My Father’s Dragon turns a bizarre book into a bigger and deeper movie

polygon.com:

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

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. (Actually, my kid thought it was weird, too.) Written by Ruth Stiles Gannett in 1948, it tells the story of a young boy who runs away after a disagreement with his mother to Wild Island, where he must outwit some tragicomic talking animals to rescue the candy-striped young dragon they have 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 plump and puppyish, striped in blue and yellow, with floppy ears and little golden wings. Apart from that, the film discards almost everything else. Director Nora Twomey (The Breadwinner, The Secret of Kells) and screenwriter Meg LeFauve (Pixar’s Inside Out) 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