Audiences are becoming jaded by special effects and will ultimately reject films that rely on them, the director of the first film in a trilogy bringing to the screen Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials said yesterday.

At a screening in Cannes of a ten-minute taster from The Golden Compass, a story of shape-shifting creatures, witches and otherworldly characters in parallel universes, which reunites the Casino Royale stars Daniel Craig and Eva Green alongside Nicole Kidman and the 12-year-old British newcomer Dakota Blue Richards, the director Chris Weitz said that story and believable characters were too often eclipsed.

“Almost anything can be done in terms of manipulating images, with talking animals, flying this and that, exploding things. There will be a backlash against that sort of thing. Audiences have been hit over the head with special effects in the last decade,” he said.

Sometimes, as in The Lord of the Rings, it was taken to extraordinary levels; and yet, he said, audiences go to the cinema because they want to be told a story.

The audience at the taster viewing of The Golden Compass at the Cannes Film Festival caught glimpses of a film spellbinding in its inventiveness, with swooping shots of the vast snowy wastes of the far north and of the young heroine, Lyra, riding across a fjord on a bear.

Fans are unlikely to be disappointed, although they have had to wait for four years as the $150million (£76 million) production has been beset with difficulties. The original director walked out feeling overwhelmed by the technology involved. Then Anand Tucker left the set, to be replaced by Weitz. The production had also lost Sir Tom Stoppard, the Oscar-winning playwright, as its screenwriter.

The film is based on the best-selling Pullman trilogy comprising Northern Lights (known in the US as T he Golden Compass, which is also the title of the film), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Together the books have sold 14 million copies around the world. The film comes from the same studio, New Line Films, as the Lord of the Rings trilogy which won 17 Oscars and took nearly $3 billion worldwide.

Weitz, who made the Oscar-nominated film About a Boy, described The Golden Compass as “one of the 20th century’s greatest works of the imagination, one that offered everything a film-maker could want – a compelling story, fascinating characters, psychological and philosophical depth, and an abiding wonder at its heart”.

The Golden Compass is due to be released in December.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010