For the most part, the story is a high fantasy in which three chiefs of Demonland—Lord Juss, Spitfire, and Brandoch Daha—embark on a heroic quest to rescue the fourth lord from his imprisonment in the mountains of Impland. However, at the end, Queen Sophonisba undertakes a resolution to the final problem that could well involve time travel.

After the time mish-mash of Ijon Tichy’s seventh voyage, it wasn’t clear whether Ijon would ever ply the channels of time again, but here he is, traveling back in time to persuade himself to go forward in time and take up the helm of THEOHIPPIP—a.k.a. Teleotelechronistic-Historical Engineering to Optimize the Hyoerputerized Implementation of Paleological Programming and Interplanetary Planning. It takes a few attempts for older Ijon to convince younger Ijon to head to the future on a one-man chronocykl, but when he does, the younger Ijon begins the unexpectedly hard task of righting history’s wrongs. As a sophisticated time traveler yourself, you’ll spot what’s happening early on, while you also get a tour of history from the formamtion of the Solar System to the extinction of the dinosaurs and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. You’ll also recognize the fun Lem has at the expense of the bureaucracies of mid-20th-century Poland.

A boy’s bedroom is invaded by six dwarves who have stolen The Supreme Being’s map, which naturally leads both boy and dwarves on adventures through time.

Charles Phillips is a 20th-century New Yorker in a future world of immortal leisurites who reconstruct cities from the past.

Jack and Annie meet Plato and learn about the treatment of women in ancient Greece, while also rescuing a fourth lost book from history for Morgan’s library

Compared to the books, I find the Harry Potter movies drawn-out and boring, but I rewatched this one during the pandemic and found that I enjoyed all three thirteen-year-olds as well as Hagrid, Sirius, Snape, Lupin, and—most of all—the fact that the filmmakers didn’t blithely destroy the single static timeline out of a misplaced sense that time travelers are meant to change the timeline willy-nilly.

When fourteen-year-old genius Artemis Fowl realizes that the only cure for his mother’s case of Spelltropy lies in a species of lemur that Artemis made extinct eight years ago, there is only one solution: Grab your 80-year-old, elfin-police-captain-friend Holly Short and trick her into traveling back in time to stop your formerly evil, ten-year-old self from killing off the last of the all-cure lemurs.

Author Eoin Colfer does a masterful job presenting a single nonbranching, static timeline, complete with three consistent causal loops (further described in our tag notes for this story). But really, Eoin, you missed the shuttle on “the kiss”! With the help of N°1, Artemis can time travel, so if you're intent on his first romantic kiss coming from Holly Short, couldn’t N°1 have brought Holly’s actual fourteen-year-old self into the story? Might have even presented an opportunity for a fourth causal loop: Fourteen-year-old Holly kissees fourteen-year-old Artemis, but only because fifteen-year-old Artemis had already told thirteen-year-old Holly that they would enjoy it.

The animated gang of teen monsters travel centuries into the past to the first day ever at Monster High, but when they return they have each merged with another in the group creating freaky hybrid monsters all around. I’m not sure, but I’m betting that Mattel used this DVD release as an opportunity to also sell freaky hybrid fashion dolls.