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Tash Jayasinghe
CibbuanoFlight of Dragons
September 29th 2006 09:55
Flight of Dragons (1982)
'Flight of Dragons' is an animated film based on a fairly well-known fantasy tome known by the same name. This cartoon attempts to take a somewhat too-clever-by-halves approach by attempting a seamless incorporation of the book and it's author into the story itself.
So who are we kidding here? This is for kids, right? The film attempts to be clever in the aforementioned way (and others) but in the end it's a cartoon for the kiddos, and it knows it can't betray this in favour of winking at any stray adults who happen to be watching. This is before Disney realised that the parents chaperoning kids to the cinema would need to be entertained as well, and I'm not even sure if this Warner Bros effort even made it to the silver screen.
But anyway, it's a kids movie. As such it takes your standard fantasy-quest format, chucks in a few more interesting-than-usual monsters, enlists the vocal talents of some half-recognisable names and sets about it's ambitious task of squeezing an epic into a self-contained 90 minute cartoon with half-hearted abandon. Don't get me wrong, some of the ideas here are actually quite good, especially it's theme of science vs. magic (which scratches the surface of something quite profound in concept), but it's format and audience-target disallows it to really develop anything satisfactorily.
I'm sure some kids will garner some enjoyment out of this, if they haven't been completely spoiled by the flashiness of modern animated films, but as such it's very much an 80s cartoon. Something you might expect to see on a Sunday afternoon in the school holidays (I think that's when I first saw it actually).
TRIVIA: Harry Morgan, who provides the voice of the wizard Carolinus, is best known for playing Col. Potter in 'M.A.S.H.'
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