6 Best Fantasy Films of the 2020s, Ranked by the Feelings Their Strange Worlds Reveal
Fantasy With Human Stakes
Fantasy can feel hollow when it relies on spectacle without emotional weight. These films connect their imagined worlds to familiar struggles, including grief, fear of failure and the search for control.
Their surreal settings act as pressure cookers for difficult feelings. The result is fantasy grounded not only in what looks magical, but in what feels painfully human.
Freedom Beyond The Walls
In Wolfwalkers, Robyn Goodfellowe, voiced by Honor Kneafsey, lives in a tightly controlled Irish city. Her father, Bill, played by Sean Bean, expects obedience, while the town treats the nearby woods as a threat.
Meeting Mebh MacTíre, voiced by Eva Whittaker, changes Robyn’s sense of possibility. The film contrasts the city’s rigid lines with the forest’s loose, rushing energy, as Robyn learns to run as a wolf. Its fairy-tale story also carries themes of colonial control and environmental destruction.
Bella Claims The World
Poor Things follows Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, as she moves from a confined life in Godwin Baxter’s London home toward the outside world. Willem Dafoe plays Godwin, while fisheye images make the townhouse feel like a laboratory, nursery, prison and dollhouse.
Duncan Wedderburn, played by Mark Ruffalo, believes he is introducing Bella to experience, but cannot keep pace with her curiosity. She explores language, pleasure, money, philosophy and power without hiding her growth. The film presents her changing movement as a sign of liberation.
Grief Becomes A Myth
In The Boy and the Heron, Mahito Maki, voiced by Soma Santoki, loses his mother in a fire and moves to the countryside. His quiet hostility reflects grief, and an episode in which he strikes his head with a rock makes the story’s pain starkly personal.
The Heron, voiced by Masaki Suda, mocks Mahito as he enters a decaying, dreamlike world. Frogs, pelicans and marching parakeets crowd the film, while its focus rests less on plot than on how loss shapes Mahito’s imagination.
Worlds Beyond The Film List
The article also turns to imagined places and the lives they might suit, including Middle-earth, The Rings of Power and One Piece’s Grand Line. It describes Middle-earth as a place where people persist in doing good even when they may never see the outcome.
The Rings of Power is presented as taking place in a final good age before disaster, giving its quieter moments added weight. The Grand Line, by contrast, is framed as a place for people who want the sea, a crew and freedom to explore.
Key points
- The films connect fantasy spectacle to grief, freedom and other human struggles.
- Wolfwalkers contrasts a controlled city with the freedom of the forest.
- Poor Things follows Bella’s curiosity as she claims greater independence.
- The Boy and the Heron turns Mahito’s grief into a strange imagined world.