The Harry Potter movies are not examples of ironic romance in this sense, of course. They're ironic only to the extent that Harry's teenaged emotions and middle-class circumstances are incongruous for the situations and props carried forward from medieval romance. Ironic romance can be much more bracingly reticent than Prisoner of Azkaban and still function primarily as entertainment, as in last year's marvelous Triplets of Belleville, in which the handicapped Grandmother's quest to save her grandson is full of bizarre incidents presented with total matter-of-factness. The Triplets of Belleville features the least sentimental cartoon doggie ever; the Harry Potter movies are more in the line of American pop romances which fulsomely blend irony and sentimentality.

Prisoner of Azkaban is an especially considered, yet bouncy, example, but it's far short of the amplitude of medieval romance. It's not even as much fun as Parzival and has none of the austere splendor of The Quest of the Holy Grail. (Of course, there are other types of romance besides medieval chivalric romance, and the amplitude of the episodes doesn't have to be supplied by Christianity, solely or at all: in the Old Testament it's supplied by Judaism; in the Odyssey and Ovid's Metamorphoses by the pagan pantheon; and in The Faerie Queene by a nationalism entirely bound up with Christianity.)

Furthermore, whereas middle-class-adolescent emotions can be extraordinarily effective in realism (in Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding, for example), they represent a shrinkage of dimension in the realm of romance. The recent Italian picture I'm Not Scared is also a romance about a boy who comes to terms with his father's example and discovers his own power, but the naturalistic handling bases the emotions in recognizable experience and thus gives them a resonance that Prisoner of Azkaban can't approach.

It isn't simply didactic to say that the nearly total reliance on romance in Prisoner of Azkaban limits its emotional impact. Realism is representational drama and so can move you simply by showing what would plausibly and probably happen in certain circumstances. But romance, as symbolic drama, has to draw meaning by reference to a system outside itself. The symbols stand for something that the romance itself can't supply.

Plainly, Harry's experiences are not literally what growing up is like; it's only by reference to the actualities of how children cope with and overcome powerlessness, how they seek to live up to their parents' examples while forging identities of their own, that the symbols gain life. But the movies feature supernatural figures, magi and demons, who seem to refer to a world beyond, but we have no idea what orders that world. We know that Florence Dombey senses her mother and brother watching her from heaven; Harry Potter's dead parents likewise seem to watch over him, but from where? The movies don't even suggest an answer, as if a spiritual conviction would be in bad taste.