My Father's Dragon (2022)
Directed by Nora Twomey
Struggling to cope after a move to the city with his mother, Elmer runs away in search of Wild Island and a young dragon who waits to be rescued. Elmer’s adventures introduce him to ferocious beasts, a mysterious island and the friendship of a lifetime.
3 connections found
View:
3 films that influenced My Father's Dragon
What critics say influenced My Father's Dragon
Films like The Secret of Kells , Song of the Sea , and Wolfwalkers (each of them Oscar nominees) stand out among a saturated field thanks to their astonishing visuals, universally appealing themes, and commitment to Irishness.
From Netflix and Cartoon Saloon, the animation company that gave us the Academy Award-nominated films “Wolfwalkers” (2019), “Song of the Sea” (2014) and “The Secret of Kells” (2009) comes “My Father’s Dragon,” a 2D-animated entry based on the 1948 children’s novel by American writer Ruth Stiles Gannett.
There’s an appealingly fecund quality to the hand-drawn animations produced by the Irish studio Cartoon Saloon ( Wolfwalkers , Song of the Sea ) – stories that unfold in verdant worlds that always seem about to burst into bud or leaf.
Each of the four films they’ve crafted into reality — Kells , Song of the Sea (2017), The Breadwinner (2017), and Wolfwalkers (2020) — are not only beloved by audiences, but by the industry as a whole as each film earned an Academy Award nomination in the Best Animated Feature category.
It’s undeniably made for kids first, and while it doesn’t hit the visual lusciousness or emotional resonance of Song Of The Sea — still, arguably, Cartoon Saloon’s high-water mark — it is so beautifully crafted, so rich in detail, that grown-ups will be spellbound in other ways.
They have a nearly unbeatable record of feature films, including “The Secret of Kells,” “Song of the Sea,” “The Breadwinner,” and “Wolfwalkers.”
Shout-out, too, to Whoopi Goldberg as a talking black cat, which has echoes of Studio Ghibli’s Jiji from Kiki’s Delivery Service .
Elmer’s interactions with these creatures calls to mind Kubo and the Two Strings, a comparison which does it no favours by-the-way, and while we get to spend fleeting moments with Judy Greer’s delightful Soda the Whale, Alan Cumming’s abstract Cornelius the Crocodile, or Ian McShane’s layered performance as an albino Gorilla, it’s the relationship between boy-and-dragon that’s the focus here.