Catching Up with the Dragonlance Movie

Ugh! I let myself get sick, and I fall so far behind. :p

Ok, lots of movement on the Dragonlance movie since last I updated. First, Keifer “Jack Bauer” Sutherland is voicing Raistlin. A good choice, I think. He may be the man from “24” to most folks, but I’ll always think of him as the leader of the “Lost Boys”. The rest of the cast list can be found here, complete with links to their IMDB profiles. Just clicking a few at random, it looks like almost all of them have pretty heavy voice acting résumés.

On the art front, there’s still not much info yet. Kunoichi Creative, the company handling the animation, did post on the official forums to try to quiet fears of a “manga” style Dragonlance. Frankly, I wouldn’t have minded something reminiscent of “Record of Lodoss War”, but I can certainly understand how some people feel anime is a fad whose time has passed. I don’t agree, mind you, but it is everywhere these days in the USA.

Words are nice, but nothing compares to seeing the actual work itself. As it so happens, both Weis and Hickman make “cameo” appearances in the movie, and you can see how they were rendered by the artists here. Not bad. I certainly don’t want to stab my eyes out. The clothing is the odd, anachronistic mishmash one expects to find at Renaissance faires, which is a tad disappointing. I doubt we’ll see much, if any, influence from Elmore or Caldwell. There’s some concern that they look too bright and clean, but I suspect we see them early in the movie before all the horror and war have begun. Still, I'm not expecting to see a Frazetta brought to life here. I very much want to catch of glimpse of these figures in motion, what the backgrounds will look like, and I’m especially curious about the dragons. Dragons are not easy to draw well, and I’ve seen some real stinkers, even from professionals who make their livings creating fantasy art. (My favorite dragons are those done by Den Beauvais, especially the ones appearing on the covers of Dragon Magazine back in the ‘80’s.)