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Beloved children’s stories that haven’t been adapted and re-imagined for the screen many times over are a rarity these days. And yet, Netflix film My Father’s Dragon is the first English-language adaptation of Ruth Stiles Gannett’s award-winning 1948 novel of the same name (following a 1997 Japanese adaptation), and will likely offer some viewers their first introduction to Gannett’s fantastic adventure.
Directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nora Twomey (The Breadwinner) from a screenplay by Meg LeFauve (Inside Out), My Father’s Dragon follows a young boy named Elmer Elevator who runs away from home to a magical island where a dragon named Boris is held captive. While there, he encounters various jungle animals — some helpful, some threatening — as he attempts to free the dragon.
My Father’s Dragon features an impressive voice cast, with lead actor Jacob Tremblay (Room) voicing Elmer and Stranger Things actor Gaten Matarazzo as the film’s titular dragon. They’re joined by Whoopi Goldberg, Ian McShane, Dianne Wiest, Rita Moreno, Chris O’Dowd, Judy Greer, Alan Cumming, and Jackie Earle Haley (among others) in supporting roles as the various animal characters Elmer meets along the way.
That talented group is put to good use, with Matarazzo particularly well cast as the dragon, whose playful innocence and optimism are channeled wonderfully in the actor’s vocal performance. Tremblay is, as always, a reliably earnest and entertaining young protagonist, while the unique and familiar voices of McShane, Goldberg, and the rest of the supporting cast provide some welcome depth and substance to their characters.
Although the over-arching story in My Father’s Dragon tends to meander a bit and get lost in its cast of colorful characters and fantastic settings, the film delivers some powerful emotional beats. The film manages to feel both incredibly sad and triumphant at times, even when the story and themes connecting those moments remain a bit vague and, at worst, confusing.
It’s unfortunate that the film is a bit of a mess, story-wise, because there are some genuinely touching moments in My Father’s Dragon. And sadly, the film’s relatively simple animation and color palette doesn’t offer the sort of distraction from its flaws that many animated features get away with.
Still, there’s a lot to like about My Father’s Dragon, which offers the sort of imaginative world-building and fantastic concepts that play well to younger audiences and keep them engaged for the long run. Elmer and the dragon are genuinely fun characters and make it easy to get swept away in their adventure.
While it doesn’t offer the bright, flashy spectacle or carefully structured emotional journey of higher-profile animated features these days, My Father’s Dragon does deliver an entertaining experience — particularly for younger viewers. Older audiences are likely to appreciate the film’s impressive voice cast and some of its more potent dramatic beats, but much of My Father’s Dragon seems aimed at the same, young audience as Gannett’s book — a decision that feels both charming and a little quaint in the landscape of modern animated features.
Directed by Nora Twomey, My Father’s Dragon premieres November 11 on Netflix.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?