Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them is in New York’s secret community of witches and wizards seventy years before Harry Potter reads his book in school.

The year is 1926 and Newt Scamander has just completed a global excursion.

They find and document an extraordinary array of magical creatures. Arriving in New York for a brief stopover, they might have come and gone without incident. The problem is with Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) luggage or rather the contents of his luggage.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them are in Newt luggage.

Newt carries with him a menagerie of extraordinary creatures, including the rampaging rhino; an invisible sloth-type thing and a kleptomaniac duck-billed platypus. But recapturing his escaped beasts, with the help of disgraced Macusa employee Porpentina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) and Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), a muggle turns out to be the least of Newt’s worries. Dark forces are at work in New York.

Scamander means well, but he’s a bit of a klutz

He is not nearly as careful as someone charged with keeping a menagerie of potentially dangerous creatures really ought to be. If he were cleverer, he probably would have left behind those beasts capable of destroying New York City, such as the atom-bomb-like Obscurus, before traveling. In his absent-mindedness, however, Scamander accidentally swaps suitcases with Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), a No-Maj factory worker, who swiftly unleashes half a dozen or so of the animals into the streets — animals that have a nasty habit of leaping directly into the lenses of Philippe Rousselot’s 3D cameras.

The enormous task at hand is better suited to some of Newt’s powerful friends back home like Albus Dumbledore, who may appear in future installments.