Premiering this week on Disney+, whose corporate parent conveniently acquired the property in its ingestion of Lucasfilm, "Willow" is a series-long sequel to the 1988 fantasy film in which an aspiring sorcerer (Warwick Davis in the title role) from a race of little people sets off to deliver a human baby, found like Moses in the bulrushes, into responsible large-people care. There are a lot of opinions among genre fans as to how best to execute such stories, but the series is fantasy as I like it best — funny, fun and just a little frightening, sometimes serious but never self-serious. If my year-end favorites piece were not already filed, "Willow" would have been a contender.
It has been 34 years since the film was released, though in the timeline of the series, "200 moons" have passed, or 16.66666 years, according to my calculator. Which makes all the younger characters teenagers, including Elora Danan, the baby whose safety is the main business of the movie and whose grown-up identity, hidden even from herself, is revealed at the end of the series's first episode. (Every time her name was spoken, I pictured Devery Jacobs, who plays someone with the same name on "Reservation Dogs" — distracting, perhaps, but also pleasant.) As to returning players Davis and Joanne Whalley, as Sorsha — daughter of the movie's evil sorceress/queen and now a queen herself — time has been kind to them. Val Kilmer's Madmartigan, the rogue-turned-hero Han Solo of the piece — who, we learn from opening narration, later married Sorsha and is the father of her teenage twins, Kit (Ruby Cruz) and Airk (Dempsey Bryk) — left a decade earlier in search of a magic breastplate and never returned. But he's still very much a presence.
Kit and Airk are unconventional royals, not keen on what their station has in store for them. Airk, a bit of a rapscallion, is enamored of Dove, who works in the bakery; Kit, who dreams of life beyond the horizon, is betrothed for political reasons to Graydon (Tony Revolori), a nerdish prince from a neighboring kingdom, but would rather be crossing swords with Jade (Erin Kellyman), her best friend and sparring partner, who is set to become the kingdom's first female knight. Before the wedding can take place, however, a mystic fog full of monsters descends upon the palace, and Airk is kidnapped. A quest is organized, in which our young heroes, including Grayson (smart kids come in handy), set off to find him. They are accompanied by a couple of adult chaperons — notably Boorman (Amar Chadha-Patel), a thief sprung from the dungeon, who has history with Sorsha and Madmartigan and knows the territory outside "the barrier," a magical force field protecting the peaceable kingdoms from the less peaceable.
