Dragons have been around for so long that some people have a hard time coping with the fact that they do not exist. 「I got some very strange e-mails from people who thought they were alive and kept in zoos and used for military purpose,」 said Peter J. Hogarth, chairman of the biology department at the University of York in England, describing the response to his work as a 「dragonology」 consultant on the 2004 Animal Planet television special 「Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real.」

Given the expectations, the filmmakers behind 「Eragon,」 the new dragon fantasy released this month by 20th Century Fox, knew they had to step carefully when it came to reinventing this particular legend.

「It was always a daunting task from the get-go,」 Glen McIntosh, the animation director who led the 「Eragon」 special effects team at Industrial Light and Magic, said in a recent telephone interview from his office in San Francisco. 「There are so many dragon movies, from Ray Harryhausen to 『Dragonslayer' and 『Dragonheart,' up to recent Harry Potter films, and they all adhere to the classic myth of a dragon as a creature that is elemental.」
Early in the process Mr. McIntosh and his team set some ground rules for bringing to life Saphira, the blue dragon who bonds with her human companion, Eragan.

「The goal was always to reference nature first – take the attributes of an animal that are regal, like a lion,」 explained Mr. McIntosh. That meant favoring real animal behavior and adding only a sprinkling of anthropomorphism.

When Saphira is 「in the air, we looked at eagle and how they soar,」 Mr. McIntosh said. 「She's a creature of fantasy, but we had to assign her with attributes people have seen on other animals, so we went looking at everything from puppies to wildebeest.」

Such range was necessary because, he explained, the audience sees Saphira from birth through adolescence to maturity, a far cry from other dragon movies, in which the creature is seen mostly as an adult antagonist, not a companion.

Stefen Fangmeier, 「Eragon's」 director, said the key to making a new kind of dragon epic was to take the mythology of beast seriously. 「Really the dragon movie had become kind of a figure that was a little bit ridiculous,」 Mr. Fangmeier said by phone from his home north of Los Angeles. 「The dragon films that were out there are ones that weren't necessarily that successful. I tried to look at, 『why aren't they?'」

On the one hand, he said, were movies like 「Dragonheart.」 「On the other side was 『Reign of Fire,' with nasty reptilian creatures who didn't have intelligence,」 he continued. 「They were reduced to giant alligators. We needed to be right in the middle.」

Mr. Fangmeirer said the 22-year-old author of the 「Eragon」 novel, Christopher Paolini, had already given Saphira enough lore and mystery to sustain her as a character. He focused instead on one aspect: the business of dragon flight. To that end the filmmaking team spent a lot of time debating the degree to which Saphira's wings should resemble the standard bat wing. Eventually they added some feathers.

Mr. Paolini, who was 19 when he wrote his first dragon story (the success of 「Eragon」 has spawned a trilogy published by Random House), had not yet seen the film when reached by telephone at his home in Paradise Valley, Montana. But he said he hoped, above all, that the efforts to preserve the believability of the myth had succeeded. 「The thing with fantasy is, you have to take it seriously,」 he said. 「Like in 『Excalibur,' or Polanski's version of 『Macbeth.' That's the kind of movie where there could be a dragon coiled up somewhere. The filmmakers don't sneer at it because it's a kid's story.」

Introduction to the movie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eragon_(film)