AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies

Fantastic Flights

Some are surreal — Chaplin trapped in the toils of a modern factory, the Marx Brothers in Freedonia. Some are completely unreal — Disney's animated creations. But most of the figures we'll be looking at here are, in one way or another, space voyagers. What they have in common is their capacity to lift us out of quotidian reality, into realms of pure imagination. What medium does this better than the movies? Or is likely to do so more often, more powerfully in the new millennium? How better to conclude our series than with this trip back to the future as the movies have imagined it. How better to suggest that there are always new worlds for filmmakers to imagine and to conquer in the millennium ahead. Films include: MODERN TIMES, DUCK SOUP, SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, THE WIZARD OF OZ, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, STAR WARS.