Just another dimension?

Saturday, December 16, 2006
The Flight of Dragons -vwv vvz

"There was a time between the waning age of enchantment and the dawning age of logic when dragons flew the skies, free and unencumbered."

The Flight of Dragons is a 1982 animated movie produced by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr. and very loosely based on the speculative natural history book of the same name by Peter Dickinson and the novel The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson. I have read the book The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson some years back. It contains some interesting hypothesis about the nature of dragons and many beautiful illustrations by Wayne Anderson. As for the novel, I did not manage to get hold of it. Even the National Library had only one or two copies in some obscure branch back then. They are probably sold in a book sale by now.

Why am I writing about an animated movie almost as old as I am? Because when I was a child, this was my favourite animated movie. I watched it over and over again until the video tape got mouldy. And now, I finally found a digital version on Google video, whoohoo! (Actually I had a low resolution copy before but the stupid CD got corrupted.)

The Eighties was the age of Transformers, Care Bears, Smurfs, Ninja Turtles, Macross and Disney movies. While the appeal in these start to fade as I grew up, The Flight of Dragon always maintained a hold on me. I guess part of the reason was that it was a good movie on many levels. For the young, there was the fascinating enchanted world. I mean, which kid didn't like dragons? When I first fell in love with the show, I didn't even understand the dialogue. As I got older, I started to appreciate the complexity of the plot, the theme of magic versus science and then later on, understand the pseudo-scientific explanation of the folkloric habits of dragons.

A plot summary can be found at Wikipedia. The link to Google video is at the bottom of the page. Since I watched it so many times before, I can honestly say that there are many memorable lines, mostly uttered by James Earl Jones, a.k.a. voice of Vader, as the bad guy of course. I highly recommend watching this film. If only they would release it on DVD as they did The Last Unicorn, the other famous Rankin/Bass production.

-- permalink --
Yiheng made 10:50 PM

2 Comments:

So many characters died in this show. How could you let children watch this?
By Soqcrates, at 12:58 AM

What do you mean many? Only one good guy died. And most of the bad guys who died are monsters who didn't speak a single line.
By Anonymous, at 9:31 PM




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