By the middle/end of the 1970s, the Disney studio was in crisis. Walt had died relatively recently, and the conservative management who ran the company kept on consciously producing films they thought Walt would have made back in the 50s and 60s. As a result, nearly all of the films being produced, at least the live-action ones, were not just throwbacks; they were generally all quite stale with it. "Pete's Dragon" is one such film. It tries to be the next "Mary Poppins" but genuinely fails. Not only does it not live up to that film's legacy, but it hasn't really got any pizazz of its own.
The story concerns a young orphan named Pete who runs away from a cruel family of hillbillies with the help of his pet dragon Eliot. Along the way, Eliot, who can turn himself invisible, gets up to mischief, and hilarity ensues. The pair arrive in a small New England town, where Pete ends up staying with a kindly lighthouse keeper named Nora and her lovable drunken father. In keeping with the spirit of replicating "Mary Poppins", the titular dragon character is animated, and the best moments in the film tend to feature him. He is a cute and well animated creation, even if he doesn't quite fit seamlessly into the live-action world around him. However, the story overall is boring and introduces too many elements at the wrong time, and many scenes fail to move the plot along at all (including a scene where the lighthouse keeper and the evil doctor's assistant go to look for Eliot in the cave). Acting and character development are also consistently below average. The musical numbers tend to be overdone, and some of them are just downright awful. Though I saw the standard version many years ago, the version I last watched was the shortened version on the UK's Channel 5, which did a lot of good by shortening or even removing the most long-winded scenes (primarily the musical numbers), but even that didn't do much to diffuse some of the film's problems.
Let me state that I did not want to go out of my way to hate this film. I am a big fan of Disney, and I watched "Pete's Dragon" as a child a few times and I quite liked it (even if not to the same extent as "Mary Poppins" or "Bedknobs and Broomsticks"). However, as an intelligent adult, I can see hardly any worth in this film. It seems overall like a mismanaged and highly amateur attempt to make a "Disney classic" based on the elements of more successful previous films.
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