Netflix’s My Father’s Dragon turns a bizarre book into a gorgeous movie

This review was published in conjunction with the movie’s premiere at the 2022 BFI London Film Festival. My Father’s Dragon Netflix debuts the new series on November 1.

My Father’s Dragon is one of those classic children’s books that seems to come straight from the subconscious. For children, it probably feels comforting and full of wonder, but if you come to it as an adult — as I did recently, reading it to my 5-year-old after a friend gave us a copy — it just feels overwhelmingly strange. It was actually also strange to my child. Ruth Stiles Gannett wrote it in 1948. It tells the tale of a little boy who escapes his mom to Wild Island. He must battle some sadomic talking animals to free the young dragon, which they had enslaved.

Netflix’s new animated film adaptation, made by the great Irish studio Cartoon Saloon (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 a puppy-like figure, with big ears and small golden wings. He’s also striped in yellow and blue. The film is void of almost all other elements. Director Nora Twomey (Breadwinner, The 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. There are times when it is hard. (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 crumbling boarding 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

The story is now grounded in psychological realities that the book has never experienced, and the new framework honors its Midcentury American 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 dragon and the island?

Twomey, LeFauve, and the book save the encounter between dragon and boy until the very end. Boris and Elmer travel together to the island, where they meet a captive rhinoceros and her baby. There are also a group of savage but adorablely rolypoly tigers and some angry, spherical, 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 is a scene stealer with his beautiful, rich voice that is tinged in worry and fury.

Image by Netflix

Matarazzo and Tremblay form an unlikely friendship as both the serious, resourceful boy and the optimistic, foolish dragon. The child and Matarazzo, as is often the case with stories such as this, are both two sides to the same coin. They’re mature and impure, open-minded, close-minded, and have egos and id. 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 fans assume that this statement is obvious. But for those who aren’t familiar: My Father’s DragonBeautiful. It’s 2D animation, illustrated in an economical but expressive style. The animation has a more clean, unadorned look than Ununtamed. 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 DragonNetflix launches Nov. 11