MY FATHER’S DRAGON: Cartoon Saloon’s Kid-Friendly Film Doesn’t Fly

Never before has a film made me so desperately wish to throttle a dragon. (For you kid readers, “throttle” is a verb, meaning “to attack or kill someone by choking or strangling them.”) Yet My Father’s Dragon, the new film from Cartoon Saloon, is full of surprises, many of them bad.

The Irish animation house rose to arthouse prominence with The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and The Breadwinner, then to international recognition with Wolfwalkers. Director Nora Twomey’s My Father’s Dragon, a Netflix release adapting Ruth Stiles Gannett’s generations-old children’s book, is ostensibly the studio’s most kid-friendly fare yet. Only, I’m not sure kids would enjoy My Father’s Dragon, a bit of a clodpoll construction that’s alternately depressing, capricious, and clangorous. Parents beware — this thing is basically wall-to-wall noise.

Elmer Goes To The Big City

The problems start early when, at the 20-minute mark, there has been neither hide nor tail of fathers or dragons. Elmer (Jacob Tremblay) works with his mom (Golshifteh Farahani) at a candy shop on the edge of bankruptcy. Despite their best efforts, the shop goes under. Elmer and Mom stand in their empty store, with little more to their name than several pieces of stale candy and a car, and prepare to leave everything they’ve ever known to move to the big city. It’s pretty bleak, especially for kids’ fare.

Within the hellish 2D nightmare city, where their bitter landlady (Rita Moreno) is the least of their troubles, Elmer and Mom spiral further into poverty and misery. Cartoon Saloon’s gifted animation team tries to make the city of Nevergreen as oppressive and gloomy as possible — visually, it recalls Tasmanian animator Elliot Cowan’s The Stressful Adventures of Boxhead & Roundhead, a bizarre little Kafkaesque project that nobody but me seems to have seen. (Cowan later worked as a concept artist on Wolfwalkers. No word on whether he contributed to My Father’s Dragon.)

In blunt terms, the city isn’t very fun to look at, though it’s admirable that only Elmer, the other kids, and a kitty have splashes of color. The kitty is the sole light in Elmer’s life. He hides it in his cupboard, sneaking it… MILK?! Okay, kids: Movies and TV are wrong. Cats are lactose intolerant. Do not give them milk.

Anyway, the cat talks and is voiced by Whoppi Goldberg — sure, whatever — and the kid is conned into hitching a ride with an annoying whale (Judy Greer) to an island where he can find a dragon. With a motivation that would make P.T. Barnum proud, Elmer wants to basically enslave the beast and make it turn tricks so he can afford a better life for his family. But the dragon, Boris (Gaten Matarazzo), is just as small, inept, and lost as Elmer is, forced by an evil clan of monkeys to keep trying to lift the island above sea level so it doesn’t sink. (This story doesn’t seem to understand how islands work.) So Elmer decides to help the dragon break free of his monkey captors and escape the island.

An All-Star Cast, But To What End?

You might notice the bizarre A-tier voice talent assembled for this innocuous kids’ story. Goldberg, Greer, Matarazzo, Tremblay, Moreno, and Farahani are joined by Ian McShane as the scheming monkey leader Saiwa, Chris O’Dowd as his right-hand monkey Kwan, and Jackie Earle Haley as the panic disorder–stricken monkey Tamir, for some reason. The random assortment of major talent recalls Dreamworks’ tendency to fill its rosters with “oh, OK?” star tsunamis rather than accomplished voice actors, and that choice is particularly irritating with My Father’s Dragon. Every new character becomes another “who’s who” that takes you out of the story both because the voice performances are wasted on this dreck and also because it’s a chore to keep going onto IMDb to tell your mom, “Yeah, that’s Dianne Wiest as the rhinoceros mother. No, I don’t know what she’s doing in this either.”

Of the lot, Alan Cumming is the best, of course. He plays a spindly blue crocodile who carries his young around in his jaws, which means he acts circles around everyone else while his mouth is open and full of baby crocodiles for, like, 90% of his performance. He’s delightful. Yet everyone else has done better work elsewhere — Tremblay recently headlined the incredible Luca, McShane’s impressive baritone was scarier as the tiger Tai Lung in Kung Fu Panda, and I’m sure Matarazzo is a far more charming presence in Stranger Things. I dunno. I don’t watch it. This overflow of voice talent is alarming, as Cartoon Saloon’s previous effort, Wolfwalkers, steered clear of such gimmicks, employing a largely native-Irish cast that, besides Sean Bean, has little recognition outside of the country.

My Father’s Dragon also goes for a flurry of low-effort jokes presumably meant to keep kids entertained. Boris’ cloying immaturity isn’t nearly as funny as the film thinks it is, and the equally suffocating soundtrack keeps trying to sell you on the whimsy. Between Boris and Elmer, there’s one Shrek-ass scene after another, where Boris keeps excitedly talking about how great of friends they are while Elmer seems like he just wants to swim back to the city.

Dragon Pyramid Schemes

The story of My Father’s Dragon was written in 1948, but it feels like a kids’ book born out of the Great Depression. Frankly, the story is garbage. The only way I can see it entertaining children is if the parents were huddled over a meal of 5-cent potato hash reading it by candlelight after a long day of pea-picking while Dorothea Lange trots up to the doorstep, her Graflex Super D camera in hand.

Numerous accommodations were made to fit the book into a tidy three-act buddy film structure. (For my mother’s part, she did not recall the book’s plot but was pretty sure there’s no monkey cult.) Saiwa, the large gorilla, is recast as not just a bully but a sort of ecoterrorist — he and his monkey clan are doing the wrong thing by lassoing the dragon and forcing him to fly, but it’s what they have to do to keep their island from sinking into the sea. And Boris is not just a captive, but one with dreams of grandeur.

There’s a whole dizzying backstory to Boris in the film. He claims to be from a family of dragons, and as a coming-of-age ritual, he is sent to Wild Island to save it from sinking into the sea. If he accomplishes this Herculean task, he becomes an “After-Dragon.” It sounds like some kind of dragon pyramid scheme. If you sat down Dorothea Lange to explain this all to her, she might brain you with her camera.

Some may find heart in the story of a boy and his dragon pal, but not me. It’s an annoying film. There’s no sense of scale to the island or to the action, and the dialogue is weak in a way that feels explicitly designed to entertain kids while preaching to adults. The same screenwriter, Meg LeFauve, wrote Inside Out, which has much more nuance to its characters and some truly expressive world-building. But here, her talents just make every character as one-note as Bing Bong the pink elephant (voiced by Richard Kind in Inside Out).

Maybe I just hate obvious fantasy stories. I didn’t feel any stakes or emotional attachment to the Bing Bong portions of Inside Out either, and stories like My Father’s Dragon that are set in dream worlds bug me. I wasn’t invited to a fancy critics’ screening of My Father’s Dragon, but if I were, I’d likely be dragged out by security, shouting, “NONE OF THIS IS REAL! THE ISLAND IS FAKE! IT’S A PLOT DEVICE TO TEACH THE BOY ABOUT COURAGE!”

Conclusion

At 96 minutes, the film feels 90 minutes too long. There’s a musical interlude toward the third act that’s quite breathtakingly animated, but is that enough? I dunno. The backgrounds are beautiful to look at, every character has triangles for feet, and I couldn’t help but think about McShane’s comments about appearing in Game of Thrones — “it’s just tits and dragons.” Only now, we’re down to just one dragon, and the tits appear to be us for tuning in.

My Father’s Dragon is currently streaming on Netflix.

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