★★★★☆ Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Full-Cast Edition), by JK Rowling
** spoiler alert ** Messrs Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Full-Cast Edition)
JK Rowling
** spoiler alert **
Messrs Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs
One of the very first things we learn about Harry Potter's world is that some wizards and witches can take on the form of animals. Vernon Dursley is disturbed to notice a cat reading a map. Shortly thereafter we learn that the cat is actually Minerva McGonagall, transfiguration professor at Hogwarts. Such people are called animagi.
In my review of Chamber of Secrets I wrote that it was a forward-looking novel, prefiguring many of the elements of Potter's world that will become important in future novels. Prisoner of Azkaban is more about the past, not Harry's past, actually, but about events of years before Harry was born, when his father James Potter was a student at Hogwarts. We learn that James Potter had three great friends at Hogwarts, and that he and these three friends were all animagi, who called themselves Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs.
The first of these we meet is Moony, Remus Lupin, who is not actually an animagus, strictly speaking, but a werewolf. (Since he was not born a werewolf, one wonders why his parents gave him such a wolfish name.) He's this year's Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, the best DADA teacher Harry will ever have, and very nearly the only one who is even marginally competent. He is in fact one of the more admirable characters of the Harry Potter series: wise, kind, and brave. He is voiced in this full-cast edition by Iwan Rheon, who does a good job of making him a likeable character.
The second we meet is Padfoot, Sirius Black, the titular prisoner of Azkaban (voiced by Sope Dirisu). He has spent the years since Voldemort's attempted murder of Harry in the Wizard prison Azkaban for the murder of a streetful of people. It transpires that he did not commit this murder. Sirius, alas, is a less admirable and less sympathetic character than Lupin. He is understandably bitter about his years of unjust imprisonment and wants revenge. He will eventually turn out to be possessive and overbearing with Harry.
I just told a lie. Moonie is not the first of the four friends we meet. The first was Wormtail, whom we have known from the first book. He is Ron's pet rat Scabbers. But it is only in Prisoner of Azkaban that he is revealed to be a human, Peter Pettigrew (voiced by Blake Harrison with the proper degree of oily abasement), in the form of a rat.
The fourth animagus, Prongs, is thus James Potter (voiced by Tom Glenister). This intimate little group has a fifth member -- Severus Snape. Snape is not an animagus, and he is joined to the other four not by love, but by hatred, which is as intimate a feeling as love. He even has a nickname, which we will not learn for some time -- he calls himself the Half-Blood Prince.
Lupin, Sirius, Wormtail, and Snape will continue to be important characters, so in this regard I was wrong to say that Prisoner of Azkaban is about the past. Still, I feel that it is more an infrastructure book, a backgrounder novel, than Chamber of Secrets. I have never liked it as much, largely because I just don't like Sirius Black. I didn't have any strong feelings about this full-cast edition.
Excellent review! And definitely lots of background info in this book, for sure. I’ve always wondered if Rowling had already known that Scabbers would end up being Wormtail when she wrote book 1 or whether she had that idea after writing the first book. Either way, it was a clever way to go with Wormtail’s character. 💯
Thank you for writing this review! 🙏
Thanks for sharing
Now I need to buy it