Fairytale - A True Story has had its official premiere in Bradford. The makers, Warner Brothers, brought a little of Hollywood with them, as fairy fever spread across Centenary Square.

But what of the film itself? T&A cinema critic David Behrens gives his view.

The line between fact and fantasy is easily confused. Ask any five year-old.

Inside the aircraft hangar of a young mind, fuelled by an imagination which literally knows no bounds, the distinctions between dreams and events can become as blurred as Oliver Reed's memory.

Was that a fairy at the bottom of the garden? Or was it a dream? And if it was a dream, where's the harm in believing anyway?

It is this universal children's dilemma - more so, in fact, than the story of the Cottingley Fairies itself - which preoccupies Charles Sturridge, director of the film which premiered here yesterday.

The workings of the human imagination - that of adults as well as children - has clearly fascinated him, and, though his cameras are in Cottingley, his soul is evidently somewhere altogether more ethereal.

The first clue that this is to be a journey of the mind comes with the opening sequence, in which we encounter little Elsie Wright on a trip to the theatre. Her parents have taken her to see Peter Pan, and as Tinkerbell flies across the stage as if by magic, Elsie is captivated.

Meanwhile, aerial flight of a more tangible variety is being practised by the escapologist Harry Houdini, suspended in a straitjacket high above the Daily Sketch building in Fleet Street. He, unlike, Elsie, believes implicitly in magic - so long as there's a rational explanation.

Back in Bradford, Elsie is joined by her cousin, Frances Griffiths. Frances's father is missing in the Great War and she - like most of the rest of Britain - needs desperately to find something else in which to believe, something to cling to.

Bradford is in optimistic mood generally; buoyed by the imminent peace. The electrification of Elsie's dad's mill is all done bar the wiring, and the new era promises for its citizens a life of prosperity and continuous employment, from the dawn of adulthood (twelve and a half) to the grave.

This then is the world which gave birth to the legend of the Cottingley Fairies. Frances and Elsie make a pact of secrecy with the elves and sprites whose myth has enchanted them. They take off to the beck with a camera - and before dad has had time to say, "What the....?" he's pulling a set of fairy photos out of his developing dish.

It's not just the girls, but Elsie's mother, too (played by Sturridge's wife, Phoebe Nicholls) who needs something in which to believe. Her other child has been lost at war, and her life now is an open void.

She shows the photographs to the noted spiritualist EL Gardner (Bill Nighy) while he's in town addressing the Bradford Theosophist society; he in turn shows them to his friend, the author Arthur Conan Doyle (Peter O'Toole).

It's here that the film starts to compress history. Three years actually elapsed between the taking of the pictures and Doyle's credulous publication of them in the Strand Magazine ("Fairies photographed - An epoch-making event"). But the continued wartime backdrop better serves the director's purpose.

(The film is also stretching a point in suggesting that Doyle and Houdini - Harvey Keitel - arrived in Cottingley together to look for evidence of fairies. But good storytelling does require dramatic licence.)

Doyle's article in the Strand causes a sensation. The girls' names are left out of it, but the Bradford Daily Argus tracks them down just the same. Local knowledge leads its reporter John Ferret (Tim McInnerny) to one of the only two becks in the area with waterfalls, as Doyle has described. (The fact that the girls' pictures, if not their names, appear in the magazine is a fact skirted over by the film, since to acknowledge it would make a nonsense of the subplot.)

"I'm not going anywhere till I get my story," says Ferret. "People have a right to know the truth." (They don't, of course.) "If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."

Soon, all of Yorkshire descends upon Cottingley like a Whit weekend, with cameras and fishing nets. Ferret of the Argus, meanwhile, breaks into the girls' house under cover of darkness (a practice which, we should point out, the Telegraph and Argus hardly ever indulges in).

What happens to him there I shan't reveal - except to say that it serves him right and to note that it further fudges the distinction between fact and imagination.

Sturridge makes his fairies real; miniature people who fly through the air with computer-generated ease. But of course, only the children, and we, can see them. Grown-ups, as Frances says, don't know how to believe.

Computer images apart, there is an appealing, old-fashioned quality to Fairytale - A True Story - though one might question the need for so many mind games among the characters. Peter O'Toole especially plays Doyle as the sort of benign old gent who's taken a wrong turning from the set of a Disney movie.

The performances of the youngsters, however - Florence Hoath as Elsie and Elizabeth Earl as Frances - are quite exquisite.

The real question, though, is just who the film is aimed at. While one can imagine a nice Edwardian family such as Elsie's sitting down to watch it, its appeal for families today is harder to define. Adults might find it insubstantial; children in search of a half-term treat perhaps more likely to be drawn to see Robin Williams in Flubber.

Those, however, who revel in the cinema's more traditional values - and who are prepared, for an hour and a half, to believe that there might, just might be fairies in Cottingley beck - will, I guarantee, be entranced.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.