Shean Marshall stars as Pete, an orphan who finds himself under the protection of a magical dragon named Elliott when he is pursued by his adopted family he ran away from.
I don’t like Pete’s Dragon. It’s one of Disney’s many films in the 1970s that lacks the magic audiences had come to know and expect from the company and shows just how out of touch it had become. The film is a complete mess with way too much going on, pointless musical numbers, unlikeable characters, and bad acting.
Not ony does the film have its main plot involving the main characters but there’s a side plot that includes one of th emain characters and a tertiary character who has their own plot in an dof themselves. While they all do converge on each other to become one, the film becomes bloated by its halfway point making it difficult to care about anything happening. The musical numbers don’t help either. They feel pointless, existing only to provide unnecessary padding. Few songs in this film are at all memorable and the rest are entirely forgettable. They all drag on too. More than half seem as if they should have ended quite a while before they actually did. It feels as if the filmmakers were unsure how to transition from one scene to the next and instead of trying to make the story better and reduce the bloat, they put in a rather lengthy song to serve as an awkward transition to whatever they had planned next.
The characters are also mostly unlikeable as well. There are only two or three who are able to employ any sense of logical reasoning and others are completely dense to the point of obnoxiousness. Many characters exhibit this in their belief that Pete is causing damage perpetuated by an invisible Elliot. Not only is the mess not something a child would even be able to do, but one character blames Pete for something she was clearly able to see wasn’t him. Further, while he is one of the smarter characters in this film, Pete spends nearly all of the film being whiny and unpleasant. Elliott comes off as the only somewhat enjoyable character and he’s barely in the film.
A majority of the actors appear like they don’t want to be in this film either. The only one who gives a somewhat decent performance is Rooney whose best scenes are in his introductory musical number. Everybody else’s performances make it clear they had no interest in this film and only wanted to act in something by Disney. The worst performance is Marshall as Pete who is unable to make anything believable.
Pete’s Dragon an awful and boring waste of film with the only memorable aspects being some songs which can easily be heard on their own. Listen to those but skip the movie.
Release date: Nov. 3, 1977
Based on: “Pete’s Dragon” (unpublished short story by Seton I. Miller)
Directed by: Don Chaffey
Starring: Helen Reddy, Jim Dale, Mickey Rooney, Red Buttons, Jeff Conaway, Shelley Winters, Jane Kean, Jim Backus, Sean Marshall, and Charlie Callas
Nominated for
Academy Awards
- Best Music, Original Song (For the song “Candle on the Water.”)
- Best Music, Original Song Score and Its Adaptation or Best Adaptation Score
Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA – Saturn Awards
- Best Fantasy Film
- Best Supporting Actor
- Best Costumes
Golden Globe Awards
- Best Original Score – Motion Picture