It doesn’t take too much effort to do bloody criticism of the live action remakes that Disney has been perpetrating with its animated classics. Almost all of them are cut from the same unimaginative and rigid pattern, which is appalling for films that were originally fairly free and that exploited the possibilities of their cinematographic language.
As if that were not enough, in addition to trying to match classics of all time, they pale for repeating history with slight changes so that an hour and a half movie does not stay. And lacking the elasticity of the cartoon, they feel lack of magic and strength. Clearly the formula works economically for them, but it is still a pity that they have mostly stuck to a boring mediocrity. It only seems to be saved from the least expected, by recovering a minor film, such as ‘Peter and the dragon’.
Very big secrets to keep
Available on Disney+, this reformulation of ‘peter and elliot the dragon‘ shines precisely for not being anchored at all to the original, a musical that brought together animation and real actors without too much flashiness. Here David Lowery, one of the most fascinating authors of the moment, takes advantage of the little nostalgia around the seventies film to make an emotional story that manages to transfer the fantastic magic of Disney to real action.
The film takes place in a remote forest region of the United States, in which Bryce Dallas Howard plays a forest ranger in charge of the area who has been listening to crazy stories all her life from her father, an emotional Robert Redford. This ensures that deep in the forest lives a fierce dragonbut she has always assumed that the story was to scare children from getting lost in said forest.
Everything will change when he comes into contact with Peter, a mysterious 10-year-old boy who apparently has no family and lives in the forest, assuring that his company is a giant green dragon named Elliott. He sounds totally unlikely, but both the vigilante and her father will discover not only that he is real, but that they will try to discover the truth about this dragon.
‘Peter and the dragon’: emotion and classic fantasy
Lowery gets to do this an old school fantasy tale, but with the spectacular nature of the modern blockbuster thanks to the means provided by Disney. Even with the demand that comes from the business brand and from depending mainly on CGI, he manages to have a very careful craftsmanship that matches the gentle and even beautiful tone that he bets on.
not only get a result clearly superior to the original, but rather shows that there is room for modern show cinema -even the most aimed at children- for exquisite taste, well measured and well managed emotion. Lowery manages to come out of this challenge, showing that within him there is a versatile filmmaker, capable of making ambitious authorial stories like ‘A Ghost Story’ or ‘The Green Knight’ and films full of tenderness like this one or his delicious ‘The Old Man & the Gun’, in which he also features a fabulous Redford.
In Espinof | Disney’s live-action remakes and adaptations ranked from worst to best