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I must admit that I'm rather horrified at the prospect, especially when I discovered not only is it a 2d/3d project, but it will be a joint project outsourced to Korea and India.

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Anyway, back on topic, I think people really have unrealistic expectations for this movie.

An animated movie, even one that flops as badly as Disney's Treasure Planet generally takes 4-5 years in production. Clean up, ink and color take about as long as the entire animation process in 2D. Throw in the complications of compositing with 3D characters and matching the 2 looks and you've got quite a task on your hands.

From the sounds of the scant production notes, they're tying up a "test shot" in january of 2007, and are slated to finish production in spring of 2007? Although their timeline seems to have slipped.. does that give them an entire 6 months or more for the core of production? That production timeline for 90-100 minutes seems more inline with the speed at which established 22 minute saturday morning cartoon episodes are produced.

I would actually be surprised if the final product is up to par with current saturday morning cartoons. Even if Dragonlance is sort of Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy meets LOTR, I don't think a spongbob squarepants animation style would work too well with it.

The warning signs are all there:
- touting known actors such as Lucy Lawless as the voices (why don't they save up this money for production instead)
- a focus on 3D and monsters
- god awful preproduction art (I'm sorry, but if those are the character designs they are going to use for 2D animation I feel very sorry for the animators. They obviously know nothing about the requirements of animation. Sure the drawing would work fine for still comic book images, and they look it, but animation-wise they only dredge up traumatizing memories of a black and white Tarzan animation with muscles of steel that moved like a cut-out on a stick.)
- the fact that is mentioned that they want to _keep_ the detail on the human (note hand-drawn) characters. So the prepro art dates from aug 06, a year from then they hope to be finished animating and cleaning up the characters.. with all that detail. Do they pay the artists in Korea enough for this kind of misery?
- 3D draconian monsters. Does this mean 3d dragons as well?
Besides compositing and integration issues, why? why oh why? Are they hard to draw? Compared to Sturm's armor which apparently they would like to preserve as detailed.. this just makes no sense to me..
Sets in 3D sure.. but why separate out the the humanoid characters vs the monsters...
- 3D smoke and light effects..
When production houses start to emphasize on the detail that is being put into using particle effects for background smoke to make it look more "realistic", god kills a kitten.
It would make sense if the sets are done in 3d, but what's wrong with good old hand animated 2d smoke that often has so much more life and style. Why waste the budget and time on 3d smoke and light effects when nothing at all is being mentioned about the excellent amount of time and money spent on character animation? I see nothing mentioned about how well animated and emotionally convincing the hand-drawn characters will be... nothing about how graceful the elves will move, how the animators studied real swordfighters for the fight scenes, or how they referenced bats and eagles for the graceful power of the dragons. Instead we're told about the awesome camera moves, the light as it streams thru the windows, and the glorious lance in the opening titles.
Will any of this matter if the dialogue is cheesy, the characters move like hot-dogs on a stick, the painstakingly detailed sturm armor crawls like worms across his body, and the smooth weightlessness of the 24fps 3D creatures duke it out with the 12fps oh-so-detailed human characters?

I stopped by the websites of the production companies, although the korean one doesn't seem to have a link. Sure the Indian 2D looks like your typical saturday morning fare, but their 3D doesn't have much to show.
I wonder if the Korean 2D animation will look like badly drawn Japanese anime. Sure there's some wonderful stuff coming out of Korea, but with the constraints put on the production, one can only hope they can pull it off.

Animated movies often boil down to time, money and craftsmanship. The trade-offs being more time requires more money, less time equals less money but also lower quality.

With the time and money pressures on this DL movie, I'm not holding my breath for it to be even comparable to a Saturday morning cartoon. Sure, maybe it will please Naruto fans but as an animation fan I can't see much promise in the entire endeavor.

It's sad to see that studios still do not realize that big names, cutting edge 3D technology, outsourcing to cheaper countries is not going to make a movie better. That animated movies of equivalent quality are not easier, faster or cheaper than their live action counterparts.

Seriously, would you rather see a poorly animated, horrendously drawn character acting to the voice of some well-known talents.. or would you rather listen to mediocre unknowns voicing beautifully drawn and animated characters. You can push the character animation and art to compensate for a poor voice actor, but can the best voice actor compensate for poorly animated artwork?

Personally I think I would rather watch a DL movie made using the Guild Wars real time game engine than any 2D/3D combo. Please, keep it all 3D or all 2D.. this mishmash makes no sense except to pander to the masses.

If I were Hicks and Weisman, I'd probably start running away as fast as I could from this project. But I'm not, so all I can say is I will hope for the best.. but the signs here are too similar to so many other tanked animation projects that have all the wrong goals in mind.

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