When Salvador Simó was a child he went to the cinema to see Indiana Jones or the Goonies movies and “he left the theater excited.” Now, the Catalan director has wanted to “recover that spirit of the adventure films of the 80s and 90s” with Dragonkeeper, an animated film based on the novels by the Australian Carol Wilkinson, which has kicked off the Festival of Malaga.
The competition’s commitment to opening this edition with an animated film seemed a bit radical, but Dragonkeeper deserves to be in competition at the main Spanish film festival. Simó has achieved his goal: Dragonkeeper excites and entertains.
Furthermore, the film promises to have a future far beyond Spanish borders. “We have made the film in co-production with China. It will be released in Spanish in Spanish-speaking countries, in Mandarin in China and in English in the rest of the world,” Simó explained in a press conference after the applauded first showing of the film.
Wilkinson’s novels about an orphan girl who, thanks to her magical powers, cares for a dragon in China 2,500 years ago during the Han dynasty, have been widely accepted by young readers around the world. When Simó read them, she knew from the first moment that he “wanted to turn them into animated films, not for the platform, but for the big screen.”
He has achieved it after seven years of work. “The pandemic slowed down the process, which is already very long and laborious. A day of work yields one second of film, two or three if you push hard, because animation is a slow motion task in which each gesture of the characters is studied with the utmost precision.”
And Simó wanted to give Ping, the young protagonist of Dragonkeeper, all the authenticity so that “she lives hand in hand with the viewer an emotional journey from her childhood as an orphan adopted by the servant of an evil and powerful man to being able to write her own destiny.”
The Dragonkeeper team has also taken care of every last note of the music, written by Arturo Cardelús from Los Angeles, and the color palette: “We have drawn it by hand because with a computer it is very artificial and we wanted to give an artistic touch and at the same time respect the veracity of the time in which the film is set,” Simó concluded.
