Dragonlance Movie - Anyone else seen it?

[RJ]

Picked it up and watched it. Wasn't too terrible even though alot of reviews are scorching it. I'd probably give it 2.5/5 stars.

The Good -

Pretty good story adaptation. Been a while since I read the books but I think they did a pretty good job of presenting the story.

Voice acting was good and I thought the banter between characters was well done. Almost all the voices rang true to how I heard them in my head when reading the book. The only one I thought was off was Tasselhoff, just thought it should have been a little more high pitched and childlike. I really thought Jason Marsden was going to nail it but he just missed it by a bit. Tasselhoff was still awesome though.

Fight scenes were decent and seemed pretty violent even though it wasn't shown in much detail. There was some blood and lots of dead bodies on the ground. Could of been disneyized with everyone just getting knocked out.

The Bad -

The animation was just awful. I'd call it Speed Racer animation with 3d animation thrown in for the dragons. I thought the character models were good but they stuttered too much when they moved. By the end of the movie I almost did not even notice the bad animation.

Some things were just overdone. In particular was Caramon and Tika's heaving breasts in the Inn of the Last Home. Made me wince and almost shut the movie off. Luckily things got better.

Small details here and there. I'll have to read the books again and see if they got things right. I thought there was a wicker dragon scene in the book. Xak Tsaroth seemed rushed, thought it took alot longer than the movie. Seem to remember Fizban teaching Raistlin the Fireball spell and also using the magic language when casting his spells. Raistlin casts spells like you would expect but Fizban just shouts "Fireball!!".

Overall a pretty enjoyable movie to watch as long as your expectations are not too high. Hope they make the other 2 books but maybe convince the actors to take a pay cut and get some better animation. Probably spent too much money getting the big name actors for the first one.

Tried to not put too many spoilers in, till everyone else see's it.

[SkywardShadow]

I saw the trailer at GenCon, and the animation looked so incredibly horrible that I refused to watch it. I'm pretty disappointed that Weis and Hickman didn't hold to a higher standard.

[RJ]

Yeah there is a review by Hickman at Amazon and he expresses his disappointment with the animation among a couple of other things. But overall he gives it 4/5 stars... The rest of the reviews fell into 54 in the 1-2 range and 54 in the 3+ range.

Man it could have been so much better... Now they've probably screwed themselves from doing the rest because sales will be miserable due to the poor animation.