A rough draft Dragonlance trailer has been released. And it looks so horrible that I’m depressed! The animation is as bad as the cheapest Saturday morning cartoons!
When I first saw that they were making a Dragonlance movie (even though it was animated), I was very excited. I thought that the top-notch voice cast might mean it would be really good.
Apparantly not.
who knows, maybe this is some kind of teaser trailer that they quickly assembled together…
What makes me think that is the different styles of animation used in this. Just seems to choppy to be on purpose…
Yeah, keep in mind that with animated movies, the quality can change drastically from a rough draft to a finsihed product, especially one using computer animation, like Dragonlance does.
That being said, it might still suck. But I’m hoping that at least the acting and story are good. With a great cast and Weis and Hickman behind almost every step of the way, we have a good chance of that.
OK, I should have watched it before I posted. Yeesh, that was bad. 
Holy crap, that’s horrendous! There’s no excuse for shitty work like that in this day and age.
Ok, I’m with you guys that the animation is rubbish but what was with the mix of cell-shaded and 3D animation’s?
Maybe they changed tack partway through production. All it does, though, is emphasise how rubbishy their 2D animation looks.
This tells you all you need to know:
Jesus that looked crappy.
You sort of think there’d be a glut of unemployed cinematic animators since the rise of CGI animated films, and they could make a decent looking movie for cheap.
Ah well, honestly I doubt even a good looking film would do well. I suspect that most people with fond memories of the series (myself included) haven’t actually read them since they were twelve, and that they’re
. . .actually pretty terrible if you go back and try to re-read them as an adult.
heh, woops. Yea, thanks for finishing my thought Trunk
Holy fucking ass crackers, that was shit. Why couldn’t they just do it with cutouts or rotoscoping or something good? Yet another childhood memory held down and violated right before my eyes.
That looked worse than the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon…
I’ve re-read them once every few years since I first read them at 14 (I’m 25), and I think they hold up ok. Are they great literary masterpieces? No, but they’re better than a lot of dreck that becomes popular (DaVinci Code, anyone?)
They’re at least as good as Harry Potter, if not better. And unlike other popular fantasy series, like Sword of Truth or Wheel of Time, it doesn’t go on forever. Yes, they are still making books for them (in fact, the second in a new trilogy was just released last summer which details the parts that take place in between the books in the original trilogy,) but they are all mostly self-contained. I don’t need to read all twelve books, I can read just Chronicles and be done with it. It has closure. The other two series seem to go on forever, and that was the reason I never got into them, even though several years ago my friends were saying they were so great. I remember them eventually reading the new books that were released moreso because they thought that had to than because they wanted to.
That being said, I’m sure I’ll get the DVD, and who knows, maybe the quality will go up between now ndn then.
Yeah, pretty much. I read the series five or six times between middle school and high school, and loved the hell out of it. Out of curiousity, I picked them up again when I was in my late twenties, and was bowled over by the almost complete lack of any sort of quality, whatsoever. The plot was silly, the pacing was way off, the action scenes were boring, the non-action scenes were soporific, and the characterization was terrible. You could cut out half of the heroes in the first book without having to make any serious plot changes. And Jesus Christ, whoever invented the Kender should be slow-roasted over an open fire. A lot of the books I loved as a kid don’t hold up as an adult, but even with Piers Anthony, I can at least figure out what parts of it would have been appealing to the ten-year-old me. With these books, I can’t even do that. I’ve no idea what I ever saw in these things.
Are you guys absolutely certain this trailer is on the up-and-up?
Because the whole thing smacks of “art school project” to me.
I agree. Or, perhaps more likely, someone working on the movie was tasked at a very, very early date to put together a trailer, and so he wrote the voiceover and threw together whatever animation had already been done for the parts he wanted to show. That’s why some parts look like the old D&D cartoon – they’re past storyboarding, but not up to full-blown, good CGI. Other parts have full-blown, shitty CGI.
Least, that’s my guess.
Y’all sure this isn’t Dragon’s Lair? 
I’d put the 2D stuff on the same level as the old series.
Considering the old series was a cheapy, 1980’s toy commercial cartoon that’s pretty bad. Those are terrible character designs and it looks like they’re skimping on the keyframes and inbetweening so everything looks jerky.
The 3D animation looks even worse. That rubber stamped army in particular looks horrific. Someone should be ashamed.
Mark me down as another that find the books to be terrible. They’re little more than D&D fanfiction pasted up as a book that is the Dragonlance series.
The 3D truly looked terrible and out of place.
The 2D? Well, it looked old-fashioned, but I’d probably at least give it a shot. I think they should be able to do better in terms of the actual art quality even for direct-to-DVD (of course)… but I sort of like the stylistic direction that they’re going in, at the same time.
As for the books - there’s such a huge difference in quality and complexity between the original trilogy and pretty much any sort of later work by Weis and Hickman. I mean, it’s not like they became Tolkein or anything, but they’re pretty reliable for light fantasy that isn’t going to be terrible (and I actually found the Death’s Gate Cycle rather enjoyable). Those first three books are pretty damn brutal for the most part, though.