Pete’s Dragon

Saddled with an absurdly overlong running time (128 minutes!) and a raft of forgettable songs, Pete’s Dragon quickly establishes itself as an unusually tedious Disney musical that boasts few positive attributes – with the movie’s sole bright spot its agreeably pleasant animated treatment of the title character. The padded-out narrative follows a young boy named Pete (Sean Marshall) as he and his pet dragon arrive in a small town after escaping from his abusive foster parents, with Pete’s eventually forming (and benefiting from) a familial bond with a friendly lighthouse keeper (Helen Reddy’s Nora) and her alcoholic father (Mickey Rooney’s Lampie). Pete’s Dragon, in its initial stages, comes off as an affable (if far-from-memorable) family picture that grows less and less interesting as it progresses, with filmmaker Don Chaffey’s head-scratching decision to employ as deliberate a pace as one could envision highlighting the various deficiencies within the proceedings. (It doesn’t help, either, that Chaffey, along with director of photography Frank Phillips, suffuses Pete’s Dragon with a grainy and unusually unpleasant visual sensibility.) The dragon, conceived and executed by Don Bluth, is admittedly a charming figure and its chemistry with Marshall’s Pete is palpable, yet the pair’s scenes together are far too scarce to overcome the otherwise interminable storyline (ie who cares about Reddy and Rooney’s respective characters?) The decidedly bottom-of-the-barrel atmosphere paves the way for thoroughly underwhelming climactic stretch, and it’s finally impossible not to wonder just why Pete’s Dragon is regarded as anything but a total trainwreck.

*1/2 out of ****