I was introduced to the Dragonlance literary universe right around the time I was in middle school after the first set of books, the Chronicles, had been recommended to me by a neighboring friend. I was already being strongly drawn toward things in the “sword ‘n’ sorcery” genre, but when I picked up Dragons of Autumn Twilight at my local Waldenbooks and tore into it, I became a wholesale convert. To this day, the fantasy genre remains my go-to for literary escapism.

So as you might imagine, I have a deep affection for this particular book, its characters, and really for this entire universe. Based on the fact that I had to wait about a month for Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight to finally become available in my Netlfix queue, I am not alone. Quite a few people were waiting to see this new animated feature based on the novel. I’m willing to be they were all as disappointed as I was in the result.

It’s startling to me that in this day and age of computer design, both for CGI and digitally animated line art, that an artistic product could come out so poorly. While using an interesting mix of hand-drawn animation and backgrounds mixed with rendered 3D characters (used pretty exclusively for dragons and the like), both forms manage to fail spectacularly – the cell animation for being rough, frequently off-model, and out of sync and the CGI (while consistent in model) didn’t animate smoothly, giving the action a bizarre pseudo-stop-motion feel. I really don’t know what’s more inexcusable about this, the fact that the cell animation was of poorer quality than your average mid-80s Japanese import or that in an age when really phenomenal digital artists are posting work on YouTube, the CGI looked like it was developed about five years ago on outdated technology. By interns.

Really, either one is a deal breaker – the producers had to have known how anticipated this project was and should have approached it with higher production standards. As it is, it looks like a cheap way to make an extra buck on a popular work.

Or maybe they just dumped their production resources into the wrong places. The voice acting cast is pretty stacked with some recognizable names: Kiefer Sutherland, Lucy Lawless, Michelle Trachtenberg… probably an expensive gamble, trying to gain marketability based on star power. This would’ve been a great idea, had the actors turned in really memorable vocal performances, but Autumn Twilight served more as example of how acting for the screen and voice acting are really separate skills, and just because you can do one doesn’t guarantee an easy translation to the other. There wasn't anything that was all that bad -- some of the readings just lacked the nuance you'd get from people used to working exclusively with their voices.

Thankfully, the animated feature did stick pretty faithfully to the story. As is common when a book is adapted to a feature-length work, a lot of the finer points of the action were omitted for the sake of run time, but the tweaks and nudges required to navigate these omissions were handled well. There were only one or two moments that I realized that something I was watching was substantially different than what I’d read, and in either case I thought the changes, mostly adjustments of location and setting, were more than justified. Except…

Now, let me take a moment to make this absolutely clear:

When you have a major revelation that occurs at the end of a three book series, it’s best if you DON’T toss it out to the audience at the end of the first installment. Especially when it’s for no good reason. Half the fun of gradually suspecting that somebody is a god walking among your main characters is when you get that big payoff moment, and that's totally lost now. So here we have a tremendous spoiler, one that will have to affect the action, at least the audience's interpretation of it, in the later installments. Unless there aren’t any additional installments, which I frankly would think to be a good thing at this point.

Adapting Dragons of Autumn Twilight into a feature -- live action, animated, whatever – is one of those special situations where you can really win acclaim with your audience, even if it is a relatively small population. It’s a project that offers some really spectacular source material that deserves to be brought to life with some care, attention to detail, and dedication. But instead what we ended up with was something that resembles a half-ass homework assignment that was neglected in lieu of reading some fantasy novels.