Pete's Dragon a soaring, heartfelt wonder

Pete (Oakes Fegley) and Elliot meet in Pete's Dragon. Image courtesy Disney.

A few days of processing have not yet helped me come to grips that the reboot to Pete's Dragon is a legitimately wonderful film. Pete's Dragon, the Disney film with the doofy looking animated dragon and little else memorable about it has spawned a real piece of art, a heartfelt ode to family and understanding with nuance and depth. Pete's Dragon – again, Pete's Dragon – has inspired a film that is great and charming and loving and nuanced.

Not that this modern incarnation of the story of an orphaned boy (Oakes Fegley this time) and his friend/guardian/dragon Elliot living in the woods near a town called Millhaven completely eschews its source material. Rather, Pete's Dragon thrives on the old school live-action Disney lineage it inherited and uses it as a means to keep away from the horrifying. Films like Escape to Witch Mountain, Freaky Friday, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and, of course, the original Pete's Dragon are often campy to the bone, placing characters into odd situations and having them adapt quickly with a strange sense of humor about the whole thing. And, like those films, the characters in Pete's Dragon (played by Bryce Dallas Howard, Wes Bentley, Karl Urban, Oona Laurence, Robert Redford and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) lack a true depth of malice to them, as any villainy they may possess is overwhelmed by the care they have for one another. Urban, the character closest to serving as a big bad, ultimately abandons his selfish intent once the risk of injury to his family becomes a reality. Then again, those other films didn't get quite so deep with their characters, one of the many ways Pete's Dragon separates itself from the older fare. The movie very much employs that goofy retro vibe as a tool, it ultimately sheds the tackiness prohibiting those films from being more than footnotes in Disney's catalog (despite my unabashed love for Bedknobs and Broomsticks). Unlike those other movies, Pete's Dragon is fun and has heart sprinkled with bits of sadness.

Yet it remains strange for Pete's Dragon, of all the remakes and reboots that have come and gone in the last few years, to be this beatific and engaging. It's an unexpectedly wonderful film offering heart, fantasy and a touch of the blues to a genre otherwise intently focused on unearned happiness and glee. The lives of the central pairing are in equal turns light and sad, the joyful glee of gallivanting and flying together undercut slightly by a sense of loneliness they share. They're effectively alone together, two beings relying on each other for fulfillment, survival and joy. Director David Lowery and co-writer Toby Halbrooks have shown how the darkest parts of childhood – the sense of loneliness one feels when the universe stops paying attention to a solipsistic soul – is balanced by a loving, caring and sometimes unconventional family. There's a moment late in the film that summarizes this, when a few characters a series of hugs between characters shortly after a perilous moment. Emotionally, the scene is effective – viewers may begin to combat all of the feels arriving at once – and it serves a practical character development beat to boot. It's the symbolism though, the expression of a major theme in the film in a quiet yet powerful way, that makes it such a devastating moment despite the uplift it represents. Sometimes its nice to enjoy getting crushed emotionally so thoroughly.

Again, all of this from a remake of Pete's Dragon. It's often astounding what people can conjure with a premise as silly as mishaps among a boy and a poorly animated dragon. The filmmakers, however, realize having a dragon around offers a gateway to some form of great adventure. They lift a little from fare like The NeverEnding Story and How to Train Your Dragon to show the majesty that is riding free in the sky, unburdened by the weight of the world or the limits of imagination. There's a sense of magical romanticism to the whole engagement, as the concept of flying upon a dragon's back has a certain allure and majesty to it not associated in other forms of flight.

The filmmakers depict the arising joy beautifully, sharing the wonderment with the viewers and offering watchers, Elliot and Pete a few moments of fun to leave take a break from the sadness of their situation. Neither the absolute joy of escapism nor the crushing heartbreak of loss and disappointment take precedence in Pete’s Dragon. They work in harmony with the other, the heart feeding life to the soul and the soul providing the motivation for the heart to keep living. It’s what makes Pete’s Dragon so terrific in the first place, as it can be difficult to find a movie at peace with itself like this one is.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 102 minutes

Genre: Family

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Target audience: Families in need of a just-before-school-starts activity.

Take the whole family?: This movie will bother really young kids – one young boy proclaimed it to be too scary during the opening sequence – but kids older than 7 should be fine.

Theater or Netflix?: There are far worse ways for families to avoid a hot summer afternoon.

What is it with Disney and feral children?: This is the third Disney property to feature a child raised in the woods by animals in the last 12 months, joining The Good Dinosaur and The Jungle Book. That the three characters have lost their families too makes a lot of sense; the company has a weird obsession with orphans, and kids who grow up in the wilderness are the most in need of saving from a strong family unit.

Watch this as well?: Some of those old Disney films, like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Freaky Friday and Swiss Family Robinson, are at least a little fun to watch, albeit outrageously dated as that last one is. A couple of ’80s films, Don Bluth's animated classic The Secret of NIMH and the aforementioned NeverEnding Story, share this film's sad vibe and will very much freak a few kids out in the process.