Movie Review: Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight

Well… to start off, Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight was fairly accurate to the novel. I haven’t read the novel for a good 10 years or so, so I’m a bit fuzzy, but it brought things back to my remembrance, and nothing seemed too out of place.
It’s a pretty typical Dungeons and Dragons style story with a whole gambit of characters: Half-elf, Barbarian, Cleric, Dwarf, Halfling (or Kender in this case), Mage, Knight, and a Fighter. They get into trouble, a quest is given to them by a unicorn and then by the king of the elves, the leader doesn’t want to be the leader, they win the battle, but the war continues on. Yup… that sounds just like the D&D campaign I was playing 10 years ago, except we had a monk that could punch a guy’s spine out with his bare hands. (Though he missed the spine by a few inches, and punched through the guy’s heart instead… same outcome.)

The animation was… how should I put this? Crap. It really was. Strawberry Shortcake cartoons have better animation than this. It was very similar to the animation in the D&D cartoon from the 80’s, but I think even that was better. What was very odd though was that all the dragons and draconians (which are different than goblins) were CG 3D animation, which looked really clean and cool… but made the cell animation look that much worse. When I first heard that they were making this movie, and it was to be animated, I pictured TMNT and thought, yes… this is going to be really good animation. Alas… I was disappointed. There were also a lot of gratuitous cleavage and butt shots, which just seemed silly and very out of place.

The voice acting was really well done however, and I thought Kiefer Sutherland as the mage Raistlin was an excellent choice. His voice was kind of how I imagined it would be: a little rough and gravelly. Xena… I mean Lucy Lawless was the Plainswoman Cleric, and Michael “Lex Luther” Rosenbaum was the reluctant leader Tanis Half-elven. They did some good voice acting, and it was hard to tell it was them. All the other voices seemed to be well cast too.

All in all, I give this movie 3.5 outta 5, because as for story and acting, it was really good. The animation was really lacking though, which is really unfortunate in this day of superb and cheap animation.

As an aside, I am reading Dragons of Dwarven Depths, which is a new book that takes place between Dragons of Autumn Twilight and Dragons of Winter Night. The movie summed up Autumn Twilight excellently, and so I am not lost while reading this new book. (Though I don’t think any editors read this book, and if an editor DID read it, he/she needs to be fired. More typos then I’ve ever seen in a book, and they even forgot that the Kender had given his knife to the Fighter’s girlfriend before she left on a solo adventure… I’m really disappointed on the editing front.)