Scenario:
Frédéric LenoirMuziek:
Klaus BadeltActeurs:
Vincent Lindon, Patrick Timsit, Rob Paulsen, Mary Mouser, Philippe Nahon, Amanda Lear, Forest Whitaker, Nick Jameson, Marie Drion, Jérémy PrévostSamenvattingen(1)
Zoë is een klein meisje dat nog in sprookjes gelooft. In het koninkrijk waar zij woont dreigt een groot gevaar: een draak staat op het punt om wakker te worden en alles te vernietigen. Als Zoë de drakenjagers Gwizdo en Lian-Chu ontmoet, denkt zij de helden te hebben gevonden die de draak zullen verslaan. De sluwe Gwizdo is echter alleen maar uit op het geld van oom Arnold, om samen met Lian-Chu het boerderijtje te kunnen kopen waar hij al jaren van droomt, en is al helemaal geen held. Zoë is vastbesloten de twee te volgen in hun avontuurlijke tocht naar het einde van de wereld. Voor haar is het een droom die uitkomt, voor Gwizdo een regelrechte nachtmerrie die alleen maar fout kan aflopen. Maar eenmaal begonnen, is er geen weg meer terug. En zowel Zoë als Gwizdo weten niet dat Lian-Chu al eerder oog in oog heeft gestaan met de draak, en nog iets met hem heeft af te rekenen… (Independent Films)
(meer)Recensie (3)
For a fraction of a second, I was amazed by the perfect final enemy, I smiled at a few very shy jokes, at times I longed to embark on this dreamy landscape, and I experienced every note of Badelt's soundtrack with all my senses. But even all of that together does not surpass the disappointment of how terribly tiresome the rest is. Sneaky Gwizdo deserves to die around the first corner, and Hector effortlessly becomes the most annoying animated animal I have ever seen.
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I know the Dragon Hunters TV series, although I have only just watched the movie today. It shares the same creative universe and has the same main characters. The only difference is that this Zoe is not the same as the Zoe in the TV series because she is shouty and not very likable in the movie and sometimes gives me a headache. The other characters are more or less the same; the animation is average, although I like how they portray the world it is set in (as I said about the TV series). The narrative features a classic heroic tale, and when the enemy is revealed, while quite imposing, it does not scare or terrify me. So, while it was entertaining to revisit a bunch of characters that gave me a pretty good time some ten or maybe twelve years ago, the movie is just a mediocre piece of entertainment albeit with a really good and distinctive soundtrack. 5,5/10.
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Elevate How to Train Your Dragon to the skies and write off Dragon Hunters as a cheap, unfunny copy filmed two years earlier? Oh, come on. Dragon Hunters is a full-fledged animated film for the whole family, and as far as I'm concerned, it has a much more tolerable and unsophisticated and unsentimental story, which occasionally spices up the behavior of the characters in a way that we would not expect in a "fairy tale" (I mean especially the dying and the ending with the golden coins). Moreover, the story takes place in a breathtaking world made up of flying, collapsing continents (the levitating mountains from Avatar... but before Avatar), on which the animators worked so hard that the result of their work is breathtaking. The central characters are likable, the dragons have a great "design" (fiery pigs), the action scenes do not lack imagination, Badelt's soundtrack is at least equal to Powell's from the aforementioned film... It's a pity that Dragon Hunters didn't get as much attention. The film deserves it.
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