This review is coming from some who has never read the book but watched the movie. But I can see why some fans are disappointed. I guess this movie is for people who have never read the books.From my perspective it is a decent movie for people who have not read the book but are still interested in Dragons, Goblins e.t.c The animation and voice actors were good. Especially since Micheal Roseabuam was in it. I am disappointed though that there won't be a sequel to this movie since there was more about to come and having a unsatisfying ending. But I wouldn't mind if Funimation or Bang Zoom make an anime of this series which might tell the full story. Overall its not a bad movie.

I'm about halfway through this thing, and it's just too painful to watch anymore.This film looks like one of the mid to late 1980s after school offerings, where major US toy makers contracted with Japanese or Korean anime studios to crank out cheap fast cartoons to promote their products for market. The kids watch the TV show, then buy the action figure and all of it's related toys in a marketing blitz against young impressionable minds.It's that bad.Truth be told the Dragonlance series, that is the novels by Weiss and Hickman, aren't great literature, and are more or less run in the mill pulp fantasy. Even then they aren't fun reads, much less "great reads". They're the kind of books you might like if you're new to the fantasy genre and haven't read anything else.However, "back in the day" (so to speak), TSR put out some very high quality game modules for their rules that really made Weiss and Hickman's mediocre and so-so books look like great fantasy fare. They were that well put together and presented.So seeing this thing makes a man furl his brow. I can't help but reflect back on Bakshi's "Lord of the Rings" effort from the 1970s. I don't like Bakshi and the cadre of social psychologists that have a lock on Hollywood, and think all of us regular people are closet Nazis waiting to unleash racist havoc on the US (even those of us whose ancestors fought under Washington), but as painful and condescending as some of his stuff was (and is), I'd much rather watch something like "Wizards" or "Fire and Ice" than this junk.Again, it's that bad. The truth of the matter is that animation is expensive. And unless you have a ton of cash, you either have to rub elbows with old guard Hollywood, or contract with someone outside the nation. Again, I don't like the Dragonlance books. I tried reading the first one and found the premise of the whole thing to be ridiculous (I seem to recall that steel is as valuable as gold ... and yet the people of this world fight with it instead of using wooden weapons), and not very well written. But TSR really made it shine, complete with maps, artwork and everything else. And so when this "movie" comes out, one is given to wonder what the heck happened.Still, I gave it a shot. And Disney it ain't. Which is too bad, because a company like Disney could have really made poor story material like this really stand out and shine, as is Disney's reputation and legacy of exceptional high quality benchmark / gold- standard animated feature films. I mention that because that's what this thing needed in order to sell it.But again, like I say, the other issue here is that the source material isn't that good in the first place, so it is perhaps fitting that some Korean company took on the project and gave a quality animated film befitting Weiss and Hickman's novel.The reason my review here is so long is that I just can't help but shake my head as to how this stuff gets made. I'm guessing the authors wanted their work in animated format that much that they were willing to compromise visual quality for the sake of cost effective expediency. Oh well.Don't say I didn't warn you.Watch at your own risk.

To be clear, I have not read the Dragonlance series of books yet so my few is only on the movie.The movie starts out with using a old wizard to try and explain the story up till now but sadly, he doesn't explain enough and the story is lost for a person who had never read the books. And since the artwork is more like a child's show so much that there isn't much blood that you can see in most of the bloody fights, that I doubt anyone who would actually be watching this would of read the books in the first place. In my mind, this breaks the movie even before it barely started. We are introduced to the characters in this rather strange fashion of them saying each others names a bit and them talking a little of their travels including a very cryptic explanation about why Tanis Half-Elven (who I guess is the main leader of the group) left but its all left up in the air as they are interrupted by some smelly orcs and the sneezing of the Dwarf character who I can only guess is allergic to horses because of how he first figured out they were coming.May I just talk about how uneventful the ending was? It does not turn out how you think everything would turn out and yet I feel almost no satisfaction in how it ended. It's all I can say without telling you exactly how it ends.The CG effects are much to be desired. They try to make it look epic and yet cartoon-like but something just feels very off. Everything feels like it should have had more detail to the animation instead of the cartoony stuff. The artwork when they do go into the 2D animation looks very lack luster, as though they were trying to copy old shows for children. Sometimes they have just as much work in it as a flash animation and use looped pieces. There are times when characters are wearing something different then they should at that time. The backgrounds are stunning, don't get me wrong, but the characters lack that same love and affection. There is a very sad line between the CG, 2D animation, and background as though they were made by three different studios. They do not work well together. It should be at least one or the other.The voice acting in some areas are alright, giving a very epic feeling to the characters, but in other parts, there is something really off putting to it. Lip-sinking is one of the main problems with the voices but another thing is that the voices try to be more epic then the expressions that they show. They have it for the 3D pieces but it doesn't look like they have it for the 2D visuals. It's surprising because there are some really good actors like Joson Marsdan who did Max Goof from A Goofy Movie and and Haku from Spirited Away. The sad thing is, he gives the character he plays in here, Tasslehoof Burrfoot, such a high squeaky voice with a hint of rasp that he just becomes annoying. The music is actually alright for what it is, catches the 'mood' of the scene though the mood is lost with the artwork.The show was slightly entertaining but that's pretty much all it was. All its problems tog in the way of me enjoying it and it did not feel like it was made in the 21st century. It felt like something done in the 1980's or so.

I'm neither a fan of Dragonlance nor do I know anything about the RPGs or novels which this movie is based on but it certainly tried to treat its source-material with some level of seriousness. Taking a risky chance with its combination of 2D and 3D animation the movie produces two types of results for both: embarrassingly bad and surprisingly good.At the beginning the 2D animation limps, appears stiff and flat whereas the CG works somehow well especially with the bigger dragon-animations. When the drakonians step in the typical minions' CG somehow begins to look a lot less impressive than the 2D which picks up from time to time in the battle-scenes. At least there wasn't a lack of effort in trying to make the characters look lively even if at times the characters' expressions and motions look ridiculously cheezy and exaggerated.On the voice-acting, nothing really stands out but nothing really annoyed me either. The frantic pace of the story is probably the film's biggest weakness as it tries to rush through the events of the novel and while it offers plenty of interesting plot-elements the film lacks a dynamic the pace would require to feel acceptable and which is only enhanced by the lapses in animation quality.The film none the less makes a valiant effort in trying to convey the story to film, the limitations in budget are most likely the reasons why the attempt is not fully successful, but the sloppiness actually begins to add some entertainment value to the film as well, so I can't say the whole thing was a wasted effort.This is a guilty pleasure for a fan of animated films, where the story and narration for once make some sense but the animation just can't keep up.