Wow…going into the wayback machine for this one.
I had seen a brief note elsewhere yesterday that the original writers of the Dragonlance series (Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman) had settled a lawsuit with the Wizards of the Coast and would be releasing a new series of novels in the near future. This got me thinking of this movie that I had never watched despite loving the novels (first six) as a young adult.
Created in 2008 this movie was made seven full years after the original Lord of the Rings film by Peter Jackson. It also featured some fairly name worthy actors doing the character voiceovers such as Kiefer Sutherland and Lucy Lawless. It went straight to video, deservedly so, and has been largely forgotten as another failure in the long line of attempts to portray well known Dungeons and Dragons settings and stories to the large and small screens.
There are LOTS of issues with the animation of the work. First the baseline animation is extremely aged. It appears they used the same artists and techniques as were used in the original Dungeons and Dragons Saturday morning cartoons or similar. Maybe it was intended to elicit that sort of imagery but it doesn’t work here…the story is darker and deeper with impaled bodies and blood splatters…a child’s story this isn’t and the images should carry the detail and grittiness that such implies. Then there is the choice to mix in computer imagery for certain characters—the dragons and draconians in particular as perhaps a way of calling them out. The effect is jarring and doesn’t work. The hand drawn cartoons mixed with computer images don’t mesh and is distracting. Add to the fact that none of these computer images of the dragons or draconians are very impactful—neither is really threatening and both come across as bumbling, clumsy, and inept—something that was certainly not the case in the novels. Lastly we come to the decidedly juvenile male POV of the “artists”…Their choices for how to display female characters is beyond moronic. Every female character has porn start breasts pointing at the stars and bouncing this way and that, barely concealed behind plunging necklines and unbuttoned shirts. I actually came away feeling dirty at points for having watched the film it was so over the top and offensive.
The story hews close to the original novel but has to be so condensed that there is never time to understand what is going on or why, the dialogue is stilted and poorly attempts humor where there shouldn’t be any. None of the “evil” characters come off as being truly “evil”…just more bumbling like as if they were in a “He-Man” or “She-Ra” cartoon…yet as I said…there are attempts here to pivot the work towards adults with violence and titillation.
In short? Its a mess. Unappealing to children or adults whether they know the books or not. Its ugly and boring. Its backwards and cheap. It also made me realize how derivative the works are as compared to LOTR and similar…you have many of the same characters and circumstances—the outcast, the protective woods, the dragons on piles of loot, the emotionally distant elves, and on and on…I still fondly remember the written words of these novels but certainly not this “movie” and I wonder if I’ll now ever go back to reread them as I once might have…and that’s dissapointing.