“Van” is the fairy boy who can’t really fly. He has an hole in one of his wings and so when his father, their chief, instructs him and his colleagues to go off in search of children needing a coin for the tooth under their pillow, well he’s not much good. On his latest trip he is outmanoeuvred by a goblin - in a suit that might have been seen in an “Ant-Man” movie, and so gives pursuit. She escapes and of course nobody believes his tale when he returns home, but he determines to track down his new nemesis. That doesn’t prove so very difficult, and soon he and the tech-savvy “Gemma” are dancing around each other in that typically bashful teenage fashion whilst trying to find some way to unite the fairies, the goblins and even the pesky trolls against their common enemy - “Webster” and his menacing spider queen. To be honest, there isn’t a great deal here for the grown ups, but for the youngsters it is a quickly paced and entertaining animation that mixes the fantasy with technology, injects a tiny bit of romance into it’s proceedings and that also serves to reinforce principles that we shouldn’t judge others by their appearance or by the settled opinions of others. The queen of the spiders makes for quite a nasty enemy; mud-slinging troll “Rupee” looks like a shaving brush with feet and there’s a battle royal at the conclusion to present us with mother nature’s equivalent of a custard pie fight. The standard of the production is all adequate enough and though perhaps it’s a little over-stretched, I found it quite an enjoyable ninety minutes.
