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So I was at the video store with the SO looking for something to rent, when we stumbled upon something completely unexpected... An animated version of the first Dragonlance novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. :O As both of us are big fans of the original book series (and animation in general), we pick it up to rent, along with Enchanted.
Now, we both had fairly low standards before we started watching the Dragonlance DVD... We didn't recognize the studio doing the animation, though they had some fairly recognizable names doing the voices; like Keifer Sutherland as Raistlin (I was so sure he'd be Tanis!), Lucy Lawless (aka Xena) as Goldmoon, that girl who played Dawn on Buffy as Tika... Plus, the character designs looked good, and similar to the art on the original covers of the book (they were also reminiscent of the old D&D cartoon from the 80's that both me and the SO were embarassingly fond of XD).
Anyhoo... The DVD wasn't as horrible as I feared it would be. I noticed right away that the animation looked like it was made in Flash, so I could forgive the choppiness in places... It also used an mix of traditional animation and CGI, which was fine... Until we realized all the dragons were rendered (albeit decently) in CGI; which looked quite out of place, since the heroes were drawn in 2-D. This made for awkward-looking (if amusing) fight scenes: "Look out, they're attacking in 3 dimensions!" XD
The plot was pretty faithful to the novel, as well; quite impressive, since they covered most of it in 90 minutes. And although I could nitpick about various animation details, such as spittle not being transparent enough, Raistlin's eyes rather than his pupils being hourglass-shaped (though I can forgive that, since it would be less noticable otherwise), the animation was okay overall, and the designs are, sadly, a lot better than I see in some cartoons, these days.
So, my final verdict? If you liked the book (and animation in general), this might be worth a rental. Hopefully you'll enjoy the reasonable retelling of the story (and get a good laugh out at the animation, as well ;).
Now, we both had fairly low standards before we started watching the Dragonlance DVD... We didn't recognize the studio doing the animation, though they had some fairly recognizable names doing the voices; like Keifer Sutherland as Raistlin (I was so sure he'd be Tanis!), Lucy Lawless (aka Xena) as Goldmoon, that girl who played Dawn on Buffy as Tika... Plus, the character designs looked good, and similar to the art on the original covers of the book (they were also reminiscent of the old D&D cartoon from the 80's that both me and the SO were embarassingly fond of XD).
Anyhoo... The DVD wasn't as horrible as I feared it would be. I noticed right away that the animation looked like it was made in Flash, so I could forgive the choppiness in places... It also used an mix of traditional animation and CGI, which was fine... Until we realized all the dragons were rendered (albeit decently) in CGI; which looked quite out of place, since the heroes were drawn in 2-D. This made for awkward-looking (if amusing) fight scenes: "Look out, they're attacking in 3 dimensions!" XD
The plot was pretty faithful to the novel, as well; quite impressive, since they covered most of it in 90 minutes. And although I could nitpick about various animation details, such as spittle not being transparent enough, Raistlin's eyes rather than his pupils being hourglass-shaped (though I can forgive that, since it would be less noticable otherwise), the animation was okay overall, and the designs are, sadly, a lot better than I see in some cartoons, these days.
So, my final verdict? If you liked the book (and animation in general), this might be worth a rental. Hopefully you'll enjoy the reasonable retelling of the story (and get a good laugh out at the animation, as well ;).
