A remake of the Disney animated feature Pete’s Dragon switches to the mix of live action and CGI which worked so well in their earlier attempt from this year, The Jungle Book. Kicking off in 1977 (a nod to the year of the release of the original movie) Pete is on a road trip with his parents when a car accident leaves him orphaned and at the mercy of wolves but at the last moment he is rescued by a huge hairy (not scaly) dragon who he names Elliot after a character in his favourite book. They are shown happily living in a vast area of forest which has not been encroached upon but modernisation is catching up on them and some local logging is beginning to reach the areas of their habitat.

When a young girl Natalie (Oona Laurence) is accompanying her father Jack (Wes Bentley), owner of the lumber mill, to the work site she spots Pete (Oakes Fegley) and follows him into the forest. When her father and mother Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard), a park ranger, come looking for Natalie they find Pete and take him back to town. At this stage Elliott has realised that he cannot find his friend, while searching for him he is spotted by Gavin (Karl Urban) a hunter who is also Jack’s brother and works for him, and he rounds up a posse to catch the legendary Millhaven dragon.

As they find out more about Pete they begin to realise that Graces father (Robert Redford) who’s stories about the time he spotted the dragon when he was younger look like they may not have been as fabricated as everybody thought so they set off into the forest with Pete to find his friend but it becomes a race against time as Gavin is also on the look out for the dragon with a very different agenda.

While watching this movie I began to notice that that there was something different in this movie when compared to recent Disney efforts and for a while I couldn’t work it out. The CGI was good but still a far cry from the aforementioned Jungle Book, the acting was decent with Howard doing a good job as the sympathetic mother like figure and it was great to see Redford still light up the screen when he appeared, showing that you cannot replace pure charisma and even at almost eighty years of age it still shines through. Urban and Bentley were wasted however as their characters never had any real chance to develop and the kids, Laurence and Fegley ware okay given what they had to do. Then I finally realised that what I was watching was a Disney movie of my younger years. The movie didn’t fill the time with exposition and a few moments of Redford narrative told us all we needed to know. There was no attempt to use comedy in the script to get some cheap laughs. The villains of the piece are not evil, they are just guys who don’t understand the situation and go about their ways with an almost comic ineptitude and the star of the film was, as it should be, the dragon.

So as much as this could have been a tale about a young boy who is rescued from a life in the forest and finds a family or of a town who are shown the error of their ways after their initial response to capture the ‘monster’ but instead it was a tale of a dragon who has become separated from it’s family, who befriends a child in the same situation and who learns that while humans may still be a danger, not all people are and is shown how important family is by his friend. Thrown in was a little nod to the consequences of deforestation and the down side to the instinct of the caveman hunter which is still embedded in our DNA. Most of all what this movie had, which has been lacking in a lot of recent kids film is heart and that is what the Disney films of my youth always had. On the downside I will say that a little more of the relationship between Pete and Elliot in the forest and less on the dragon hunt side would have been nice but I walked out having enjoyed it more than most of the other movies I have seen this summer. Unfortunately this film seems to have been swept aside in the melee of the recent bid budget filmaand that is a shame because there is a feel good factor to this story which is missing from a lot of this years releases.

DJ Speaks Rating: 6 Out Of 10