What should have been a cool homage to the Godzilla legacy mixed in with an after school special ends up being a dreadful mess that combines unimpressive animation with sloppy writing to tell a standard beat-em-up monster movie.
The original Firebreather comic by Phil Hester and Andy Kuhn is a kind of silly story aimed at a teen audience, supplied with plenty of kitschy angst. Our hero Duncan (Jesse Head) is a troubled kid who has a hard time adjusting in high school because of his different appearance and whose divorced parents share custody of him, forcing him to divvy up his week between them. The twist being that his mom (Dana Delany) is human while his dad is Belloc (Kevin Michael Richardson), King of the Kaiju, a race of giant monsters from Monster Island (basically a Godzilla stand-in).
For the Cartoon Network original movie, at the purpose of aiming it to their younger demographic, it strips the concept of the its self-awareness and becomes a far more generic story of a half-man half-dragon kid learning about his abilities and finding himself stuck between legacy and doing the right thing story (of course he does the right thing). The hope for a TV series to come out of it is all too present in the movie: it sets up a premise where Duncan has to fight a different monster every week while dealing with the follies of high school.
The CG animation is boring to behold. Aeon Flux creator Peter Chung directed this, and his anatomically exaggerated style looks awful with the rigidity of CG models. What could have been dynamic shots just look like dolls with limited expressions posing awkwardly.
Additional voices supplied by Dante Basco, Amy Davidson, Grey DeLisle, Reed Diamond, and Nicole Sullivan.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Further damning the animation is a visual comparison to Andy Kuhn’s original comic pages, but adding insult to injury is the inclusion of a really cool “2D Animation Test” done in Chung’s familiar traditional animation style (and with a little more blood than what Cartoon Network would have allowed in the final product). If the movie had looked as great as this test, maybe it could have been salvaged.
"Firebreather" is on sale March 22, 2011 and is not rated. Animation, Fantasy. Directed by Peter Chung. Written by James Krieg, Andy Kuhn. Starring Dana Delany, Dante Basco, Grey Delisle, Kevin Michael Richardson, Jesse Head, Amy Davidson, Reed Diamond.
