Ok, so it might totally suck. It might be the most horrific piece of festering dog crap ever committed to film. But it's here! Dragonlance: the Movie! Fantasy geeks rejoice! Or cower in fear of the hazing you are going to get if this straight-to-DVD turkey completely bombs. You know you are going to watch it, come what may.
http://www.dragonlance-movie.com/news/show_news.asp?id=21
Hey, think of it this way, the first Lord of the Rings movie ever made was a badly animated children's feature, too. Maybe in time, someone will do a live-action, big budget version of the Dragonlance Chronicles that doesn't completely blow goats.
8 comments:
What struck me when I re-read the Dragonlance Chronicles was how moral a work it was.
It was definitely a morality play on several levels. What impressed me was the depth of the characterizations. None of them were entirely free of doubt and inner turmoil. Not even Tasselhoff, the child-like Kender. Most people don't credit fantasy fiction as being particularly moving or "deep". It's considered a genre for children. Dragonlance, as a major live-action, adult oriented movie trilogy, could have changed that. Alas, they chose to make it a cartoon, thus reinforcing the idea that it's just for the kiddies.
Tasselhoff was fun.
I'm such a geek that, while attending the 1996 Gencon, I asked Margaret Weis if Tasselhoff was directly translated into "heaven" instead of being squashed by Chaos.
She said "I like to think so."
Sure Tas was fun. Unless you were locked in a cage with him for a few days. Then you just wanted to strangle the little twerp.
On the flipside of "just for kiddies"--there's where you have your best chance to build someone's taste. Give a kid a story that's accessible to their current reading level and capable of surviving later re-reads? Not only do you raise their standards for other authors, other stories, but you also slip in ways of thinking that (hopefully) colour the way they see the world for the rest of their lives.
Not to harp on the "old dog/new tricks" nonsense (because that's exactly what it is), but you've got to admit--kids have fewer preconceptions to get around than adults do.
There's worse things than having well-developed, thought-provoking kiddie lit. Maybe if YA fiction wasn't the bastion of weak writing, we'd have a brighter crop of adults, later. Or at least, maybe more of them would ask themselves "Is this conducive to a long and healthy life?"
Okay. /$.02
(Hi, by the way; I'm the Jess that swings a wide orbit around the ADT fencing crew. I dig the blog. ^.^)
It could be worse. Some of my friends like to play quicklings, a souped-up halfing variant. Like Tas on speed. Eek.
We ran into an evil Quickling in a campaign once and our wizard had a great idea for dealing with it. We ended up luring it into a box canyon and casting a "grease" spell in front of it. The resulting splatter could be considered art, I suppose.
Hi, Jess! Yes, I remember you. :)
To answer your point, I agree that kids should be exposed to fantasy fiction if they are to appreciate the genre as adults, however, there are plenty of age appropriate books out there that could be made into animated features for them, which would leave the more adult oriented stories as live-action features for us grown ups.
What we end up with instead is a strange sort of inversion. The young adult stories are made into big budget, live-action feature films (ie. The Bridge to Terebithia, The Dark is Rising, The Spiderwick Chronicles, The Golden Compass, etc., ad nauseum), while the darker, more mature tales are given the (usually poorly) animated or stupidly adapted b-movie treatment to dumb them down or kidify them unnecessarily. It is apparent that the movie execs don't belive that you can market fantasy to anyone *but* children, despite the rather large demand by adults for such fare.
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