La Leyenda Del Dragón

I feel this film doesn't deserve to be shot down. I liked the story, the characters are a bit childish, but I enjoyed the voice acting, the animation was good

As I said, while I'm no professional reviewer, I'm a fan of well made animation, the soundtrack seemed to be in sync enough not to give me any discomfort. The artwork was well drawn and an enjoyable watch.

Over all a nice looking film to comfortably pass sometime and definitely not a waste of effort.

(Why is there such a high character count required in a review. I makes writing a review quite an effort, especially as I've got dyslexia.)

With the emperor ailing in his capital, he sends out messengers to secure the one thing that can save him from certain death: the blood of a live dragon. Luckily for the few remaining dragons, though, there's a young girl "Ping" and her pet rat "Hua" who are determined to preserve their last egg and ensure that "Kai" is born in the sacred birthing pool safe and sound. It's quite good fun, this, and I always liked the Chinese depictions of dragons as rather more lithe and nimble then the grumpy, scarred and scaly Western interpretations, but otherwise this is a rather thinly padded out story that might better have tried to incorporate more from this six book series it's based on into it's plot to better build up the characters and fill out the plot. That said, it doesn't hang around and there's plenty of action as the youngster and the ancient dragon "Long Danzi" take on the whole Imperial army - and it's dastardly and scheming agent - whilst trying to preserve this fragile blue egg until it's ready to hatch. There's a gentle moral to the story about self reliance and the odd humorous moment too, and though it's probably not a film that the very young will really get much from, the animation is lively and colourful with some menacing bugs and fiery blue fisticuffs and it's worth a watch on the telly if you like the family fantasy genre.

Ping is an orphan girl living with a servant woman tasked with feeding the "Honored Guests" living under her master's care. The "Honored Guests" are actually the last two imperial dragons along with their unhatched egg.

Ping learns that she has the power to control qi or chi which makes her a dragon keeper and she is destined to be the person to take the last remaining egg to a special birthing pool to hatch. To achieve this goal she will need the help of her dragon friend, Danzi, and her mouse friend, Hua Hua, to retrieve the stolen egg.

Ping will have to overcome the sickly Emperor, who wants the egg's qi to heal his illness, and the evil necromancer, Diao, who wants to steal the egg's qi to become an immortal god.

I enjoyed this film very much although I did think that some of the subject matter might be confusing to a child. It's beautifully animated but it was lacking a little something that I just can't put my finger on. My biggest complaint is that it simply didn't feel complete. The film seemed to leave a lot of questions unanswered and feels as though there must be a sequel in the works but I couldn't confirm my suspicion.

Glad I came across it and I hope they are planning to make a sequel simply because I feel there should be more to Ping, Danzi, Hua Hua and Kai's story. I would definitely watch it.

Wonderful film of Chinese and Spanish co production, you can sense the combination of both east and west sensibility. The drawing style is very beautiful with great colors, artistically referencing details from the Han dynasty. This is a great story for kids to understand about friendship, responsibility and courage with a nice touch of humor. The music score gets you really into the emotion and adventure. I have watched it twice with family and friends and both adults and kids enjoyed it. The beautiful ending credit style is a real surprise, a film made with a lot of efforts and love. Really looking forward for the sequels.

Watched this with my 11 year old today ... the first 30 mins were very harrowing & upsetting; we almost left the cinema, but stayed for the surely inevitable happy ending? Which actually didn't really materialise to any great degree . The whole thing was an endurance test and we left drained and depressed. I can't believe this is a PG. We should have left after 20 mins ! Do not take children to see this unless they like very the, dark often grim stuff.

The dubbing was also very poor, but we could have put up with that. Some of the CGI was excellent but many of the human faces were pretty poor.