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Petes Dragon
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The childrens tale that features Pete the Dragon.
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Disney loved to mix live action with animation (Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks), but this 1977 effort falls on its face. The turn-of-the-century story concerns an orphaned boy whose only friend is a cartoon monster. While the latter is entertainingly rendered, the rest of the film strains to be enchanting and the cast overreaches in a big way. Not for anybody over the age of ten. --Tom Keogh
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This story of a winsome orphan and his guardian dragon features an Academy Award-nominated score and song, Helen Reddy's "Candle on the Water." The combination of a live-action story with an animated figure was innovative in 1977, and the green dragon with pink wings will still charm youngsters today. However, its plot has the boy running from a nasty family to whom he's been sold into slavery, as well as an evil magician who tries to steal the dragon for his parts. These dark story lines may scare or bore younger children, who only want to see Elliot the dragon belch fire and give Pete rides on his back. And older children who might appreciate the plot may scoff at the relatively crude animation. This leaves a rather narrow audience window of about ages 3 to 7. A cast of veterans includes Shelley Winters, Mickey Rooney, and Red Buttons, who all turn in the hammiest of performances. Acting newcomer Reddy demonstrates both why her acting career never took off and why her singing career did. (Lines like "You're a bunch of superstitious ding-dongs" don't give her much help.) However, her sometimes awkward performance as the lonely lighthouse keeper who gives the boy a home provides the film with its heart. Bottom line: it's a keeper for diehard Disney fans, dragon lovers, and those who remember this movie fondly from their childhood. --Kimberly Heinrichs
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This story of a winsome orphan and his guardian dragon features an Academy Award-nominated score and song, Helen Reddy's "Candle on the Water." The combination of a live-action story with an animated figure was innovative in 1977, and the green dragon with pink wings will still charm youngsters today. However, its plot has the boy running from a nasty family to whom he's been sold into slavery, as well as an evil magician who tries to steal the dragon for his parts. These dark story lines may scare or bore younger children, who only want to see Elliot the dragon belch fire and give Pete rides on his back. And older children who might appreciate the plot may scoff at the relatively crude animation. This leaves a rather narrow audience window of about ages 3 to 7. A cast of veterans includes Shelley Winters, Mickey Rooney, and Red Buttons, who all turn in the hammiest of performances. Acting newcomer Reddy demonstrates both why her acting career never took off and why her singing career did. (Lines like "You're a bunch of superstitious ding-dongs" don't give her much help.) However, her sometimes awkward performance as the lonely lighthouse keeper who gives the boy a home provides the film with its heart. Bottom line: it's a keeper for diehard Disney fans, dragon lovers, and those who remember this movie fondly from their childhood. --Kimberly Heinrichs
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Marrying animation to live action had been experimented with in the '30s and '40s, perfected in the '60s for Mary Poppins, and elevated to tour-de-force status on Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but Disney's 1976 feature Pete's Dragon helped pioneer the use of the technique as feature-film vehicle. The song-score of Al Kasha and Joel Hirschorn occasionally rises to the level of the Sherman brothers, their daunting predecessors at the studio, but it also graced one of the last of the old-school Disney musical films. Indeed, it's likely the most consistent element of a much-troubled production (its animation was originally intended for a brief segment at the end, then steadily expanded after the fact). Indeed, there's an almost schizophrenic sense of the traditional Disney musical ethos occasionally clashing with the changing musical mores of the late '70s. The mature, Helen Reddy-performed ballad "Candle on the Water" won a Best Song Oscar®, but other tunes like "Passamashloddy" and "Boo Bop Bopbop (I Love You Too)" sometimes feel like they could have been outtakes from any six previous Disney musicals. But if the studio's impossibly sunny, marvelously crafted song ethos of its '40s-'60s prime is what you're after, you'll find a familiar friend here. -–Jerry McCulley
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