Stay away from this DVD. This is possibly the worse adaptation I’ve seen of anything… EVER and the problems aren’t how close or unclose it stayed to the source material. The problem is that it physically hurts to watch the movie.

Before we get to other things let me first mention that this is a very gratuitous film. Fanboys will be in cleavage heaven. Now don’t get me wrong, I like boobies, but the cartoon took it too far for something marketed to kids. There’s one scene where a character is introduced and her boobs jiggle and a guy spends a few seconds staring at them. Then the rest of the movie is just filled with breast. I mean in the pic above, that woman with the torn shirt, she just has it torn for no reason. She wasn’t attacked or tripped or anything.

Then, moving past the breast, the next noticeable problem with the movie is that the art is straight from the 80’s. I don’t mean that it has a cool retro vibe. I mean that it is so horrible they were doing better animation work over 20 years ago. Even weirder is that every now and then they inserted Dragons using 3-D animation (bad 3D from the early 90’s) and the mix of animations is what causes your eyes to burn. They don’t mesh right and as a result cause the flaws in both animation styles to become even more obvious.

If you’re a masochist and somehow manage to look past the art, then you have to deal with the plot. The movie stays so close to the novel that even if you’re a fan or have simply read the books you’ll still be absolutely confused by the compression. They squeezed over 400 pages of prose into a 90-minute cartoon and it just doesn’t work.

Because the movie is so fast paced there is no room left for any kind of character development. Of course we are talking “Dragonlance” whose characters were originally conceived during a D&D gaming session, but even so, the original books managed to create characters there were interesting and that you cared about. The characters that appear in the movie are worse than the cookie-cutter versions that have followed the original novel’s release date.

Since the characters are short handed, the high-talent cast is a complete waist. It doesn’t matter that you have Kiefer Sutherland, Lucy Lawless, or Michael Rosenbaum because all they manage to do is throw out confusing exposition.

So don’t bother renting this. Don’t even think of renting this. If you want something that has an “old school” feel but are craving some fantasy then go re-watch “Castle in the Sky” “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind” or any other Hayao Miyazaki film.