JK Rowling's new Harry Potter world-extension isn't so much a prequel as it is a loose, distantly relevant novella. People wave wands and use familiar lingo. Footnotes from the wizarding world take flesh and form out in the wild and there's a bit of familiar name-dropping to keep us all invested. Eddie Redmayne takes top billing as the introverted naturalist with an extensive collection of traveling wildlife, but as the name implies, the beasts themselves are the real stars here. A live-action jaunt through the monster manual, it's an interesting, unusual turn if not a terribly fulfilling one. Many times, I felt like I was digging through the guts of an info-rich companion book and not a free-standing tale. There's the framework of a story, of course, but it's awfully dry, light fare and the real focus is quite clearly on establishing a deeper lore for the growth of the franchise. The effects work is strong, as it desperately needed to be, and I enjoyed the unexpected aesthetic of magical society at play in the roaring twenties, but there isn't a lot of meat on these bones. Disappointing, since the Potter films are brimming with precisely the kind of depth, warmth and rich, implied back-story that this is missing.