During the long, lonely summers of my childhood before I learned the secret to making friends and influencing people, I used to plan my weeks around the books I would read. Barnes & Noble stores weren’t yet ubiquitous, and oddly, my family did most of its shopping for books at Tower Record stores. At the beginning of summer, I would spend hours on the floor of a store accumulating a pile of books. My taste skewed toward fantasy novels with garish covers and page counts close to six hundred, the kind of books that were almost always components of a trilogy or a larger series. Few series took up more of my summer days than the Dragonlance books.
Based on a role-playing campaign, the Dragonlance novels were set in a generic fantasy world called Krynn. There were elves and dwarves and hobgoblins and dragons. The dragons, like the mages, came in different colors, each signifying different powers. It was fantasy heroin with all the trimmings, and even though it has been years since I read any of those books, I can still remember an embarrassing amount of trivia.
Thus it was with a strong sense of nostalgia and shame that I queued up Dragons of Autumn Twilight on Netflix. Hell, there were no other movies that were begging to be watched. I’ve had Crash, Babel, and The Queen sitting near the top of my queue in a deadlock of I-really-should-watch-this-but-god-I’d-rather-chew-glass for months, so a poorly received animated movie based on a clichéd fantasy series I read when I was younger seemed like a pleasant escape from the monotony of the Academy Awards’ vision of realism.
Some background, then. Autumn Twilight is the first book of the first trilogy set in the world of Krynn, and it follows the usual adventuring party as they do their damnedest to save the world. The leader is Tanis Half-Elven, a ranger of sorts who suffers from Hamlet’s wishy-washy disease on account of his mixed heritage. There’s Gimli, the old, crotchety Dwarven warrior, except his name is actually Flint. There’s a thief, a Kender named Tasslehoff; Kender are basically Halflings with kleptomania. A barbarian cleric who carries around the MacGuffin for the first half of the novel before proving that the Gods Have Returned. (Did I mention that in this fantasy universe the gods abandoned humans three hundred years before the start of this adventure? It really, really doesn’t matter all that much.) The only genuinely interesting character is Raistlin, a red mage with hourglass eyes who may or may not end up traveling through time to become the greatest wizard of all time. There are three other warriors: a barbarian, a knight, and Raistlin’s twin brother and body surrogate. If that sounds exhausting, it is. The difference is that in a book, you have more time to develop affinities for these generic characters. In a 90-minute animated movie, it’s just a cliché clusterfuck.
For most of the past decade, Michael Chabon and the McSweeney’s crew has been crusading for the literary merits of genre fiction. The argument is that genre fiction has been consigned to the dustbins of Literature, but really, genre fiction can tell a good story, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Literary fiction, they of the quiet, epiphantic conclusions, don’t really have stories. Yadda yadda yadda. If you really want to hear the arguments, you can read Michael Chabon’s essays in Maps and Legends. If we ignore for a moment the fact that in much of genre fiction the characters and plots are recycled (because, honestly, all literature borrows and steals and cribs from those that came before), the problem with arguing for the merits of genre fiction so adamantly is that it doesn’t acknowledge the problems that have led these books into book stands at grocery stories and airport terminals. Though each genre has its own particular failings, I am most familiar with the downfall of fantasy and science fiction. The main staple of these books is to speak in nested explanations because the author is in such a hurry to explain the universe to the reader.
To go back to Autumn Twilight, you’ll see that virtually every proper noun comes with some sort of explanatory phrase. Sometimes those phrases are mercifully brief, but generally, you find characters speaking as though they were reading an entry from Wikipedia and following every single hyperlink as they spoke. Flint asks Tanis upon meeting him something like (and I’m exaggerating only slightly), “Were you successful in your quest to find evidence of the return of the gods after they abandoned us in the Cataclysm 300 years ago?” When you’re reading fantasy books, you’re used to this convention, and it passes mostly unnoticed, but when you’re watching a movie based on that same book, the habit makes you want to scream. Since there’s no room for an omniscient narrator in the movie, all of this explanation has to spill out awkwardly from the mouths of the characters.
Before the main characters ever appear on the screen in Autumn Twilight, you are already treated to a brief summary of the history of Krynn. And then when you meet the main characters, you hear them explain their doubts and fears and past love affairs all within ten seconds of showing up. There are no silences in this movie. Tanis is a brooding character in the books, but in the movie, to make it clear to the audience, he has to speak his doubts aloud, which is fine if you’re Hamlet and Shakespeare’s got your back with witty monologues.
So, dialogue and character development aren’t strong, but the makers of this movie clearly intended to aim it toward children, so bright colors and shiny action should be in abundance, right? I think standard television runs at 24 frames per second (or something around there). Dragons of Autumn Twilight seems to have four cels of animation per second. Four badly drawn cels. And then, in their attempt to sexy up the awful animation, the makers decided to use computer animation for the dragons and Draconians (lizardmen; don’t worry about it). As you might expect, the computer animation is worse than the actual animation, and there is no effort to blend the two. Did I mention that the computer animation is clearly intended to be 3-d while the normal animation has no pretenses of depth at all?
And Jack Bauer does the voice of Raistlin.
As much as I hated the movie, I would absolutely watch the next book in the trilogy if they were to produce it. Because I really, really don’t watch to watch Crash.