When Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park debuted in 1993, it was a technical achievement like no other. For the first time ever, computer-generated creatures interacted with actors on the silver screen through a combination of CGI, puppetry, and practical effects. With Industrial Light & Magic’s expertise, Jurassic Park changed cinema for the better by showing audiences what sci-fi could look like on screen through the power of CGI.
But while Spielberg revolutionized the movie industry with his sci-fi dinosaur epic and launched a franchise that’s still going over three decades later, a forgotten fantasy that arrived just a few years after Jurassic Park managed to do the same thing for the fantasy genre.
What makes a fantasy film? For me, the perfect fantasy film has to involve one very special thing: mythological creatures — namely dragons.
Dragons have always bewitched fantasy fans, particularly in Western literature. Seeing one come to life on the silver screen as a character, not just as a creature for the protagonist to slay, was unheard of in the early 1990s. That is, until the 1996 fantasy film, Dragonheart, appeared on the scene.
Set in a time of tyrannical kings and warring peasants, Dragonheart follows Bowen (Dennis Quaid), a knight who hopes to pass on his belief in chivalry and valor to his apprentice, the Saxon prince Einon (David Thewlis). During a revolt that leads to Einon’s father, the King, being slain, Einon suffers a critical injury, forcing Bowen and the prince’s mother to ask a dragon, later revealed to be Draco (Sean Connery), to save Einon’s life. Draco agrees, tying his heart to Einon’s, on the condition that Einon promises to be a just ruler. Years later, Einon is even worse than his father. Bowen, believing the dragon has falsely corrupted Einon, decides to take his vengeance by taking up arms as a dragonslayer.
As a child, I was enraptured by Dragonheart. Connery’s Draco was more than a creature; he was a hero, and his relationship with the jaded Bowen, once marked by animosity and later blossoming into comradeship and brotherhood, was easily the heart of this bittersweet story. But beyond its epic story, Dragonheart is an accomplishment by its very existence.
Despite Universal’s fondness for the script and story, the studio struggled to envision how to bring Draco to life, especially given its limited budget. At first Universal first turned to Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, known at the time for its work on Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. Gary Pollard, a sculptor who had previously worked on Alien 3, and his team raced against the clock to deliver miniature puppets, as well as a full-size animatronic head of Draco. The head, in particular, was considered quite the triumph for its ability to move its lips in a way that felt natural.
Unfortunately, Pollard’s efforts were all for naught.
“Although we worked through several consecutive days and nights to get this done on time,” Pollard later said in an interview, “they didn’t think it could move in a dynamic enough fashion.”
However, producer and filmmaker Raffaella De Laurentiis passionately believed in Dragonheart and, having seen Jurassic Park, felt that CGI could be the answer to the studio’s problems. So she turned to Industrial Light & Magic. The company assigned visual effects supervisor Steve Price and animators James Straus and Jim Mitchell to create Draco. Much like Pollard, they had very little time to do so — just two weeks.
Thankfully, the trio had an idea on how to create the dragon Universal needed to see without having to start from scratch.
“They took the T-Rex head from Jurassic and put a whole bunch of shapes on it, like a smile, a lip curl, and phonemes for ‘A-E-I-O-U,’ and James animated a proof-of-concept,” Rob Coleman, creative director of ILM’s Sydney studio as well as someone who had previously worked on Dragonheart as an animator, explains in a 2024 interview for Lucasfilm.
The result was electric. Universal was far more confident with this CGI model of Draco, and ILM went above and beyond to ensure the dragon would be able to be as expressive as Connery’s delivery of dialogue. They created their own program, Caricature (nicknamed Cari), which allowed them to animate a visual mask of a character’s face in record time. Before Cari, the process took much longer and often relied on trial and error. With Cari, ILM was able to focus on Draco’s face (arguably the most expressive part of the dragon) without having to worry about the rest of the body.
The effort to create Draco may have been tough, but the outcome — both as a film and in its technical achievements — proved worthwhile. Years later, there are plenty of dragons in media, with the most recent visual masterpieces of the wyrms being House of the Dragon’s Targaryen dragons like Syrax and Vhagar. While perhaps far more popular today than Draco, there’s no denying the blood, sweat, tears, and T.Rex that went into creating Dragonheart.
Dragonheart is available to purchase via Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Fandango, and Google Play.
