This is the 5th and final (double) movie of the Fantaghiro saga. We have meanwhile a main character (Fantaghiro), which was build up and developed over the four previous movies and who fought different opponents and made many friends. The creators tried something new and put Fantaghiro into another world, which sounds maybe more spectacular than it is. This way she is able to have new adventures and the story gets rid of the rest of the old stuff from the previous part.
I understand the disappointment of some people, if they compare this movie to the first two or three episodes of the Fantaghiro movies. To be fair, this fifth iteration of the Fantaghiro story is not really such a hard cut anymore, if you compare it to the previous movie. In the fourth movie the viewer did not even see her castle, her sisters, her sisters husbands and kids, her father, her adopted daughter, the white witch, Bolt, Lightning etc anymore, beside some workarounds with old footage from the first movies. The story of Barabas was already told to the end in Fantaghiro 4, so it made no more sense to bring him back.
The way the transfer to the new world is executed in Fantaghiro 5, drives away a part of the audience eventually. In the very beginning you see Fantaghiro, but then the movie invests a lot of time (around 30 minutes) to explain this other world without her, before Fantaghiro finally arrives in the new world. This seems strange in the beginning, but the movie profits a lot of this procedure in the later parts, because the audience is directly behind Fantaghiro when arriving to help these people and the story has not to retell from the past of this new world. Also, the movie respects Fantaghiro no more being in her hometown and being homesick.
Fantaghiro is meeting new creatures, humans and new character types, for example Aries and the evil boss are told pretty good. The movie also creates a final opponent for Aries, but this opponent is overall a bit disappointing and doesn't add much to the story. Overall, the storytelling is solid and the behavior of the characters is more traceable than in the previous movies, where the main plot or the direction of the story relied too much on the changing moods of the evil characters.
One could debate, if the travel to other worlds or introducing in this iteration a setting in the style of Pirates of the Carribean (2003) were good for this franchise, if you just pick the main character herself from the previous movies. On the other hand, I have to add, that his movie was already shown in 1996, so eventually the movie was even a bit ahead of its time. But the transfer from fairy-tale into fantasy was maybe not really accepted by the audience, so we could not see other variants of the Fantaghiro character on her own in later movies. While I see no problem in the ending of Fantaghiro 5 on its own, this ending doesn't really fit the overall saga of the five (double) movies. Too bad, the ending of Fantaghiro 4 was using old footage, which also had not been a great way to finish the saga.
I understand the disappointment of some people, if they compare this movie to the first two or three episodes of the Fantaghiro movies. To be fair, this fifth iteration of the Fantaghiro story is not really such a hard cut anymore, if you compare it to the previous movie. In the fourth movie the viewer did not even see her castle, her sisters, her sisters husbands and kids, her father, her adopted daughter, the white witch, Bolt, Lightning etc anymore, beside some workarounds with old footage from the first movies. The story of Barabas was already told to the end in Fantaghiro 4, so it made no more sense to bring him back.
The way the transfer to the new world is executed in Fantaghiro 5, drives away a part of the audience eventually. In the very beginning you see Fantaghiro, but then the movie invests a lot of time (around 30 minutes) to explain this other world without her, before Fantaghiro finally arrives in the new world. This seems strange in the beginning, but the movie profits a lot of this procedure in the later parts, because the audience is directly behind Fantaghiro when arriving to help these people and the story has not to retell from the past of this new world. Also, the movie respects Fantaghiro no more being in her hometown and being homesick.
Fantaghiro is meeting new creatures, humans and new character types, for example Aries and the evil boss are told pretty good. The movie also creates a final opponent for Aries, but this opponent is overall a bit disappointing and doesn't add much to the story. Overall, the storytelling is solid and the behavior of the characters is more traceable than in the previous movies, where the main plot or the direction of the story relied too much on the changing moods of the evil characters.
One could debate, if the travel to other worlds or introducing in this iteration a setting in the style of Pirates of the Carribean (2003) were good for this franchise, if you just pick the main character herself from the previous movies. On the other hand, I have to add, that his movie was already shown in 1996, so eventually the movie was even a bit ahead of its time. But the transfer from fairy-tale into fantasy was maybe not really accepted by the audience, so we could not see other variants of the Fantaghiro character on her own in later movies. While I see no problem in the ending of Fantaghiro 5 on its own, this ending doesn't really fit the overall saga of the five (double) movies. Too bad, the ending of Fantaghiro 4 was using old footage, which also had not been a great way to finish the saga.
