Dragon Rider, review: a colourful half-term romp (but the kids will have déjà vu)
Dir: Tomer Eshed. Cast: Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Felicity Jones, Freddie Highmore, Patrick Stewart, Nonso Anozie, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal (voices). No cert, 91 mins
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the makers of the How to Train Your Dragon films must currently be blushing like schoolgirls.
Dragon Rider, a slick and zippy family animation from Germany’s Rise Pictures, owes the billion-dollar-grossing DreamWorks trilogy a creative debt of Smaug-like proportions, with points of similarity ranging from its blocky red title font to the broad contours of its plot, which sees a colony of flying reptiles searching for their utopian homeland of old.
On the other hand, the book from which it was adapted, by the German children’s author Cornelia Funke, was published in 1997 – six years before Cressida Cowell’s first How to Train Your Dragon novel surfaced. So perhaps there’s an element of ambient, multi-directional rip-offery at play here, which in the realm of children’s fantasy would hardly be a first.
Perhaps because these similarities are hard to ignore, Tomer Eshed’s film takes the unusual set of pointing directly at them, by staging an early set-piece outside the thronging premiere of… a blockbuster animation called How to Tame Your Dragon, produced by a studio called FireWorks. It’s while dodging through the crowd outside the cinema that the young orphan Ben (voiced by Freddie Highmore) slips into a warehouse and encounters Firedrake (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), a silver dragon who searching with his forest brownie friend Sorrel (Felicity Jones) for a distant mountain called the Rim of Heaven, to where he and his fellow winged lizards hope to relocate before humankind can bulldoze their current habitat.
Their quest has caught the attention of an enormous, evil, dragon-eating golem called Nettlebrand (Patrick Stewart), whose origins are explained in a rustic story-time prologue shamelessly filched from Disney’s Moana: Eshed and his screenwriter Johnny Smith, who also co-wrote Gnomeo & Juliet, are nothing if not blatant in their borrowings. Yet the glaring lack of originality here becomes less irritating as the story gathers momentum, and our rag-tag trio of heroes negotiate various colourful locales that resemble levels in a video game: underground temples, tangled forests, vibrant beaches and the rest.
The film bounces along predictably but charmingly, and parents whose cringe threshold is as low as my own will be relieved to find its sense of humour is gratifyingly un-tacky throughout. (One running gag has Stewart’s villain scouring dating apps for a prospective mate, but it’s less ghastly than it sounds.) The comedy is generally grounded in some well-staged digital slapstick and ebullient vocal work from supporting characters played by Nonso Anozie, Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar, while the visuals are perfectly charming and picturesque, despite lacking the dizzying graphical sophistication for which the How to Train your Dragon series became renowned.
Dragon Rider is unlikely to spawn many imitators of its own – even if it did, how could anyone tell? – but as a half-term diversion, it ticks every box.
Available on Sky Cinema now
