Last night’s MTV Movie Awards brought us a load of new trailers and clips for upcoming films.  Among them was this first full trailer for Warner Bros.’ Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them.  Hitting theaters this fall on November 18th, the film is the first installment in a proposed prequel trilogy set decades before the events of the popular Harry Potter films.  The movie centers on “the adventures of writer Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) in New York’s secret community of witches and wizards seventy years before Harry Potter reads his book in school”…

This honestly looks like a lot of fun.  While it trades on nostalgia, particularly in terms of the score, the film appears to be a return to the more whimsical nature of the first few Potter films.  Given how dark things got in the latter installments, this gives Fantastic Beasts a fresher and dare I say more magical feeling.  I remain skeptical as to whether audiences will embrace an entirely new set of characters wandering around this world, but for now this looks to be an interesting continuation of the Potter saga.

Director David Yates, who helmed the last four Potter films, has returned to direct this latest installment in J.K. Rowling’s epic magical saga.  The script was written by author J.K. Rowling herself.  The film stars Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Samantha Morton, Jon Voight, Ron Perlman, Carmen Ejogo, Jenn Murray, Faith Wood-Blagrove, and Colin Farrell.