![]() ![]() I heard the whispers of kids around us – along with my own eight year old son – “It’s like Mowgli from Jungle Book”, which of course it is. But the next patch proves to be on the doorstep of Elliot’s lair, a tree root bunker he shares with the now-orphaned Pete, far from other humans. More trees are felled by Elliot, the aforementioned dragon, than any redneck lumberjack. The story is set in the logging town of Millhaven, a small mill town on the edge of a deep forest, and in which there are underlying tensions in the logging community over the need to mark their next patch and stave off competitors. It’s shocking and stunning at the same time, tapping into a child’s nightmares without resorting to jump scares. The opening scene that sets up Pete’s new life without his parents is sparse in words, but bursting with raw emotion, wonderfully shot. For once CGI hasn’t been used as an excuse for a rubbish story line. If you remember the 1977 original, and I surely do, this is not only the obligatory step up in terms of sheer screen magic, but in terms of narratival and conceptional sophistication. ![]() Someone was peeling onions at a rate of knots in the theatre for sure, cos the sniffles grew louder as the rustling of potato chip packets grew softer. Pete’s Dragon is a beautiful tale of love, loss, redemption, mystery and yearning – the best stuff of movies rolled into a timely 100 minutes. What a pleasant surprise I was in for – or a teary one actually. You know nasty conservative loggers living on the edge of a green forest, in pursuit of a poor green dragon, with fervent activists saving the aforementioned green things from destruction. So I have to admit when I watched the trailer for Pete’s Dragon I was a little worried that the depiction of a small town US logging community in the midst of pristine forest would be Hollywood’s perfect opportunity to castigate Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables”. Replete with gender, sexuality and immigration sermons it felt like we were being played – too hard. ![]() But just lately I’ve been losing the faith. Last time all four of the family went to the movies we suffered through the virtue signalling, glitz and glamour, all smoke and mirrors, of every progressive upper school English teacher’s next assignment topic, the animation Zootopia. There’s magic in the cinema if you know where to look for it. ![]()
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