Movie Square

It has a decent storyline with buyable characters. The graphics are very good, but they depict a dark and unrealistic environment, lacking color and life. It is just too gloomy graphically speaking.

Rating: 2 / 5

Aimed at a more juvenile audience. Plot is rather simple. Kind of prophecy-fulfulling by comparing to an earlier “book” in the story about Silver Knight Gothic told to the heroes and so becomes self fulfilling.

Great voice acting, Stunning graphics. But we’re never given much of an explanation for how the world came to be like World of Warcraft’s Outland and why the dragon looks like something straight out of Northrend.
Rating: 3 / 5

Dragon Hunters / B001U3D88M

“Dragon Hunters” feels like the sort of film you would get if you gave a rather large budget to a bunch of animation film school grad students and told them to go nuts. It’s very pretty, but there’s only a skeleton of a story to hang onto, and the “comedy” is never funny and often disturbing.

Let’s drill into the comedy first, and get it out of the way: there isn’t any. Nearly all of the “comedy” is in the form of body jokes of a strangely suggestive nature – the blind king, when sizing up a potential warrior, isn’t convinced of his manliness until he has had a chance to handle the warrior’s package. This really isn’t, ah, plot relevant, so why was it included here? The stick held over the heroes’ heads to get them to complete their mission isn’t jail time or anything so mundane – no, it’s the threat that if they refuse to complete their mission, they will be “spanked” by the king, in public, on their “bare bottom”. This point is stressed, frequently. At the end, the “plucky” girl on the team is threatened with this fate and she is “saved” by another, male character being punished in this manner in her place. Seriously, there is a LOT of screen time devoted to discussions of public spankings.

There’s also an animal side-kick whose only purpose is to pee little spouts of fire.

The rest of the “comedy” is meant to come from the quirky comic relief character, Gwizdo, here voiced by Rob Paulsen, of Pinky and the Brain fame. You may remember Pinky as having a voice pitched so high and so annoyingly as to give Jar Jar Binks a run for his money. If so, your memory does not deceive you. Because this is a dark! and edgy! film, Gwizdo is a con-man who has no intention of following through on their contract to save the kingdom, but does so anyway because of the Bonds of Friendship. This does not, however, prevent him from going crazy and threatening to strangle a little girl with his bare hands. I digress, though – much of the “humor” involves him hoping up and down and screaming in a voice scientifically designed to burst my eardrums that He Does Not Want To Make This Journey. This gets old, fast.

Indeed, I say that much of the humor involves Gwizdo’s protestations, but it would be more accurate to say that most of the entire movie centers around this. This really is the most watered-down plot I’ve seen in awhile: an ancient evil is preparing to wake and ravage the populace, and our heroes are hired to go to his ancient sleeping place and stab him a few times for good measure. They walk there, through a number of surprisingly lovely yet ultimately pointless, worlds; arrive with no strategy in mind; and pull an unlikely win out of their hair, largely because the hero’s family was destroyed by the monster when he was a child, and having him kill it is more poetic. Then they all go back home and Gwizdo gets spanked. That is IT. Along the way, there’s no story, no plot, just lovely backgrounds and Gwizdo whining at a rate of four complaints per minute.

If you have a specific need to hear Rob Paulsen talk about being spanked in public, “Dragon Hunters” is for you, but if you’d like a story with your plot, run away as fast as you can.

~ Ana Mardoll
Rating: 1 / 5