Dragons have been around for so long that some people have a hard time coping with the fact that they do not exist. "I got some very strange e-mails from people who thought they were alive and kept in zoos and used for military purposes," said Peter Hogarth, chairman of the biology department at the University of York in England, describing the response to his work as a "dragonology" consultant on the 2004 Animal Planet television special Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real.
Given the expectations, the filmmakers behind Eragon knew they had to step carefully when it came to reinventing this particular legend.
"It was always a daunting task from the get-go," Glen McIntosh, the animation director who led the Eragon special effects team at Industrial Light and Magic, said in a recent telephone interview from his office in San Francisco.
"There are so many dragon movies, from Ray Harryhausen to Dragonslayer and Dragonheart, up to recent Harry Potter films, and they all adhere to the classic myth of a dragon as a creature that is elemental."
Early in the process McIntosh and his team set some ground rules for bringing to life Saphira, the blue dragon who bonds with her human companion, Eragon.
"The goal was always to reference nature first — take the attributes of an animal that is regal, like a lion," explained McIntosh, who knew he had to strive for the kind of verisimilitude that made the scene on the ledge between the actress Naomi Watts and the computer-generated ape in last year's King Kong a showstopper. That meant favoring real animal behavior and adding only a sprinkling of anthropomorphic interpretation on top.
When Saphira is "in the air, we looked at eagles and how they soar," McIntosh said. "She's a creature of fantasy, but we had to assign her with attributes people have seen on other animals, so we went looking at everything from puppies to wildebeest."
Such range was necessary because, he explained, the audience sees Saphira from birth through adolescence to maturity, a far cry from other dragon movies, in which the creature is seen mostly as an adult antagonist, not a companion.
The most difficult challenge was not to make the dragon breathe fire but to make it speak. Remembering the brogue of Sean Connery spewing from the creature's mouth in Dragonheart, they knew they had to do better.
"In the book, and in the movie, there's this telepathic, symbiotic relationship," McIntosh explained of the fearsome, elegant Saphira and her human co-star, a teenage boy played by Edward Speleers. "You'll hear her voice, but we had to convey that in her facial movements, in her eyes."
Having worked on Jurassic Park 3 as lead character animator in 2001 — a lifetime away in special effects terms — McIntosh said he was confident that Eragon would strike even sophisticated viewers as something more than a recycling of computer algorithms that created real or imagined monsters of the past.
"As far as the world of visual effects that came out in 1993, we had just scratched the surface," he said, referring to the first Jurassic Park film. "And now we've been able to see this evolution, whether it's Gollum and King Kong and now Davy Jones," the half-man, half-crustacean co-star of the most recent Pirates of the Caribbean installment.
Stefen Fangmeier, Eragon's director, said the key to making a new kind of dragon epic was to take the mythology of the beast seriously. "Really the dragon movie had become kind of a figure that was a little bit ridiculous," Fangmeier said by phone from his home in the canyons north of Los Angeles. "The dragon films that were out there are ones that weren't necessarily that successful. I tried to look at, 'Why aren't they?"' On the one hand, he said, were movies like Dragonheart. "On the other side was Reign of Fire, with nasty reptilian creatures who didn't have intelligence. They were reduced to giant alligators. We needed to be right in the middle."
Fangmeier said the 22-year-old author of the Eragon novel, Christopher Paolini, had already given Saphira enough lore and mystery to sustain her as a character. He focused instead on one aspect: the business of dragon flight. To that end the filmmaking team spent a lot of time debating the degree to which Saphira's wings should or should not resemble the standard bat wing. Eventually they added some feathers, though not so many as to tip the creature toward the canine-looking dragon Atreyu from the 1984 fantasy movie The NeverEnding Story.
Hogarth said he was certain that people would continue to believe in dragons, whatever the level of realism brought to bear in Eragon."
"In young people it's sort of understandable," he mused. "What surprises me is the middle-aged civil engineer wanting to come across the Loch Ness monster."
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