I was very pleased to see that Warwick Davis won a BAFTA Fellowship last night. When I was very small I remember watching Willow repeatedly; it was definitely one of my childhood favourites. Davis is obviously a great actor who deserves his fellowship very much, not least for the tremendous work he has done for the representation of people of reduced stature.

Once I get onto that subject however, it seems to me that several issues and questions crop up. Willow is obviously based on The Lord Of The Rings, with a baby standing in for the one ring. It’s as if the producers wanted to tell the story but couldn’t get the rights to Tolkien’s book, so they made up a fantasy-adventure narrative using many of the same tropes without making it so similar that they could be sued for breaching. copyright. Unlike Peter Jackson’s Oscar winning official adaptation though, Willow cast actual short people rather than using complicated camera techniques to make normal sized people look short. That would seem to me to raise certain questions 

There is a long-standing principle in disability arts that disabled characters should always be played by disabled actors, and the same naturally goes for people of reduced stature. In that case, did Jackson get wrong what Willow got right? Should he  have cast actual short people as hobbits? No doubt Elijah Wood and Sean Astin were incredible as Frodo and Sam, but if we are going to take the representation of social minorities in film seriously, then this is something we could find problematic. Warick Davis is an outstanding actor who has done a great deal for the representation of people of reduced stature; it’s just a pity that the greatest film ever to be made involving short characters didn’t have any actors like him in it.