Best Fantasy Movies of 1933

Trouble starts when the queen's magic mirror says Betty Boop is fairest.

A political hack becomes President during the height of the Depression and undergoes a metamorphosis into an incorruptible statesman after a near-fatal accident.

In Victorian England, a bored young girl dreams that she has entered a fantasy world called Wonderland populated by even more fantastic characters.

This story is based both on a long-standing legend and a play by E. Temple Thurston. Veteran British director Maurice Elvey brought years of experience with theatrical adaptations to the difficult task of filming a movie that spans centuries and strains credulity. Conrad Veidt stars as the Jew who urges Roman authorities to crucify Jesus and release Barabbas. As a punishment, he is condemned by God to wander the Earth for many centuries, enduring innumerable trials and tribulations on several continents.

Betty Boop hosts a Hallowe'en party with a few uninvited guests.

While recuperating in a hospital after he's hit by an automobile, a struggling shopowner dreams what his life might have been like if he'd made different choices twenty years earlier.

A fantasy satire on politics in which a little boy dreams that he becomes President of the U.S. and his 'mammy' is Vice President. The film spotlights two now legendary performers much earlier in their careers: Ethel Waters and Sammy Davis Jr. In his first screen appearance, around the age of seven, pint-sized Davis sings, dances and clowns. Nicknamed 'the beanpole' slim and slinky Waters looks far different from the heavier figure she displayed in Pinky (1949) and Member of the Wedding (1953). Statuesque in a long glamorous white gown, she sings her big hit "Am I Blue." Davis, in turn sings "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You." (Separate Cinema)

A young American man is transported back to London in the time of the American Revolution and meets his ancestors.

A chef helps a housewife cook a duck dinner that will not give her husband indigestion.

A storybook opens to depict little Dorothy on the grey Kansas prairies, when suddenly a cyclone comes up, turns her world to color, and she lands on a Scarecrow, who promptly gets up and walks with her. Her dog Toto finds a woodcutter made of tin, so the Scarecrow oils him up and he accompanies them. They watch some animals reproduce before being ushered into the Emerald City by singing suits of armor and a lavish parade of overweight cops before meeting the Wizard, a devious little man who transforms eggs into uncontrollable forms, much to Billina's dismay.

Christmas Eve. A poor orphan boy trudges through the snow, pathetically. He finally arrives at his miserable cabin. While he is crying, Santa arrives and, singing the title song, offers to take the boy to his workshop. They arrive, and the toys go wild (in the full version, they sing the title song, but this has been censored in some versions due to outdated stereotypes). He plays with a few toys. A candle falls off the tree and starts a fire. The toys try in vain to fight the fire; the boy hooks up a hose to a set of bagpipes and takes care of it.

As two feline sweethearts sail along Moonlight Bay, the moon invites them up for a visit. They discover the moon is not made of green cheese, as is rumored, but is actually a land of candy, ice cream and cake.

Part religious allegory and part church pageant, it presents the heavenly trial of a woman who has died giving childbirth out of wedlock. The jailer wears a mask death's head mask and a nun's habit with a skull and crossbones on the front and God sits on an altar, flanked by angels, while the devil attempts to convict the woman for her sins. Shot with a handheld camera that doesn't always remain steady or keep the scene in frame, it is full of religious imagery and evocative folkloric elements, with flashbacks to the woman's life that provide a realism in sharp contrast to the allegorical pageantry. It shows its amateur origins, the texture, the pageantry, and the allegorical and ritualistic elements also looks forward to the American Underground cinema of Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington, and others in the 1950s and 1960s.