Ermingarden (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ermingarden) wrote2025-03-08 11:57 pm
ermingarden) wrote2025-03-08 11:57 pm
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What Went Wrong with the Dragonlance Movie
I got very into Dragonlance last year. And today, rather than talking about the novels I love, I for some reason want to talk about the 2008 animated movie Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight (adapting the first book in the first Dragonlance trilogy, Dragons of Autumn Twilight).
I found out recently that (a) this movie exists and (b) it’s on YouTube, so naturally I immediately watched it. I also roped the lovely and long-sufferingfiona15351 into watching it with me, by which I mean we synced up our video timestamps so we could text simultaneously about all the shenanigans - of which there were many!
To be clear: The Dragonlance movie is a bad movie, and I do not recommend it. But some of the ways in which it is bad are really interesting.
The Dragonlance movie is mostly 2D animation, but the dragons and draconians are rendered in 3D. This is a choice that had the potential to be really interesting, but it just doesn't work onscreen. I think the artists wanted to convey the uncanny, unnerving, otherworldly sense of the dragons and draconians, but the two styles simply do not mesh well. (It's especially a problem for the draconians - it might have worked out decently for just the dragons, but unfortunately our heroes get into melee combat with draconians pretty often.) It might also have worked better if there had been more of an animation budget; frankly, the animation (especially the 3D animation) would have led me to guess the movie was from the 90s rather than from 2008. Interestingly, the Legend of Vox Machina animated series also uses a mixture of 2D and 3D animation, with dragons (and some other things) in 3D, and it works much better![1] So the vision is possible; the execution is just lacking here.
In general, the movie suffered most from a pacing problem. The screenwriters managed at least a glancing hit on just about every plot point in Autumn Twilight in just an hour and a half, but the cost of that is never lingering on anything. Everything is truncated to the point that many of the most memorable scenes in the novel no longer seem at all compelling.
Another, related result of condensing the novel into a movie script in the way the screenwriters did is a sense that the central characters pretty much all hate each other! Of course, what characters say when they're arguing or insulting each other is more likely than other dialogue to be directly relevant to the plot or to contain information about the characters' backgrounds, and it's therefore more likely to be included in the movie, while ordinary amicable conversation is cut - but it's exactly the ordinary chatter that gives a sense of the characters actually having bonds with each other. (The movie's dialogue choices also give the strong impression that Sturm and Raistlin are exes, and the breakup was a messy one...though I'm not exactly complaining about that, I kind of love the idea.)
An extra layer to any conversation about Dragonlance adaptations is that the first Dragonlance novels are adaptations themselves: novelizations of a D&D campaign! Of course, it's not possible (except for the few people who were at that table) to compare the novels to the original campaign. But you can definitely feel (or at least I could definitely feel) a kind of zany TTRPG energy throughout the books that are based on the campaign, which is missing from the books that are not (however excellent some of the latter are!). There are also moments where you can really tell someone had a streak of bad rolls. (Looking at you, Sturm.)
Ultimately, though, the Dragonlance novels succeed as adaptations because they significantly cut, condensed, and somewhat reshaped the story to fit the new medium - something the movie, in determinedly trying to hit every plot point in the novel, fails to do.
I found out recently that (a) this movie exists and (b) it’s on YouTube, so naturally I immediately watched it. I also roped the lovely and long-suffering
fiona15351 into watching it with me, by which I mean we synced up our video timestamps so we could text simultaneously about all the shenanigans - of which there were many! To be clear: The Dragonlance movie is a bad movie, and I do not recommend it. But some of the ways in which it is bad are really interesting.
The Dragonlance movie is mostly 2D animation, but the dragons and draconians are rendered in 3D. This is a choice that had the potential to be really interesting, but it just doesn't work onscreen. I think the artists wanted to convey the uncanny, unnerving, otherworldly sense of the dragons and draconians, but the two styles simply do not mesh well. (It's especially a problem for the draconians - it might have worked out decently for just the dragons, but unfortunately our heroes get into melee combat with draconians pretty often.) It might also have worked better if there had been more of an animation budget; frankly, the animation (especially the 3D animation) would have led me to guess the movie was from the 90s rather than from 2008. Interestingly, the Legend of Vox Machina animated series also uses a mixture of 2D and 3D animation, with dragons (and some other things) in 3D, and it works much better![1] So the vision is possible; the execution is just lacking here.
In general, the movie suffered most from a pacing problem. The screenwriters managed at least a glancing hit on just about every plot point in Autumn Twilight in just an hour and a half, but the cost of that is never lingering on anything. Everything is truncated to the point that many of the most memorable scenes in the novel no longer seem at all compelling.
Another, related result of condensing the novel into a movie script in the way the screenwriters did is a sense that the central characters pretty much all hate each other! Of course, what characters say when they're arguing or insulting each other is more likely than other dialogue to be directly relevant to the plot or to contain information about the characters' backgrounds, and it's therefore more likely to be included in the movie, while ordinary amicable conversation is cut - but it's exactly the ordinary chatter that gives a sense of the characters actually having bonds with each other. (The movie's dialogue choices also give the strong impression that Sturm and Raistlin are exes, and the breakup was a messy one...though I'm not exactly complaining about that, I kind of love the idea.)
An extra layer to any conversation about Dragonlance adaptations is that the first Dragonlance novels are adaptations themselves: novelizations of a D&D campaign! Of course, it's not possible (except for the few people who were at that table) to compare the novels to the original campaign. But you can definitely feel (or at least I could definitely feel) a kind of zany TTRPG energy throughout the books that are based on the campaign, which is missing from the books that are not (however excellent some of the latter are!). There are also moments where you can really tell someone had a streak of bad rolls. (Looking at you, Sturm.)
Ultimately, though, the Dragonlance novels succeed as adaptations because they significantly cut, condensed, and somewhat reshaped the story to fit the new medium - something the movie, in determinedly trying to hit every plot point in the novel, fails to do.
[1]There's also something to be said about how the Vox Machina series is an adaptation of an actual campaign like the original Dragonlance books are - although the fact that the Vox Machina campaign was an actual play, and thus oriented toward an audience in a way that the Dragonlance campaign was not, is a significant distinction between the two.
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(I do feel like Sturm and Raistlin being apparently messily divorced slightly compensated, for me at least.)
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I'd say the books certainly have their rough spots, but I really enjoy them.
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I also kind of love that idea.
Whoever was playing Tas was having the best time. Raistlin too.
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Yes, I knew I forgot to mention something and it was the voice acting! Also, honestly, the fact that Lucy Lawless (!!!) played Goldmoon may explain at least some of where the animation budget went.
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