In this column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the 1980s are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since.
For a more in-depth introduction to this series of articles, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. This time, we’ll be jumping to the other end of the decade and the popularity spectrum to 1988’s beloved fantasy adventure classic, Willow.
Willow was a film I watched with my sister and stepsisters growing up. I don’t have any distinct memories of the first time I saw it, but it felt like it was in the rotation of movies we might reasonably watch on VHS. While it did not occupy the myth-making centrality of, say, Labyrinth or The NeverEnding Story in my household, it had its own place in our collection of relatively well-made, child-friendly ’80s fantasy —that is, except for one terrifying scene that is among the most grotesque, Cronenbergian body horror ever put in a family film (more on that later).
Based on a story conceived of by George Lucas in the early ’70s (which was, unfortunately, titled Munchkins), Willow is a beloved 1988 fantasy film starring Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer. It centers on Davis’ eponymous character, Willow Ufgood, a “Nelwyn” (basically a Hobbit with the serial numbers filed off) who is charged with returning a magically important baby, Elora Danan, to the human world and who ends up working to overthrow the evil sorceress, Bavmorda (Jean Marsh, who also took a heel turn in the traumatizing ’80s classic Return to Oz), alongside the villain’s wayward daughter (Joanne Whalley) and Kilmer’s lovable rogue, Madmartigan.
Directed by Ron Howard, the movie was nominated for two Academy Awards—sound effects editing and visual effects (the irrepressible Phil Tippett worked as an animator on the film, racking up his third nomination)—and lost in both categories to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which honestly seems fair. Willow was released to mixed, lukewarm reviews and only a modest box office take in the U.S. But it went on to be something of a blockbuster overseas and a juggernaut in the growing home video market. That’s where I saw it, of course (and where, I suspect, many of you did as well).
Willow is an odd film. I don’t mean that as knock on its qualities, precisely. In some ways, it feels incredibly generic—a fantasy epic that borrows heavily from Tolkien (the aforementioned Nelwyns, a conflict between two magical gurus in the physical bodies of older people, the hunt for a magical maguffin disrupting the lives of simple farmers), Biblical tropes (the plot revolves around a baby set adrift on a river so that she is not murdered by a prophecy-addled tyrant), and Star Wars (a team-up between a good-hearted fledgling magic wielder, a wise old mentor with a personal stake in the political situation, and a lovable rogue who has to learn to care about people other than himself).
In other ways, it’s very much defined by its specificity. There is surprisingly strong worldbuilding, with a trio of human-nations locked in a (slightly) more complicated political conflict than one would expect, and there is a lived-in feel to the way that the film leverages the truly withering racial slur, “peck,” against its Nelwyn characters, drawing a more fleshed-out relationship between the two species than feels strictly necessary for a fantasy film. Additionally, it is sparing but somewhat unique with its use of fantasy creatures. Other than the Nelwyn, there are tribal, nature spirit-worshiping Brownies (mostly used as comic relief); feral, simian trolls; and a wildly inventive design for a hydra-like monster called an “Eborsisk” (more on that later). The weirdness of its world manages to cut against the potential staleness of its trope-y plot and, for all that it can feel rote, it captures a little of that George Lucas magic where a blend of Vladimir Propp story beats and Joseph Campbell characters combine into something that’s both familiar and genuinely fun.
Much as its world manages to feel both generic and unique, Willow is both elevated and hampered by its star, Warwick Davis. He made his acting debut, five years earlier, in Return of the Jedi as Ewok Wicket W. Warrick (my head canon is that the character’s name is just what George Lucas thought Davis’ name was) and Lucas supposedly wrote the part of Willow Ufgood especially for him. But that, in and of itself, seems odd; Davis was only seventeen during the filming of Willow (and very much looks it), but his character is the married father of two young children. Julie Peters, the actor who plays Willow’s wife, Kiaya, was 44 during filming while the actors who played his children were seven and five. Davis is at his best playing a magically-gifted teenage naïf—a diminutive Luke Skywalker—and is fairly unbelievable as a cautious and caring father of two. Beyond the strange age discrepancy, Davis is simply not yet at the peak of his acting prowess and, while he is charming, it seems like a risk to stake so much of the movie on a seventeen-year-old actor’s shoulders—especially when he had not had any lines in any of his previous films. He struggles, nobly, and doesn’t quite hit the mark.
I am, however, happy to report that, even after thirty-seven years, Val Kilmer’s Madmartigan is just as delightfully rakish (and wildly attractive) as you remember. The film comes to life as soon as he’s on screen. He plays Madmartigan as an obvious lout, but a lout who’s so desperate, shameless, and winning that one instantly forgives his trespasses. He also spends at least half the film wearing a torn, pink dress—the remnant of an ill-advised attempt to bamboozle a jealous husband he’s cuckolded—a detail I had forgotten and which absolutely makes the performance that much more delightful. I should note that this article was written before the sad news of Kilmer’s passing broke—while he’ll be remembered for many standout roles in a remarkably rich career, there will always be those of us who’ll keep a place in our hearts for Madmartigan: disgraced knight, incorrigible rogue, true hero, and the greatest swordsman that ever lived.
There’s also a lot to love about Willow’s production design and effects. There is a grubby, fallen, Gothic quality to the world, with more ruins than inhabited castles and clothes that feel dirt-spattered and threadbare. Rather than bask in splendor, the villainous sorcerer-queen, Bavmorda, wears a headscarf, spiked crown, and shapeless robes that deliciously evoke a nun or Catholic saint more than a monarch. Her captain of the guard, Kael (Pat Roach, Raiders of the Lost Ark’s ill-fated Nazi plane mechanic) wears a mask carved from a giant’s skull and fringed with ratty fur that oozes a rancid, flea-bitten aura. The gutted mouse head that the Brownie warrior, Rool (a vaguely continental-European-accented Kevin Pollak), wears as a helmet is an especially excellent touch, equal parts gruesome and endearing.
And the effects are also pretty spectacular. The transformation of the cursed witch, Fin Raziel (Patricia Hayes), is one of the most successful early uses of ILM’s digital morphing technology. She seamlessly but painfully transforms from a goat to an ostrich to a peacock to a turtle to a tiger before finally returning to human form. It’s still pretty convincing today. On the practical side, Bavmorda’s “Death Dogs” are played to menacing effect by Dobermans in wooly, giant rat appliqués.
But the transformation viewers are most likely to remember is a sequence where Willow uses some less-than-practiced magic to turn a troglodytic troll into the Eborsisk. Let’s give some context. The Eborsisk is a gigantic, two-headed monster whose fire-breathing visages look like an unholy cross between a dragon and an elephant seal. It’s never called anything in the film, but the on-set name is a reference to the acerbic film critic double act of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. (Incidentally, the aforementioned Kael is named for iconoclastic film critic Pauline Kael—the script really has it out for luminaries of that profession). Its creation involves a singularly gory transformation where the troll’s skin peels off to reveal a brain-like, pulsating mass of flesh that seems more at home in The Fly or Alien.It was during this scene that my (uninitiated) viewing companion shouted “What in the John Carpenter?!” and stood up from the couch in shock. The Eborsisk is a pretty scary beast for a children’s film, but its genesis is the stuff of childhood trauma legend—a sequence that feels designed to give impressionable young viewers nightmares for years to come. Every ’80s genre film has something like it, and this one is among the best/worst.
All in all, Willow holds up admirably well. It’s not quite even enough to be an unblemished watch that effortlessly upholds cherished, childhood memories. It’s nowhere near bad enough to be consigned to cinema’s dust heap. I feel like this one, ultimately, comes down to one’s tolerance for well-worn tropes and one’s desire for high fantasy to be served with a generous portion of silly, cozy fun. Depending on your mood and your level of nostalgia, it might feel like pablum… or just the right amount of comfort for a night in.
Willow’s most obvious legacy (aside from the pretty fun, 1989 arcade game, filled with questionable translations) is the 2022 Jonathan Kasdan-helmed sequel series that premiered on Disney+ to generally favorable reviews before being promptly Zaslaved into æther and memory. Full disclosure: I’m obsessed with this show. It is deeply concerned with preserving and expanding upon the lore of the original film while also being a complete tonal mismatch with it. The show is horny, unsettling, bombastic, and surprisingly gay. It has a weirdly stellar, vaguely inappropriate cast that includes Bottoms’ Ruby Cruz, Les Misérables’ Ellie Bamber (who I was convinced was Angourie Rice right up until I wrote this sentence), The Grand Budapest Hotel’s Tony Revolori, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s Erin Kellyman, The Decameron’s Amat Chadha-Patel, along with a staggering number of the film’s original cast (Warwick Davis is in every episode, but both actor and character seem like they have no idea why they’re there).
Somehow, the show manages to feel both like a hollow, corporate amalgam of what various key demographics would want to see in a Willow follow-up and, simultaneously, like such an insane, gonzo, launching point for an instant classic that I genuinely cannot tell if I love this show or am put off by it. What it definitely isn’t is a series made for people who loved Willow and wanted to see more of the same (seriously, the show takes way more inspiration from Hellraiser than one might reasonably suspect). Its lack of availability is also part of its alluring mystique. Like Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, it’s probably more fascinating to most people as a victim of corporate greed than for its actual content, but I can’t actually bring myself to refrain from, foolishly, recommending it… I’m definitely not saying you should torrent it. That would be a very irresponsible thing for me to do.
Beyond this star-crossed artsploitation streaming series, Willow’s cinematic influence can arguably best be seen in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. Willow’s plot liberally cribbed from Tolkien’s template, but it took the lived-in, gritty approach to production design that people praise Lucas for using so effectively in Star Wars and brought it to fantasy films. Jackson would apply this dirt-under-the-fingernails approach to Middle-earth to great effect. Moreover, the deeper lore driving Willow’s story is hinted at but largely absent from the film, but there is a larger, cohesive world suggested by the way it combines a broken-in, well-used aesthetic with some limited but well-placed bits of exposition. Middle-earth is not dimly adumbrated by any means, but it would have been overwhelming to a wider audience to try and include the whole of Tolkienalia in Jackson’s adaptation of the books. Willow seems to be the nearest model for what Jackson ultimately achieved.
And it’s not just the abstract, unverified approach to making fantasy movies that connects Willow and these later blockbusters: There are a few moments in LotR that really feel as though they must have been directly inspired by Ron Howard’s movie. The final confrontation between Fin Raziel and Queen Bavmorda, though it involves a great deal of magic, is, ultimately, choreographed as a painful, drag-out brawl between two older women, pushing their bodies to the limit. It’s strikingly reminiscent of the fight between Gandalf and Saruman in Fellowship of the Ring, and serves the same emotional purpose.
Moreover, there is a sense of wonder and adventure mixed in with desperate terror and despair that runs through both Willow and LotR. For older millennials, like myself, Jackson’s films are the ultimate comfort watch. They are movies that capture resilience in the face of crushing darkness, and manage to tell a story about the good and seemingly powerless people of the world overcoming monstrous long odds without being treacly or pat. For those of us who came of age with those films (I was 18 when the first one was released), they were a soothing balm at the rocky end of a mostly comfortable childhood that had taken a hard turn into political upheaval and financial instability. Along with a significant portion of my peers, I’ve been known to tear up just watching the DVD special features. And in that regard, LotR feels like the fulfillment of a half-remembered promise. Willow was a movie watched on VHS, unmoored from larger context, which left us with a reassuring sense that the small and unprepared could triumph in the end. Years later, when the adult world proved harder and crueler than many of us were raised to believe it could be, Jackson answered those distant dreams that George Lucas and Ron Howard incepted, rousing us with the rarest species of hope just when we needed it most.
But what do you think of Willow? Do you have fond memories of it as family-friendly fare? Do you still have nightmares about the Eborsisk? Is this the definitive Val Kilmer performance for you? If you have other favorite Kilmer roles or moments you’d like to shout out, please share them in the comments, and definitely join me next time when we shift to the Sunday afternoon premium cable staple, The Beastmaster (1982)!
My family loves Willow. My siblings and I grew up with it.
I don’t know if I would say it was Val Kilmer’s best role though Madmartigan is certainly a beloved a character.
When I think of Val’s acting ability I go to films like “The Saint” and “Tombstone”.
I do want to mention another fun film I haven’t seen mentioned much that was one of his breakout roles, “Real Genius”. We really love that one around here too.
In my mind, the new TV show is like if the original Willow film was a tabletop game, and years later, raised on tales of the parents game, the GM runs a game for their kids, and uncle Warwick joins in. It perfectly explains the mismatch between the tone of the setting and story, and the characters who don’t quite want to fit in, and dress and speak with out of settling elements.
YES! It has big D&D-steamrolls-the-DM energy.
I love Willow. I furiously ignore any and all faults (your points are valid but *lalalalalalalalalala*). I must have seen it 50 times by now. I fully understand why Labrynth and Neverending Story would be more influential for many people, but for me, Willow is my jam and what I watch when I want to watch a movie that I loved as a kid.
It is so unbelievably, consistently comforting. I think it’s rare for a film to have that powerful an effect on so many people.
I found the film pretty typical of Lucas’s concepts — an amalgam of references to established genre tropes and plot formulas, not particularly deep or innovative in story, but highly innovative in technique and visual effects. I didn’t love it, but I found it reasonably entertaining, largely thanks to its impressive production values and a charismatic cast. Warwick Davis made an appealing lead, and Joanne Whalley was intense and brain-meltingly gorgeous. (It’s a sweet story that she and Val Kilmer actually fell in love during the filming of this movie and went on to get married.) I didn’t care for the comic-relief brownies much. I respected it for its inclusiveness, giving a starring role to a Little Person actor rather than relegating him to being a droid or Ewok or goblin or whatever. When I revisited it prior to watching the series, I think I liked it better than I had the first few times.
It should be noted that the transformation effect was not done exclusively with morphing, as the technology was too new. (It wasn’t even called morphing yet; an article I read at the time called it “splining,” after the mathematical principle behind its transformations.) They built animatronic animals that could do as much of the transformations as possible (e.g. a goat whose neck could extend and forelimbs fold into winglike shapes as the first step of changing into an ostrich), then used splining/morphing to smooth the transitions between the animatronics.
Oh the brownies are awesome though
“I stole the baby!!”
“You are mine to toy with!”
I’m honestly kind of surprised that you mention the “grotesque, Cronenbergian body horror” of the Eborsisk’s creation but leave out the similarly traumatizing scene where Bavmorda transforms the attacking army into pigs.
Oh man, that’s a rough one as well! But for my money, the pigs just don’t quite capture the sheer trauma of seeing a deleted scene from The Thing in the middle of a kids movie.
I love Willow! I lost count how many times I’ve seen it, but we did keep count of the movie theater views – 17. I also loved the series and I am still mad at Disney for taking it away from me in the middle of the rewatch.
I’ve always been a big fan of Willow (added it to my DVD collection as soon as I could). The whole thing was a great romp, funny, exciting, hopeful… and it wasn’t just because of Val Kilmer’s Madmartigan, but he made for a great action hero. Some of the effects were just tolerable, but the overall look of the movie made up for it.
I’d say Warwick Davis wasn’t the best in his role, but honestly, a lot of the little people in the movie weren’t the best of thespians. It was all good, though, as the spirit of the movie made up for any amateurish talent.
The thing is, it’s always been hard for Little People to get good acting roles that aren’t gimmick characters or fantasy creatures in masks, so it’s hard for them to get the experience to become stronger actors. (Although there have always been some terrific ones, like Michael Dunn, David Rappaport, and obviously Peter Dinklage.) Willow deserves tons of credit for letting multiple Little Person actors take central roles, even if it was mostly just Davis after the first act. They got to play a whole society that weren’t just caricatures or joke characters but acted and felt like regular people with all their complexities, and that was great. I wish more movies had followed suit. I was always annoyed that the LOTR/Hobbit films used camera tricks to make average-height actors look smaller, instead of providing the kind of casting opportunities that Willow did.
not merely central roles; Lucas made Warwick Davis the protagonist and title character.
Yes, obviously, but my whole point it that it wasn’t just Davis as a lone token performer, but a whole society with multiple distinct characters.
Another interesting connection between Willow and LOTR was the use of New Zealand as the backdrop
My sister and I had this as one of our favorites growing up (along with The Neverending Story). And both of those movies had Patricia Hayes in them. She was my favorite character in both. (And I also loved her in The Witches and the Grinnygog on Nickelodeon.) Now that I am an older woman (though not as old as Patricia was in those productions) I have an even greater affinity to them. :-)
George Lucas and Chris Claremont also wrote a series of 3 books continuing the Willow story. It was supposed to be made into a movie, but never was . Excellent series, though. I was very disappointed it never came out on film.
I grew up watching Willow over and over on VHS. So underrated.
Willow is probably the film I’ve seen most frequently throughout my life. I fell in love with it as a child and still love it today!
Agree a lot with what you say. Flawed but fun movie, and because of that it feels like it has a lot of potential. I remember as a kid waiting for the follow ups that never came (except for the Claremont novels which I have a set of but have struggled to get through because if the guy is wordy in comics, man his novel prose dials that up).
And the TV series is and isn’t a mismatch. I think as much as it plays on tropes, Willow undercuts them quite a bit as well in subtle ways (in many ways Whalley and Kilmer’s roles are reversals of classic tropes even as much as they’re a replay of Leia and Han) and has a modern (but not quite postmodern) sensibility to it in the film, so that they follow through on that quite a bit in how the TV series works – the biggest crime, I think, is that they don’t provide us with a new Nelwyn to anchor the cast alongside Willow, but I would be very happy to see a Season Two or follow up project somehow.
I thought Annabelle Davis (Warwick’s daughter) did an excellent job as Mims in the series, and I’d hope she got a bigger role if they ever did a second season.
What I like about the film is that, aside from the opening sequence with the midwife rescuing Elora, it starts with Willow and the Nelwyns, sticks with them, and reveals the larger world through their eyes. Okay, that’s probably just because it was copying how The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings did it, but it was nice that it treated Willow’s world as the baseline and let us see the human/Daikini world through the Nelwyn’s eyes as this mysterious, exotic land of giants. The series went about it the other way, starting us off with the human point of view and treating the Nelwyns as the outsiders, which is a lot more conventional. The second episode balanced the viewpoints more, but after that, most of the focus was on Daikini with Willow as the only Nelwyn.
Willow is fantastic, and it really opened up my young brain and fired my imagination when I watched it as a kid. It made the fantasy feel grounded and real, with it’s grunge and it’s less than perfect heroes. It was dark and scary, but hopeful. And I always wanted to know more about the world, the nature of Elora Danon and the faeries. Bavmorda was a wonderful villain, gleeful in her power and so tired of the incompetence around her. And Willow was a great hero, because he did not want to be there, but in the end stepped up. All the horribleness of their adventure is what really sold it, it didn’t feel like it was for my benefit as an audience, it was just what happened.
For those who wish to know more, and want to take a look at an entirely alternate sequel series that is equally nuts tonally and content wise, I encourage you to look into the trilogy of books written by Chris Claremont (of X-men fame) who wrote The Chronicles of the Shadow War trilogy. These books follow Elora as she grows into her destiny, and are absolutely bonkers. The start with
This, all of this.
I am a bit surprised that the book trilogy was not mentioned since it beat the heck out whatever the heck the streaming series was.
No the books are far from perfect and some parts of it did not age very well, however they still stand up mostly well.
One thing made me wonder when I rewatched the movie a while back: how did Cherlindrea even know Elora Danan’s name? She was taken from her mother immediately after her birth, so her mother never even had the chance to name her. So did Cherlindrea give her that name? Or maybe the midwife who rescued her did. (During the opening, I found myself thinking that that nameless midwife was one of the bravest, most heroic figures in the movie. Kind of a shame that her part in it gets glossed over in favor of Willow and Madmartigan.)
Another thought I have every time I see the film: While I do understand the intended “believe in yourself” point of the “finger test,” I’ve always felt that the answer to “The power to control the world lies in which finger?” should have been the thumb. After all, opposable thumbs are what enabled humans to use tools, build civilization, and so forth. Sure sounds like controlling the world to me.
I found the TV show to be an unexpected delight. I’m sure it has flaws, but it also has sword lesbians, so I won’t really hear any criticism. Amat Chadha-Patel is DIVINE as the sexy, roguish Thraxus Boarman. I also would never advocate pirating the show, that would be wrong, but I’m sure you could find it on what rhymes with Doogle Grive.
Yeah. I think I let the imp of the perverse get ahold of me in waffling on my love of the show. Sword lesbians and Chadha-Patel forever!
I love this movie and am delighted whenever I see it on. One of the things that always stood out to me was it having more of a fairy tale flair with some swords & sorcery mixed in to it than epic fantasy. Joanne Whalley as Sorsha closed out the trinity of my pre-adolescence crushes from fantasy films (with Mia Sara’s Lily in Legend and Jennifer Connelly’s Sarah from Labyrinth).
I also rather liked the TV series. It was a bit rough at the start, but I felt it was settling into its stride by the end and I did like how it built more of the world from the film. (Also Joanne Whalley was still incredible as Sorsha in it).
I have the novelization, and because I lived in a backwater town in the 80s actually read it before seeing the movie. It is amazing and has much of that deeper lore you write about. (You find out about the baby’s parents, for example.)
This was the movie that cemented Val Kilmer in my heart, and I will forever think of this film first when thinking of his career. It was this movie that made me want to look up his other roles and follow his career.
The first time I saw Willow, I was a little disappointed. It just wasn’t Star Wars. But since then it’s become a family favorite that we would watch over and over. Thunderheart might be my favorite Val Kilmer movie. I just don’t see people mentioning it.
Thunderheart does not get the run it deserves, imo
I adore this movie and cannot remember when I first saw it. It just always seemed to be a part of my little kid consciousness. (My dual love for Madmartigan and Sorcha should have raised a few flags, tbh) There is something so comforting and reassuring in it, even when it gets a bit weird and, yes, nightmare inducing. Even when Davis is slightly off-groove or you’re questioning choices made. It is the movie I queued up when I heard of Val Kilmer’s death; though it was a hard race between this, Real Genius, and Top Secret… There was no way I was going to pick Tombstone because I did not need to cry THAT hard.
Also I own the novelization by Wayland Drew and I maintain that the 80s were the peak time for quality movie novelizations. Madmartigan gets an entire fleshed-out backstory to explain why he’s such a screw-up! It’s delightful.
Looking forward to an article on ‘Krull’ popping up in the future!