******may contain minor spoilers****** Its unfortunate that Jim Danforth, one of the true greats of stop-motion animation has been reduced to working on films as poor as this. The plot basically rips off Mighty Joe Young, with the dragon replacing the part of the gorilla in a very phony version of modern day Scotland. When an evil businessman puts the dragon on show in a theme park the heroes bust in and free the dragon, or sorry I should say they climb onto his back and he flies away since there was nothing really imprisoning him in the first place despite the fact that the villain went to the trouble of protecting the place with armed guards. Well this is just a very dumb kiddie movie sure to bore the kids. The best thing anyone has to say about this movie concerns the lack of violence in it, however in one idiotic scene where the villain tells the heroes that they should have read the small print before signing the contract, one of the heroes responds by punching him in the face. A later scene shows another of the heroes breaking into the park by bashing the two guards' heads together. To me this kind of violence is much more harmful in the attitudes it instills than the sort of thing that parents are afraid will give their kids nightmares. When some one wrongs you, you punch them in the face. Anyway this film is bad. To say that kids might imitate anything in it flatters it way too much. The acting is terrible -even for this sort of thing. I don't know what we're supposed to like about the lead character. The direction is just not there at all. The music by Richard Bland is just so insipid and lame that maybe you'll want to turn the sound down completely and draw your attention to the shoddy editing, boring composition, uninspired use of cinematography, and overall bad use of the language of film. The only redeeming thing about this film is the stop-motion animation which from an animation point of view is good with a few very impressive scenes hindered only by bad plate photography and the goofy design of the dragon. The animatronic versions of the dragon do not tie in very well with the animation. While the special effects aren't that impressive next to Jurassic Park, the animation is a step up from those famous Ray Harryhausen films. All in all a bland, boring, cliche-ridden film that kids will not want to watch.
Review of Dragonworld
