble. She’s just bought an 8,000 strong army of slaves to help her win her quest, and she even traded one of her dragons to do so. No, Dany, no! But then… psych! She doesn’t so much turn the tables as annihilate them, revealing that she was double-crossing the slave trader all along, freeing the army and unleashing hellfire.
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Cersei’s Walk Of Shame ‘Mother’s Mercy’ 5.10
Oberyn Vs Gregor ‘The Mountain And The Viper’ 4.08
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“My name is Oberyn Martell. You killed my sister. Prepare to die.” Well, okay, maybe Oberyn (aka the Viper) didn’t actually say that, but we were all thinking it during this deadly cat-and-mouse game of a battle. Then Oberyn gets a crushing headache. This show knows how to shock, eh?
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She’s a murderous, back-stabbing, bitchy, hissing snake we all love to hate, and yet, somehow, you find yourself actually feeling sorry for Cersei Lannister here. Forced to walk naked through King’s Landing as crowds attack, harass and insult her, just watching this scene will bring you out in a cold sweat. Lena Headey deserves every award going; we can’t even imagine how hard it was to film.
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countdown
Tyrion Rallies The Troops ‘Blackwater’ 2.09 King Joffrey’s as much use to his troops here as a chocolate teapot, and so Tyrion steps forward to rally them for battle. “We’ll come out behind them and fuck them in their arses,” he yells, then while we’re sniggering at that, he goes on to prove his legendary way with words can incite death and glory. “Those are brave men knocking at our door. Let’s go kill them!” They do.
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Daenerys And The Dragons ‘Fire And Blood’ 1.10 If there was one thing missing from season one of Game Of Thrones, it was dragons. Then Daenerys, who had stumbled from one disaster to another since joining the Dothraki, finally cemented her destiny by not only surviving a burial fire but also hatching three weeny beasties from her beloved dragon eggs. A majestic birth.
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Goodbye, Jon Snow ‘Mother’s Mercy’ 5.10
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Thanks to his permanent status as the put-upon, grumpy-faced actionhero who “knows nothing”, Jon Snow was something of a Game Of Thrones icon by the time he met
his fate here (possibly – season six rumours notwithstanding). Betrayed by his Watch-brothers, most notably little Olly (boo, hiss), this was a truly shocking and yet somehow inevitable finale to the show’s fifth season.
The Red 1 Wedding ‘The Rains Of Castamere’ 3.09
Gruesome, tragic and unbearably cruel, this is surely one of the most terrifying sequences ever to air on television. We liked Robb! We liked Talisa! We liked Catelyn! And yet here they were, brutally, coldbloodedly slain, and with no punches pulled (you know the bit we mean – that poor unborn baby…). Startling, devastating drama, it was horrific enough to go down in TV history.
Off With 2 His Head ‘Baelor’ 1.09
Sure, Sean Bean dies in all his films, and sure, readers of George R.R. Martin’s books knew he was going to die here, too, but somehow it was hard to believe it would actually happen. Ned was likeable, honourable, brave and larger-thanlife, and the fact his head was lopped off in front of his own children was gasp-out-loud shocking. Boy, if we’d only known what was still to come…
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y s a t n a f ! r e v e s m fil Firebreathers, sword-wielding heroines, witches, a surprising number of men in skirts… Fantasy films have entertained us for decades with their strange magic. Here’s the ultimate rundown of the very best big-screen fantasy films…
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50 Zack Snyder’s blood-soaked comic adap paved the way for game of thrones… Words: Joseph McCabe
S
PEND A FEW minutes listening to Zack Snyder and you realise why he was the perfect guy to helm 300. Like most directors, he thinks visually. Whether those visions are his or – as in the case of his big-screen adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel – another artist’s, they’re inevitably outrageous and oversized. But they’re also fuelled by a passionate urgency. Snyder speaks in quick, staccato bursts and, like a volcano that can’t erupt fast enough, words tumble forth before his mind has time to properly arrange them. It hardly matters. Snyder proved his skill at realising his visions with his breakthrough hit Dawn Of The Dead. Dawn proved that a horror film remake need not suck, so long as its images linger long after the theatre lights have come back on. 300 offers further proof of his talent, finding him once more equally at home among the heroic and the grotesque: 300 Spartan soldiers and their Persian foes in the legendary Battle of Thermopylae. “Do you intellectualise all the violence and things?” says Snyder of his penchant for the extreme. “A little bit. You can’t help it, but at the same time, do you just do what you think is cool? That’s the other thing: you do do
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Fearsome fire-breathers are the big bads of fantasy, and cinema has served up a few in its time… Various Georges Méliès (1903–1911)
French FX pioneer Georges Méliès gave us the first film dragons. Records suggest that the beast he created for Le Puits Fantastique (1903) also turned up in Le Palais Des Mille Et Une Nuits (1905). It was, in fact, just a large cardboard cut-out.
The Reluctant Dragon (1941) An animated short based on the book by Kenneth Grahame of Wind In The Willows fame, set within a Disney film which took you on a fanciful tour at Disney studios (fanciful in that it made Walt look like a nice guy…).
The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
Ray Harryhausen gives us cinema’s first threedimensional dragon, with a stop-motion creation who has a tussle with a cyclops. Also the first instance of dragon bondage if you’re into that sort of thing…
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Sleeping Beauty
Sleeping Beauty (1959)
The evil dark fairy Maleficent transforms herself into this magnificently monstrous dragon at the climax of Disney’s classic. Turn to page 100 for our further look at this psychedelic film.
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962)
Animators Jim Danforth (who would later work with Harryhausen on Clash Of The Titans) and David (son of George) Pal provided a stopmotion dragon for this musical from director George Pal.
Pete’s Dragon (1977)
Another 2D-animated dragon from Disney, but this time appearing in a cheerful live action musical alongside Jim Dale and Mickey Rooney. The dragon, Elliot, can make himself invisible (always handy for the budget).
Dragonslayer
NeverEnding Story
Dragonslayer (1981)
Dragonslayer features a vicious female dragon going by the wonderful name of Vermithrax Pejorative. Created using Go-Motion (a kind of computer controlled version of stop-motion) Vermithrax is a superb, pre-CGI creation.
The NeverEnding Story (1984) The dog-headed luck dragon Falkor starred in all three of the NeverEnding Story films. He was
The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad
an optically enlarged puppet with a booming voice.
Willow (1988) Another optically-enlarged rod-puppet, the twoheaded dragon in George Lucas’s fantasy was dubbed the “Eborsisk” by the production team,
movie dragons
The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug (2013) Benedict Cumberbatch mo-capped the titular beast in Peter Jackson’s prequel trilogy, bringing a sinewy, serpentine menace to the riddlesome baddie. Pro that he is, the Sherlock star studied lizards at London Zoo to emulate their movements, and aimed for a “deep and rasping guttural dryness” when it came to Smaug’s voice. Impressively rendered by Weta Digital, the final CGI monster is so photo-real we feared for our lives…
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire
in honour of famed US film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. Sadly rubbish design, and badly matted.
(1996)
The first speaking, interactive CG movie character was Dragonheart’s Draco. So who better to voice him than Sean Connery? A great gimmick at the time, but the early CGI FX have dated really badly, despite coming on the tails of ILM’s work on Jurassic Park.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)
Spirited Away
This cash-strapped adaptation of the famous role-playing game features a distinct drought of dragons. When they do appear, though, they’re pretty impressive CG creations, and not even Tom Baker as an evil wizard
can act them off the screen. Shame there was no live version of the five-headed dragon Tiamat from the TV cartoon, though.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) Illegal dragon-hatching activities give us Norbert, a baby Norwegian Ridgeback. Small but fiery, and eventually sent away to Romania.
Shrek (2001) Is a CGI cartoon really the place for some dragon/ donkey sexual tension?
Spirited Away (2001)
Anime monster in not-interested-in-fondlingschoolgirls shocker! Haku’s a super-sleek water dragon oozing Oriental cool from every scale.
Loadsa dragons! Even cute miniature versions. The CGI Hungarian Horntail is a majestic beast indeed, fighting Harry in the Triwizard Tournament with a stunning chase around the grounds.
How To Train Your Dragon (2010) This DreamWorks Animation film is a veritable treasure trove of winged things, but our favourite has to be Toothless. Despite being described as “the unholy offspring of lightning and death itself”, the deadly Night Fury turns out to be as adorable as a scaly house cat, befriending young Viking Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and enjoying further adventures in the film’s blockbusting sequel.
IMAGES: Rex Features (1)
How To Train Your Dragon
Mulan (1998)
Dungeons & Dragons (2000)
(2002)
Dragons versus tanks and fighter planes – what more could you want? A decent plot, perhaps? The CG dragons are great but camera shy, putting in only fleeting appearances.
Dragonheart
Mushu is another 2D-animated Disney dragon, mostly notable because he’s voiced by Eddie Murphy doing a dry run for Shrek’s Donkey.
Reign of Fire
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BOOKS in tribute
terry pratchett
Talking
Pterry In tribute to the late Sir Terry Pratchett, Jonathan Wright listens in as fellow writers choose their favourite Pterry books
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ast summer saw the publication of Sir Terry Pratchett’s final Discworld novel, The Shepherd’s Crown. Because of a fault in reality, we’re sadly unable to talk with Pratchett himself about the book. Instead, inspired by Neil Gaiman’s moving tributes to his friend, we sought out the perspectives of Pratchett’s fellow writers on his work. Thanks to all who contributed – and to A.S. Byatt, who let it be known that her favourite Pratch novel was Small Gods but with whom we were unable to schedule an interview before our deadline. If you should ever have a moment to explain why it’s your pick, Dame Antonia…
Lavie Tidhar
The Dark Side Of The Sun (1976) “You could say it’s his early science fiction book, but there’s something really charming about it, a lot of love for the material it’s playing with. It’s almost like early Pratchett wasn’t quite sure if he was going to be the fantasist or the science fiction writer. There are references to everything from Asimov onwards in there and it’s full of affection, which is what I really like.”
Suzanne McLeod
The Colour Of Magic (1983) “It was the first Pratchett I read and it’s just got everything in it, hasn’t it? It’s very like The Princess Bride, in that he’s taking the mickey, taking fantasy tropes and making fun of them, but also you can see he loves them.”
Stephen Baxter
The Light Fantastic (1986) “This was Terry’s take on the SF disaster story. Its structure mirrors that of a movie like When Worlds Collide. Experts, in this case Druid stone-circle computer engineers, see the approach of a rogue star. As disaster looms, people turn on each other and Terry’s most morally absolute character, Death, looks on in dismay. ‘THE DEATH OF THE WARRIOR OR THE OLD MAN OR THE LITTLE CHILD, THIS I UNDERSTAND… I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS DEATH-OF-THE-MIND.’ “So in this early, slapstick-comedy novel you have quite a profound moral message. Maybe disaster porn is part of our maturing as a species, as we attempt to deal calmly with long-term risks such as
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