They're all a bunch of animals

Continuing through the Harry Potter films, today I watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004).

The first time I saw this movie I was turned off from it pretty early on. I couldn't handle the shrunken head on the bus, it just seemed too cartoonish for me and it didn't seem to fit in the world. It seems odd that the Harry Potter movie directed by Alfonzo Cuaron who directed two movies I really enjoy Children of Men and Gravity, made a Harry Potter movie that didn't sit well with me on the first viewing, about 10 years ago.

This viewing was much better, in fact I really enjoyed it. The bus scene at the beginning was much shorter than I originally remembered. You just have a little bit of shrunken heads to ignore and the rest of the movie is very impressively put together. The sets are just amazing, they feel like they all run in to each other as the story progresses one step of problem solving at a time.

There is a lot of "boys will be boys" ways out of antics Harry and his friends get into. It makes me think that's how Voldemort started out and things escalated as he became more powerful. Wizards will be wizards and then they're too much of a wizard and we don't talk about that anymore.

Letterboxd review.