Dragonlance
an animated movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 6/10
I enjoyed the Dragonlance cartoon movie. I found it campy and fun, very much akin to a Scooby Doo cartoon from the 1960s. The plot was fairly complicated considering, and there were a ton of characters. Most of the characters were extraneous and frequently they were similarly dressed.
The animation style is frankly pathetic. Nothing had depth or shading. There was a limited palette of colors, like someone bought the animators a 24-pack of markers and they couldn’t use anything else or combine colors.
The movie did not make a lot of sense if you are not already a fan of the books. That was too bad, but I am a huge X-Men fan and I loved the first X-Men movie while people who are not fans were left cold and I was really peeved that they kept panning the movie instead of watching it two or three times and getting with the program. So I am probably bending too far backwards giving the Dragonlance people the benefit of the doubt. I could sum up with, “The characters all act completely randomly throughout the movie, but there are glimmers where other characters reference things we never saw which promise that the characters actions would make sense, if we knew them better.”
The voice acting in Dragonlance was flat out horrible. There were some really big names, Kiefer Sutherland, Lucy (Xena) Lawless, that Baby Buffy girl who also played Harriet the Spy, and some other recognizable people. But the Scooby Doo effect of the animation and the really lousy script probably hampered their efforts and it is unfair to lay the blame at the actors’ feet entirely.
In the end, it’s an animated movie with dragons and magic and there was an actual story. So I kind of liked it. If those things don’t float your boat, you should definitely take a pass. If you’re a fan of Dragonlance and happen to be reading this blog post without having seen the movie, it’s worth Netflixing.
It could have been so much better, but it’s hard to tell whether the improvements I wanted would have destroyed the campy vibe that kept me amused throughout.
