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Disney’s new Pete’s Dragon remake highlights the small problem we have here at Toonzone that it’s harder to tell what’s an animated movie anymore. The original movie spliced a hand-drawn animated dragon with a live-action cast, which was novel at the time and was never a common movie-making technique. The remake replaces the hand-drawn dragon with one created in CGI, which makes it just like every other effects-driven movie from the past decade or so. The one-degree-of-separation from something with an undeniable animation pedigree is one reason why we opted to review the Pete’s Dragon remake, which is a significant improvement on the original in a number of different ways at the expense of blending in with the increasingly crowded field of movies driven by CGI characters.
The only element retained from the original Pete’s Dragon is the film’s core relationship between a young orphan named Pete (Oakes Fegley) and his companion Elliot, a giant flying dragon who can also turn invisible. This remake wisely dumps everything else about the overly-complex and mostly silly original movie in favor of borrowing a page from Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Pete is now a feral youth who survived a car accident that killed his parents, growing up without parental supervision in the deep forest for six years with the help of Elliot. Pete eventually encounters the kindly forest ranger Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is engaged to her fiancé, the kindly lumberyard foreman Jack (Wes Bentley). She and Jack’s daughter Natalie (Oona Laurence) quickly bond with Pete while trying to figure out where this strange boy came from. However, Elliot soon emerges from the forest looking for his missing companion, and is soon discovered by Jack’s renegade brother Gavin (Karl Urban) who sees big opportunities for himself in the giant furry green beast.
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I find that all the individual pieces of Pete’s Dragon are well-crafted, with director David Lowrey’s slightly quirky sensibilities keeping things off-kilter enough to avoid cliches. It hits all the right emotional notes without excess mawkishness or saccharine, although I’m not sure it manages to resonate as deeply as it intends to. Oakes Fegley and Bryce Dallas Howard shoulder the dramatic heavy lifting wonderfully well, with the young Mr. Fegley showing tremendous promise in his extremely natural and convincing performance. The movie is extremely spare, with absolutely no unnecessary fat or flab, but this sometimes means characters aren’t able to expand much beyond the simplest archetypes. Only Karl Urban manages to surprise a little bit as his venal Gavin turns out to be not so bad after all. It seems like a little bit of a waste to have an actor as sublime as Robert Redford playing Grace’s father Meacham and then give him so relatively little to do. Meacham encountered Elliot decades earlier, and while it is wonderful to listen to Mr. Redford tell a tall tale (and then recount his meeting much more seriously later in the movie), this is about the limit of what he’s able to do in the movie. The rest of the cast has to make do with even less.
Unfortunately, Elliot may be the weakest element in the movie, though it’s not due to a lack of effort. He is wonderfully realized and animated by the wizards at WETA Workshop, with movements and behaviors that make him seem as familiar as a family pet, but still retaining a fundamentally wild and untamed nature. His vocalizations (mostly provided by actor John Kassir) are suitably otherworldly, which balance nicely with his dynamically expressive facial gestures. The problem is that there are a few too many moments in the movie where he doesn’t quite fit in with the surroundings, breaking the spell the movie works so hard to achieve. I kept having moments where I thought, “That’s an impressive effect,” instead of truly accepting Elliot as a full-fledged character like Rocket and Groot in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie. It’s odd that I don’t remember thinking similar thoughts while watching the original Pete’s Dragon for the first time a few years ago, even though the special effect of splicing the hand-drawn Elliot into a movie was far more obvious and the assorted trickery to make the actors interact with him was infinitely less sophisticated. In those sorts of movies, the suspension of disbelief is simply the price of admission, and we are soon conditioned to accept the big lie we’re watching. Modern-era CGI cinema trickery has gotten good enough over the years that the standard for acceptance is now much higher, and I’m afraid Elliot doesn’t clear that standard consistently.
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I must also admit one other reason why I picked up Pete’s Dragon for review was the unique press drop that Disney offered us, wrapping up a digital copy code in an old VHS videotape box (photos of which are provided above). Undeniably, it’s a slightly wasteful indulgence to use this much plastic to package two small cards, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t get a thrill out of holding the box in my hands and cracking open the clamshell as I used to do all those years ago. I wonder if this kind of package could be revived for a special retailer-specific release for a future home video release (especially since Disney’s live-action feature division seems increasingly intent on dedicating the bulk of its release schedule to expensive live-action remakes reliving the studio’s past animated glories, while the actual animated feature division is busy making new stuff).
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The digital copy of the movie seems to come with the same bonuses as the Blu-ray release of the film. An interesting and informative feature-length commentary is provided with director/co-writer David Lowery joined by co-writer Toby Halbrooks and child stars Oakes Fegley and Oona Laurence. The group manages to balance between behind-the-scenes information (almost none of which is duplicated in the other featurettes) and genial joking around about making the movie. A reel of deleted scenes confirms statements in the commentary that the screenplay was pretty tight and got tighter in post-production; most of the cut footage is unnecessary expansion or explanation from existing scenes. A very short blooper reel is insubstantial, which probably reflects some combination of the cast and crew’s professionalism and the very tight shooting schedule they were on. Three small featurettes focus on different aspects of the production: one is little more than an extended tourism ad for New Zealand (which made a lusher, wilder Pacific Northwest than the U.S.’s actual Pacific Northwest); one looks at the CGI magic that brings Elliot to life; and one shares excerpts from David Lowery’s diary through the 70 days of principal photography. Finally, the digital copy includes two music videos for “Nobody Knows” and “Something Wild,” two of the fine songs that grace the soundtrack.
Pete’s Dragon is cinematic cotton candy: perfectly enjoyable while in-hand, but with surprisingly little staying power afterwards. I liked the movie far more than I thought I would, but realized I had forgotten significant plot details mere hours after finishing it. It also doesn’t help that Elliot never quite achieves the level of cinematic magic that he requires. It’s a good movie that has its heart in the right place, but it can’t quite reach the heights it aspires to. It means little to say that this remake is a significant improvement on the original, since the original was one of many of Disney’s more mediocre efforts from the 70’s, but against so much competition in the marketplace, this remake ultimately finds itself turning nearly as invisible as Elliot.
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The not-so-veiled shot at Disney’s live-action feature department in the review stands in contrast to Disney’s animated feature and TV divisions, which have both doing some of their best work in years. While the features are getting the bulk of the attention, Disney TV Animation has been pushing boundaries and scoring numerous critical successes (even if some shows, like TRON Uprising, Motorcity, and Wander Over Yonder never seemed to gain the audiences I thought they deserved). The new series Elena of Avalor comes with high ambitions and a daunting checklist of requirements: sustaining the Disney Princess franchise with Disney’s first Latina Princess, balancing both the wholesome girl- and merchandise-friendly requirements of the most successful Disney Princesses while avoiding some of the company’s unfortunate race-related pratfalls. If I say that the Elena of Avalor: Ready to Rule DVD seems to be familiar and on the safe side, I’m not sure this is really a criticism since it seems that this is exactly what Disney was aiming for.
Spinning off from Sofia the First (and sharing that show’s creator Craig Gerber), Elena of Avalor begins with a fairy tale of an enchantment that trapped the title character in a magical amulet for 41 years. Freed from the amulet (along with her younger sister Isabel), the physically 16-year-old Elena must take the throne of the kingdom of Avalor as its Crown Princess. The first episode of the series, “First Day of Rule,” establishes that her decisions must be approved by a Grand Council until she comes of age, and then teaches the headstrong Princess that she’s not quite as ready to rule as she thought she was. The overarching theme of misunderstandings gets an appropriately Disney-esque resolution right before Elena selects her Grand Council: her grandparents; her scheming cousin, the Chancellor Esteban; and her new friend Naomi from the docks. Throughout the four episodes on this DVD, Elena is also aided by Mateo, a wizard-in-training and grandson of the former royal wizard Alakazar; Zuzo, a magical spirit fox that only Elena can talk to; and a trio of jaquins, magical flying jaguars, named Sklyar, Migs, and Luna.
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There are relatively few surprises in the episodes on Elena of Avalor: Ready to Rule, other than the way that the entire setup for the show is summed up in a talky exposition sequence right before the first episode starts. It turns out that story, Elena and the Secret of Avalor, wasn’t told until a Sofia/Elena crossover episode that aired several months after Elena of Avalor premiered, which seems backwards but that ship sailed some time ago. Like nearly all of Disney TV Animation’s recent releases, the show maintains a high minimum level of quality throughout, although I find that Elena of Avalor rarely ascends much higher than that minimum level of quality. The one episode which genuinely impressed me the most was “All Heated Up,” with its tale of a misunderstood rock monster whose temper is linked to an active volcano that looms over an Avalor farming village. In addition to being the most unpredictable episode on the disc, it’s also the one with the best obligatory musical number.
Elena of Avalor skews a little older than Sofia the First, with the same gentle spirit getting filtered through slightly more raucous sensibilities. There seems to be a lot more action in Elena, and while I’m not sure whether to credit that to a desire to lure boys or an older audience, I can confirm that it makes Elena a lot easier to sit through for those in either group (or, in my case, both). Elena is winning enough as the heroine of her own story, partially due to a spirited vocal performance by Aimee Carrero and partially due to plots that are structured to give her opportunities for growth and enlightenment. Interestingly, I find Elena of Avalor tones down the element of a threat close to home that Sofia the First seemed to play up more in the hidden machinations of Cedric the magician. Chancellor Esteban resents his younger cousin’s ascension to the throne and engages in power-plays that inevitably end in buffoonery, while Elena herself remains oblivious to his schemes. The last episode on this disc, “Island of Youth,” suggests that Esteban isn’t really this show’s Cedric equivalent, or that at least he’ll reach his rapprochement with his cousin much sooner.
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Recent events convince me that a non-trivial portion of the American population will dismiss this show sight-unseen as “too politically correct,” and I waste no effort to dissuade them from their foregone conclusions since too few people who use that term as a pejorative seem willing to listen to contradictory opinion. However, those genuinely concerned with the paucity of non-white representation in the entertainment world, and in the lack of good Latino characters specifically, can rest easier knowing that Elena of Avalor does quite well in filling that niche. While I don’t think Elena of Avalor is quite as successful at crafting its pan-Latin-American kingdom as the recent Moana is at crafting its pan-Polynesian world, I think Elena is also confronting a much more familiar culture to many Americans and has to do it under different restrictions and far more visible scrutiny. I think it’s successful enough, and initial concerns from assorted Latino groups seem to have abated in the face of the actual show. If anything, I had a slightly raised eyebrow at the Asian-inspired kingdom of Satu in the second episode, “Model Sister,” but my initial concerns were nicely eased by the sly performance by George Takei as the King of Satu and by the way the episode hinges on some fundamental misunderstandings.
The Elena of Avalor: Ready to Rule DVD is extremely bare bones, even for a Disney TV series aimed at younger viewers. The disc contains exactly four episodes of the TV show and no bonus features other than trailers, which makes it a very, very slim home video offering that barely clears 90 minutes. The initial release includes a small “Elena Projection Scepter,” a 4-inch long miniature flashlight that projects a disappointingly small picture of Elena on a wall; I expect even this meager offering will vanish in later pressings of the disc.
Elena of Avalor isn’t a bad show by any means, and does exactly what it sets out to do. However, I am heartened by its mere existence, and in the way the show provides numerous positive role models for Latino-American kids both in the characters and the actors voicing them. Perhaps Elena will get more satisfying subsequent home video releases to balance out this disappointingly short first DVD.
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