The hot streak for Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon cools with My Father’s Dragon, which loosely and unremarkably adapts the classic 1948 children’s book by Ruth Stiles Gannett. Stepping outside the cultural specificity of the studio’s prior works while targeting a younger audience, the film tells the story of Elmer (Jacob Tremblay), a boy who travels to Wild Island to free a young dragon named Boris (Gaten Marazzo).
That My Father’s Dragon is being distributed by Netflix feels oddly appropriate, as director Nora Twomey’s film exudes the feel of just another colorful tile on the service’s vast content pile, able to entice parents who might recognize the source material just like they would anything else in a brand-focused, IP-forward catalog. The film is preferable to any number of cheap-looking, lifeless CGI creations produced under the impression that children aren’t able to discern The Nut Job from Pinocchio, but Cartoon Saloon’s prior work has never needed such qualifiers.
Scripted by Meg LeFauve (Inside Out), the film creaks with the rigidity of template filmmaking, sloppily bolting themes of friendship and belief in oneself onto the quest undertaken by Elmer and Boris. The two are paired up as a prototypical odd couple quite early in their adventure, a notable contrast to how the source material doesn’t introduce its titular dragon until the end.
My Father’s Dragon’s more interesting deviations from Gannett’s book are ones it largely fails to explore, many of them suggesting near-inescapable hardship. At the start of the film, Elmer and his single mother (Golshifteh Farahani) move to an apartment in Nevergreen City after their grocery store in a vaguely detailed small town is foreclosed in the wake of a seeming recession. Between the intrusiveness of their landlady (Rita Moreno) and their dwindling savings jar, there’s a sense that Elmer runs away to avoid burdening his mother further.
Boris faces a similarly grave predicament, having been captured by an old monkey, Saiwa (Ian McShane), to pull their island up out of the water before it sinks to the bottom of the ocean. In depicting a world whose elders have no workable solution to their existential dilemma except to pass off responsibility to the young, the film is almost a commentary on climate change.
By the end, though, few of these threads feel resolved and fewer still are engaged with at all, to the point where any broader meaning they might have feels accidental. The storytelling as a whole is oddly sloppy, shrugging off as it does a secondary monkey villain (Chris O’Dowd) and generally failing to establish Boris’s insecurities before foregrounding them in the climax.
My Father’s Dragon’s visuals are cleanly rendered and pleasant to look at without ever standing out, perpetually framed from a respectful distance that might evoke the illustrations of a child’s storybook but one that translates poorly to the more dynamic realm of 2D animation. Even the book’s unique narration, which provides the title and sounds like a story being told, is relegated to little more than bookends in the context of this ultimately impersonal film.
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