Topic: So I just saw DragonLance Dragons of Autumn Twilight
Blayne Bradley
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posted
You know what happens when a film is so underhyped that you walk in sit down only because "hey its based off of a book I loved, and I get to see Tasslehoff Burrfoot again and Raistlin Majere". So I sit down with extremely low expectations.
And you know what happens? You get shocked and dismayed because the movie didn't turn out to be as terrible as the trailers made it look like, I was actually fairly impressed with myself I managed to enjoy it and come out of it smiling, and some of the lines were really funny rehearing them after so long.
Now this is not to say that the movie was "excellent" or "awesome" it is from an unbiased standpoint not bad the animation while sloppy was better then what the trailer made it look, the voice acting could have been a bit better but it was acceptable and didn't make me cringe like watching Gundam Seed in English. Then again I'm biased as I really wanted Ted Lewis for the role of Raistlin but Sutherland did a good job I loved seeing Raistlin again. The voice acting overall made me smile not because it was "okay" but more on the line that at times it seemed like a bunch of american angsty teenagers playing Dungeons and Dragons that coincidentally happens t have a cartoon synced with it.
The animation was once more "okay" or rather "acceptable" as life action + CGI would have been BEST to do, but I geuss people don't seem to learn their lesson from LOTR. It could have been alot better though even animated, as being animated is not a bad thing I love anime for example and I think with Miyazaki on the team they could have done much better had they made it Animated Japanese fashion.
The story and plot were roughly as I remembered it which I liked my only issue is that it felt "rushed" and I think the producers must have envied Peter Jackson for all the time he was allowed to have for his movies, 120-180 minutes would have done much better.
Will they make the sequals? I don't know. Will I watch them if they do? Hell yes.
On the whole I think while the movie was rushed it was true not nessasarily to the book per se but was pretty true to the DragonLance setting as it represented in passing some much more mature themes like rape, murder, horny draconians that you just don't quite see the same way in other fantasy works made into viewable media.
While those of us spoiled by better animated movies and cartoons made cringe a little watching it, maybe its bcause I busied myself glazing urns at the same time so it didn't seem so bad for me but the movie if you go into it expecting it to be bad the movie will surprise you and you'll enjoy it.
posted
I just watched it online. It was decent. I hope that they make sequels, and that the animation is of higher quality.
Posts: 2705 | Registered: Sep 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: The animation was once more "okay" or rather "acceptable" as life action + CGI would have been BEST to do, but I geuss people don't seem to learn their lesson from LOTR.
Oh, I think they arguably learned their lesson. It's just really, really difficult to do that combination well. Take a look at any of the LOTR movies; then, take a look at "Eragon".
Having recently been to where Hobbiton was filmed, I have a new appreciation for just what an exacting labor of love LOTR really was. Jackson had an oak tree cut into pieces and re-assembled at the top of the Bag End location, and then had hundreds of fake oak branches imported from Singapore attached to it, just because it's mentioned in the books that there's an oak tree hanging over Bag End... The tree appears in less than a minute of the entire trilogy's running time.
Then there's "Eragon", which apparently blew most of its budget on the dragon (which, admittedly, looks pretty nice; unfortunately, it's one of the few parts of the movie that does.) I have the strong impression that most of what the people responsible for "Eragon" got out of watching the LOTR trilogy was "people who watch fantasy movies like to see lots of helicopter shots of the heroes travelling across the landscape."
You can scout locations and pore over source materials and fly your actors across to a rare location without power lines and do weird things like import fake branches from Asia and talk the military into making your shooting location a no-fly zone... Or you can pay a group of decent actors for a few days work in a sound studio and ship a lot of your animation work out to Asia on the cheap, and have a much better chance of the whole operation coming out in the black.
I can hardly blame the producers of "Dragonlance" for taking the latter option. It's a pity the animation looks so sub-par in the preview, as it will undoubtedly keep a lot of people away. I'm glad the final result was halfway worth watching.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
I'm left wondering if I watched the same movies as you did Blayne... They rushed most of the best parts of the story, gave away stuff that wasn't supposed to be known till the second or third books, and the animation looked like a Thundercats/Heman episode with some Johnny Quest CG thrown in.
The voices themselves weren't overly annoying, but the voice ACTING was terrible... it's like they didn't even read the books (maybe they didn't?)
Posts: 636 | Registered: Apr 2002
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