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.

Beowulf
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 7/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 5/10

(The animated version of Beowulf from 2007/8.)

Generally I enjoy animated movies. I also have a soft spot for the story of Beowulf. However this movie did not really take advantage of my willingness to let things slide because it is a great story.

There were some really good points about the movie. I enjoyed the dragons and the monsters. Some of the background animation was also good. The special effects would have been extremely costly if those sets had been built in real life. I still enjoy Beowulf as a story.

The bad points started with the lapsing into “Colorforms” style animation where the people are stuck onto a pre-fab background and look obviously fake. Sometimes it seemed like the cost of doing great animation caused things to be skipped over or rushed and interrupted the flow.

Most of my complaints come from the alteration of the story from the original text and from Beowulf being a ear-bleeding moronic twit. In my discussions with other people, apparently King Hrothgar’s dalliance with the demon and his siring of Grendel were not as obvious to Beowulf as they appeared to me. We see the queen publicly shunning the king and saying that the king will not be getting any more heirs. Hrothgar later says Grendel is his fault and the camera focuses on the queen’s face so we know she knows why. There were enough verbal cues by this poing to make it clear Grendel is Hrothgar’s son. So why, when presented with the same choice Hrothgar had, does Beowulf make the same mistake?

I did like some of the subtext in the movie. Like the women making ribald comments in the feasting hall, comments which specifically remind us that women like sex just as much as men. Women before the influence of England’s Queen Victoria don’t even have the stigma attached to sexual interest. I also enjoyed the way the Christian church is presented throughout and how specifically the church’s representative was right there when horrible things were happening. Both of these fit with my understanding of historical accuracy.

The fight scenes were energetic and tolerably shown, though rushed in several places. Many fight scenes are viciously edited until no one can tell what is happening due to tight focus on the hands or stop motion or shadow forms or whatever. It could have been much worse.

I think a knowledge of the story of Beowulf would not have helped the viewer of this movie. Going into the movie without foreknowledge would have allowed the viewer to accept this as an oddly modern historical movie. In that regard it was vaguely enjoyable. I would have liked it better with a more detailed story. Neil Gaiman’s name is plastered all over this and he is known for his writing foremost, I had much higher expectations for a story written by a real author.