Firebreather debuted as a comic book miniseries created by Phil Hester and Andy Kuhn in 2003. Image Comics published the miniseries, followed by the ensuing one-shot issue the following year, and they started an ongoing comic series in 2008. With all the support and acclaim for the story, it’s little surprise that Firebreather got an animated adaptation movie on the Cartoon Network in 2010 and is making its way to Blu-ray next week.
Firebreather is a classic tale you’ve heard a million times before. The central character is high schooler Duncan Rosenblatt, the son of divorced parents Margaret and Belloc. And Belloc is a fire breathing dragon.
Wait, say what?
That’s right. Duncan’s dad is over a hundred feet tall and is part of a race of giant monsters called kaiju. I’ll let that and the inevitable “how did that work?” questions flow through your mind before I mention that the couple shares custody of Duncan, and Belloc spends his portion of the visitation trying to groom his son to be the king of the monsters. Duncan has inherited his mom’s humanity but has more than a few kaiju gifts as well, the abilities to fly and breathe fire chief among them. Pulled between his mother’s desire for him to live a normal life and his dad’s wishes for him to be a murder machine, Duncan finds himself center stage when two new monsters arrive on the scene and he realizes he’s the only thing standing between them and the destruction of his city.
Jesse Head voices Duncan in this new movie adaptation, while Dana Delaney and Kevin Michael Richardson play his parents. Dollhouse‘s Reed Diamond and 8 Simple Rules‘s Amy Davidson co-star. The movie is directed by Peter Chung, who previously has worked on MTV’s Aeon Flux animated series, as well as Rugrats and a segment in the animated anthology follow-up to The Matrix, 2003’s The Animatrix. The animation in Firebreather is CG, pretty much a standard for cartoon movies these days. For the most part it looks great, and the monster effects are a lot of fun. Some of the character models do occasionally come across as stiff, but it’s nothing that will break the movie.
The Blu-ray release includes the movie, as well as a deleted scene and some short features about the animatics and visual development of the movie. All in all, it’s a cool adventure that will appeal to fans of the comic, as well as to kids and probably to old school monster movie fans. Firebreather comes to home video on March 22, 2011.
