Pete's Dragon Reviews

Almost a year ago I did see the remake by David Lowery and since I did like it, I thought I should watch this original version at some point, especially since it was available on Disney+. The interesting thing about this movie was that it was one of the few early attempts from Disney to mix live-action with some animated characters, something which has become pretty common nowadays thanks to the rise of the CGI technology. Well, apparently, it wasn't really a success when it was released but, since then, it has become more or less a cult-classic but, to be honest, I really struggled to care about the damned thing. Eventually, I don’t know what bothered me the most, the fact that the tone was just so sweet, it was borderline syrupy, or the fact that the story was actually pretty weak. I mean, it was rather odd that there was no proper introduction explaining how Pete and Elliott actually got acquainted but it wasn’t really a big deal. A bigger issue was that pretty much everything happening was just terribly random. To make things worse, I thought that Sean Marshall was rather obnoxious and I’m not surprised that the kid soon retired after playing in this movie. The fact that his character kept telling everybody that his best friend was a dragon was also just so annoying and pretty stupid. I mean, at some point, you would hope that he might figure out that it wasn’t such a smart move and just shut up about it. At least, Elliott was a cool character (in fact, it would be the last work done by Don Bluth for Disney before he left the company disillusioned) and I liked the fact that the character was completely mute but there were some long stretches during which this dragon was seriously missed. Anyway, to conclude, I think I was actually really generous with my rating here but I guess it might be worth a look, however, only if you really like the genre.