Review of Jane And The Dragon (Review)
Monday, 10th March 2008, 03:41

Introduction
Jane and the Dragon is a tale of Medieval Girl Power with wannabe Knight-in-Training Jane and her adventures with a friendly Dragon. She lives in a castle as a lady-in-waiting to the King and Queen and their precocious daughter Lavinia. A spoilt brat son, Prince Cuthbert, features in the first episode but fails to reappear in subsequent episodes.

Jane's friends include the Jester, Rake the Gardener, Pepper the Cook and the Smithy. They all feature in her adventures as do her Knight-Tutor Sir Theodore, Gunther, a squire in training and Sir Ivon. Most important of her friends is her 300-year-old bright green chum "The Dragon" who likes nothing more than scaring cows and having a good scratch on the palace wall.

It is, of course, the sort of show where teaching teeny viewers lessons in being better people is far more important than entertaining them, so the stories tend to be moralistic and more than a little pompous. Having said that, the stories do have their cute moments and occasional burst of sheer genius. The first story on the disc is easily the poorest of the six episodes, with the Tooth Fairy and Jester's Duel stories being the jolliest.

Curiously, the subtitle for the set "Dragon Rules" is the title of the seventh episode which is not included on this disc. Produced in 2006, the show ran to 26 episodes and is a co-production between Canadian animators Nelvana and New Zealand effects supremos Weta Productions.

Watching the episodes was a curious experience. The first episode was awful, dominated by a spoilt-brat young character causing problems for Jane and her friends. However, subsequent episodes got steadily more interesting and more charming. The aggravating Cuthbert character disappeared and Jane's below-stairs friends came to the fore. By the end of the six episodes, I was hooked.

Video
Made in 4:3, the show is colourful and lively. Weta's primary contribution to the animation process is its state-of-the-art motion capture system, developed to breathe life into Gollum and King Kong. It gives the characters a fluidity and naturalness of movement that is impressive, but subsequently denies them the art of the animator. The characters are rather stiff-looking and lack the dynamics of drawn (either flat or CG) animation. Having said that, some of the facial mo-cap has marvellous subtlety – looks and expressions – that would do any animation proud.

Continuing on the theme, hair rendering is particularly good for a tv animation show. Visually, the show has an interesting look, with texture maps on characters looking as if they've been drawn in pencil (a bit like the shading on The Snowman). The characters are very skinny, particularly Jane herself, who has real stick-insect limbs.



Audio
Dolby Digital 2.0



Features
Only subtitles



Conclusion
Something of an acquired taste, on one hand this is a charming Medieval fantasy with a contemporary tweak. On the other, it suffers from that old-fashioned need for childrens' entertainment to be improving.