Dragonkeeper

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.

Dragonkeeper is an adaptation of the books of the same name by. Carole Wilkinson, specifically the first novel. While the overall tone is lighter than the book, it was written by the author herself, so any flawws in the story are within her purview.

The story takes place in an Ancient China where dragons have been hunted to near extinction and where a chosen one can wield chi powers. The latter is kind of a gross misinterpretation of chi seen also in Mulan 2020, but for the most part the movie is accurate to chinese dragon lore, associating them with water.

Personality wise, the characters very very archetypical. There are some missed opportunities; the villain, for example, has a sympathetic scene setting his motivation, but devolves in a card carrying bad guy for the rest of the film. Not a lot of complexity to be seen here.

Overall, if you want a Wuxia fix, this movie will deliver half-way.

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.)

I put this on for my son who is 5, it was immediately obvious that this was re dubbed from a Chinese version. Some if the voice acting is awful, with voices nowhere near matching the physical look of the characters. That said you can live with tha, and my son surely would never notice it.

But what bothered me most was how dark the whole tone of the movie was. My kid asked me why everything was dying and absolutely nothing positive or uplifting happens until the very end of the film.

Children's films are becoming increasingly dark these days and that probably reflects society. I've a feeling Dragonkeeper is reflecting current Chinese society. But with themes like slavery, bullying and murder, I probably wouldn't have let my kid watch this had I known.

I also believe there's something that's lost in translation with this movie, but somebody cleverer than I can analyse that.

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.