My Father’s Dragon review: Wolfwalkers’ studio revives an odd book

Ruth Stiles Gannett’s classic children’s book My Father’s DragonIt seems like it comes straight from your subconscious. Some children might find it comforting or full of wonder. But for those of us who discover it as adults — as I did recently, reading it to my 5-year-old — it just feels overwhelmingly strange. It was actually also strange to my 5-year-old. This 1948 novel tells of a boy running away from his mother to Wild Island to escape a dispute with her. There, he will have to outwit some talking animals in order to save the young candy-striped dragon that they had enslaved.

Netflix’s new animated film adaptation, made by the great Irish studio Cartoon Saloon (The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, Wolfwalkers), keeps that top-level plot summary, some of the characters, and the indelible design of Boris the dragon, as illustrated by the author’s stepmother, Ruth Chrisman Gannett. Boris is large and puppyish with yellow and blue stripes and small golden wings. The film is void of almost all other elements. Director Nora Twomey (Breadwinner, Secret of Kells) and screenwriter Meg LeFauve (Pixar’s From the Inside) have rebuilt the Gannetts’ fragmented, surreal little parable into something that’s more like a conventionally structured kids’ movie, but they’ve also made it more exciting and resonant. It’s a lovely film.

In this version, the boy, Elmer (Jacob Tremblay) — who will, we understand, grow up to be the father of the unseen, elderly narrator (Mary Kay Place) — leads a happy life in a tiny town with his single mother (Golshifteh Farahani), who runs a thriving neighborhood store where everyone’s needs are taken care of. But then, there are hard times. (Twomey makes the transition clear by having a bright tangerine fall from an overflowing crate to the floor, where it rolls and evaporates — a wonderfully understated, eloquent gesture.) Mother and boy move into a dilapidated board house in an industrial hub. There, he has to adjust to the new, less fortunate circumstances. After Elmer’s mother chases off an alley cat he takes in, he runs after it, down into the city’s guts. Passing through a narrow crack, he emerges in a fanciful new reality where the cat talks (with Whoopi Goldberg’s mischievous purr) and ushers him to adventure on the back of an excitable baby whale.

Image by Netflix

This frame gives the story a new psychological context that it never has, but also pays homage to its American midcentury origins. Twomey and LeFauve’s expansive ideas don’t stop there. In the book, the animals of Wild Island are vain and lazy, and when the dragon falls from the sky, they capture him and put him to work as an air taxi, flying them across a river they can’t be bothered to swim across or walk around. The film’s Wild Island is a more complicated, metaphorical, and morally ambivalent place.

The island is a forbidding dome-shaped structure that sinks into the ocean. Its animals, desperate to survive, have captured Boris (Gaten Matarazzo) because he’s powerful enough, when harnessed to the rock of the island itself, to pull the whole landmass up out of the water. The more he pulls, the more it sinks, but Saiwa the gorilla (Ian McShane), the animals’ authoritative, caring, but blinkered leader, is fresh out of other ideas. There are mysteries, too: a gaping cavern of bright white fire at the island’s summit, the legend of an all-knowing turtle somewhere in its heart, and crude hieroglyphs of a fire-breathing “after-dragon” that Boris longs to be. But what is the connection between the island and dragon?

Twomey and LeFauve are quick to bring them together, unlike the book which holds the boy-dragon encounter until the last. Boris and Elmer explore the island together. They meet a baby rhinoceros, an adorable crocodile, her brood and some wild, but adoreably playful tigers. There is also a group of angry and spiny hamsters. The animals are played for laughs and pathos by a stellar cast that includes such treasures as Dianne Wiest, Judy Greer, Chris O’Dowd, and Alan Cumming. McShane’s stunningly rich voice, infused with fury, worry and fear, steals the scene as the gorilla who carries the entire island.

Image by Netflix

Matarazzo and Tremblay form an unlikely friendship as both the serious, resourceful boy and the optimistic, foolish dragon. Like so many stories, Matarazzo and Tremblay are not the only ones who have the magical companion. The child is both mature and immature and has an open mind and heart. They will naturally help one another overcome their fears and accept new realities. That’s the part of the film that feels most formulaic. But it’s still touching, especially in the context of Elmer’s “real” life in the city, and what he’s running away from there. Still, what lingers longest after the credits roll is the social allegory of the island’s animals, drowning not through ignorance or laziness, but because they can’t understand how to save themselves and are willing to push that burden onto someone else.

Cartoon Saloon enthusiasts will think this is obvious, but it’s not for everyone. My Father’s DragonIt is stunning. It’s 2D animation, illustrated in an economical but expressive style. This animation is cleaner and less hand-drawn than the untamed. Wolfwalkers, but Twomey’s keen sense of scale and her simple, striking compositions create a powerful emotional geography for the story, and a surprisingly epic, catastrophic canvas for the action. This is a director and a studio at the forefront of their craft, with the confidence to take a beloved classic and turn it into something bigger — and deeper.

My Father’s DragonYou can stream Netflix right now