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The director/producer team of the BBC movie
The Sand Fairy has paired up again for this sequel in which a quartet of children once again descend upon the British countryside to bedevil the locals and pester the hairy wish-granting troll. This 1993 follow-up is much more concerned with a moral than the original, which was based on Edith Nesbit's book,
Five Children and It. These brothers and sisters (apparently unrelated to the first set) are sent to the country to temporarily stay with a child-hating maiden aunt and her mean-spirited servants. Rather than squander their wishes selfishly, they (mostly) use them to help a sickly motherless neighbor, pair up the girl's widower father with their nanny, and turn their aunt from cranky crone to delightful dowager. They do visit the future and attend a party circa 1990, one of the boys becomes invisible, and the whole lot gets to fly with the same wings as their predecessors. Not quite as inventive as the first, but close. As with the original, this movie's length (138 minutes) makes it daunting for anyone under the age of 5.
--Kimberly Heinrichs
