Last week, a co-worker told me about the Dragonlance DVD that was goign to be released on January 15. I called my wife, who works part time at Finders to see if it could be ordered. Following the not-so-great day yesterday, when she got home, she gave it to me since it came in. Since the guys at work knew at least of it, I figured I would bring it in and start watching it over lunch. I first had to wrestle with my laptop to play the DVD since it is “protected content” and neither PowerDVD or Medi Player wanted to play it. Fortunately, I found AVS DVD Player (courtesy of this blog), and it works much better than what I had before.
So, once that was taken care of, we (my boss and I) started watching it. As I expected, it was a combination of 80s-style cartoon and CGI, best summed up in the intro when a CGI Takhisis and a cartoon Paladine “fight”. Maybe “80s-style cartoon” is a bit of a bad descriptor, as it looked more polished up than that, but it certainly was not anything like anime. Some of the shots were best summed up by my boss when he said “at least they’re keeping with the theme that all women in roleplaying games are scantily clad.” Initially, that comment was made when it was showing peasants being attacked by goblins, so both men and women were wearing torn clothing. Ok, I’ll accept that. However, after just 22 minutes of watching, there were a number of shots that can only be described as “gratuitous”, “over the top”, and “laughable”. Here’s some quick samples. To get the full effect, imagine that all movement has addition animation to help accentuate what the character is doing.
I’m hoping that I’ll either start not noticing when they happen or that I don’t get annoyed when they do happen. Really, they were that bad, like something I would expect from a B-movie. I guess this technically counts as a B-movie though. Because of the combination of cartoon and CGI, it seems like they’ve been working on it for the last 10 or 15 years and just decided to compile and publish what they had.
I didn’t mean to make this post be about the failed attempt at sexy animation, but I didn’t watch the entire thing yet; I plan on watching it all the way through. I just found it all rather amusing thus far, that, and the story hasn’t quite taken off yet.
And why not: here’s another example of the laughable “sexiness” they try and instill in a female character:
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