Tales From the Magic Garden Review: Processing Grief

Three children and their grandpa find ways to heal from grief in stop-motion animation Tales From the Magic Garden, which serves as a reminder of our universal need to feel safe.

At first, everyone is struggling to adjust to this new reality, but things start to improve when eight-year-old Suzanne (Žofie Hánová) starts telling her brothers Tom (Mikuláš Čížek) and Derek (Alex Mojžíš) stories in the same way their grandma used to do it, using a big hat as a container of ideas that came from every member of the family. Soon, we step into a world shaped by her imagination but also by grief, where her deepest fears come to life and her need to be loved and looked after speaks louder than the images we see.

And so, we watch as, in the first tale, a boy and her younger sister suddenly lose their parents. As they lean on their their recently rescued cat, aptly named “Fearless,” to find the strength to process the news, they find out that nobody wants to look after them. But just when they’re about to be taken to a children’s home, a somewhat disquieting Aunt moves in with them and saves them from their fate.

In the second story, we meet a boy whose brother refuses to take anything he says seriously. One day, as they both wander through a forest, he finds his way to a magical door, behind which is an apple-eating lady who tells him about the “love of my life and death,” a man she loved whose skeleton resides in her attic. Having realized that the magic he perceives all around him is real, the boy isn’t scared anymore, and acquires enough confidence to familiarize with the creatures he sees.

For Suzanne’s final tale, the children are joined by their grandpa (Arnošt Goldflam), and this makes the third act of the movie more special. This story is about an old man who’s mourning his wife, and who spends his days at the cemetery talking to her grave. One day, a strong gust of wind whisks him away, and his terror is soon replaced by relief when a flock of cormorant birds rescues him. Eventually, he learns that he can fly, and he’s able to live in the moment, see beauty in this experience, and feel again.

Tales From the Magic Garden is quite clearly a film about processing grief, and the stories you’ll get in the movie serve more as a reminder or its main theme than as a source of further depth or insight. If at the start of the movie you think you know where this is going, you won’t find any surprises later on. Still, what makes Pohadky Po Babicce stand out from similar tales is its source material – Arnošt Goldflam’s book – which has plenty of childlike charm but also contains frightening creatures and eerie, unsettling developments.

In stop-motion animation, this results in a story that successfully embodies the chaos caused by sudden loss, taking us into the mind of a child where wonder and terror coexist to create a world that’s full of life, but also of death. The stunning worldbuilding makes these imaginary settings truly magical; art designers Patricia Ortiz Martinez and Jean-Claude Rozec use different styles of animation to make each story feel different, but all of them come alive with bright colours, impressive use of lighting, and immense attention to detail.

In each of these stories you’ll find plenty of cute animals, childlike curiosity and adults that come to save the day, but there are just as many haunting, disturbing elements that give every frame an otherworldly feel, aided by the score and sound design (Miroslav Červená Chaloupka). I personally liked the design of the setting so much more than that of the characters, who all have incredible hair but whose faces could have been more expressive and distinctive. But that is a matter of personal taste in an otherwise well-crafted story that’s even more impressive if one considers that this was a labor of love born out of the collaboration of four production companies: the Czech “MAUR film,” the Slovakian “Artichoke,” the Slovenian “ZVVIKS,” and the French “Vivement Lundi!”.

The main question I kept asking myself while watching Tales From the Magic Garden is who its target audience would be. The Berlinale’s site lists it as a movie for “6 years old and up,” and yet I do feel that the film is way too morbid for children that young. Still, the film asks questions that a lot of children that age might be thinking about themselves, so it could also be a therapeutic experience, if they’re able to engage with the story despite its slow pace. Adults might feel the opposite way: fascinated by the movie’s unique setting and atmosphere but perhaps not very interested in its most childish elements, which make up a good chunk of the film.

The journey itself definitely has highs and lows, which made me wonder if a shorter, episodic format would have helped take care of some of these issues while allowing the movie to retain its unique approach to its themes. Still, there is a lot to like in Tales From the Magic Garden (Pohadky Po Babicce), a gorgeous stop-motion animated tale that’s both an ode to the resilience of children and a reminder that we’re never not going need to feel safe and looked after.

Tales From the Magic Garden premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 16, 2025. Read our Berlin Film Festival reviews and our list of 20 films to watch at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival!