LibriumArcana.Games

I admit I never read the books and didn't know what the special nature of this setting was, but I checked out the DVD from the Library a couple years ago and just thought of it tonight while listening to Spoony's RPG vlogs.

It's the first novel "Dragons of Atumn Twilight", with a cast of noted voice actors and actresses, but apparently fans hate it. Given all the RPG fans here, I was curious as to views of it here....

Steve, I've got much love for the DL series as a whole. Well, the general core series at least. It's turned into SW:EU where everyone and their brother has a DL novel out now and we're up to over 130 of the damned things. Anyhow...

Yeah, the Dragonlance animated movie was something a lot of fans were looking forward because hey, a Dragonlance movie! And Weiss and Hickman were suppose to be creative consultants on it so there's that.

Yeeeaaaahhh.... it was bad. At least in my opinion(along with a lot of other people). My two big reasons are as follows:

1 - The animation quality. Now, I'm a gamer and I'm a fan of anime and 80's cartoons. I like story and can ignore some bad art quality to get it. But this was what I can only say was the worst aspects of 80's/90's animation thrown together here. Passable CGI animation kept getting cut back and forth with 2d animation that was absolutely horrible. It made me think of the old Heavy Metal movie if anyone has ever seen it. But only not as good. And as I said, I can ignore some absolute shit art to have a good story, but that leads us to point number

2 - The story. Dragonlance is a rather long story. Is it as deep and epic as say LotR? Probably not. But there's still a good bit going on with a lot of characters doing a lot of things. This movie was 90 minutes long. To say things got left on the cutting floor is an understatement. The entire story suddenly became very rushed, the characters never had a chance to be the characters and the whole thing felt messy to me. It was a race from one scene to the next without the scene ever being allowed to play out at a natural pace. Ideally this should have been a 2.5-3 hour movie and released as two parts. The book had a natural split in it between what amounts to the first half and the second half of the book. There was a natural stopping point there. It wasn't taken. I think this was a big mistake and really detracted from the movie.

Beyond that, there's some minor nitpicks as far as voice acting choices that I didn't think were absolutely great but they're not unbearable and don't really harm the movie at least.

If you're a fan of the series, check it out. It's not unwatchable. It's just not that good either.

B4 pretty much sums up my opinion on the movie - and I'm a huge DL fan....

I was....disappointed...especially with Keiffer Sutherland as Raistlin...his voice wasn't right for it.