How to Train Your Dragon

Dreamworks Animation has a pretty nice streak going as they open How to Train Your Dragon this weekend with the studio’s last three movies (Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar 2, and Monsters vs. Aliens) combining to make more than $1.6 billion globally. Sure, that’s not quite Pixar money, but it is way ahead of what Walt Disney Animation or other animation studios have done during the same period. It’s a nice bonus that the movies have been moderately well received by critics as well.

The pattern of Dreamworks’s long-term success has been a decidedly contemporary sentimentality with most titles chock-a-block with pop culture jokes and parodies. The more recent trend is action and adventure, and How to Train Your Dragon continues this with dragon battles and hyperkinetic flight scenes. Missing, however, is the pop culture—and the result is quite a lot of fun while at the same time feeling more timeless. It is a bit of a relief to know that seeing this movie again in a decade or two won’t require “Pop-Up Video”-style annotations to explain the jokes.

For those familiar with the book of the same name, be warned that this movie is a very loose adaptation of the book, introducing a much heightened level of conflict. No longer is the goal of the Viking village to capture and ride dragons, but rather to kill—and if possible, eradicate—them. The Isle of Berk is a remote ancient Viking outpost in the North Sea in which the villagers live under constant threat from marauding dragons that come to steal their sheep. Glory in battle against the dragons is very much the path to adulthood, and it doesn’t appear it’ll be an easy path for Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the teenaged son of the Stoick (Gerard Butler), the village’s chief and greatest warrior.

Hiccup (it is a belief of this village that an ugly name wards off bad luck) is eager to take on dragons, but he’s also clumsy and slight of build, the complete opposite of his father who clearly loves him but is also embarrassed by his efforts. Dragons come in a wide variety of types with different strengths and weaknesses, and during the movie’s opening dragon attack, Hiccup actually manages to bring down a dreaded “night fury” dragon, a type of dragon so powerful that not only has one never been captured or killed but it has never even been seen. Unfortunately for Hiccup, he did this when nobody was watching, and in the process of further embarrasses himself by setting fire to a significant portion of the village (as Hiccup notes in narration, due to the fire breathing dragons Berk is a very old village with a lot of very new buildings).

Shamed, Hiccup heads off by himself to find evidence that he actually succeeded against the night fury and eventually finds the dragon stuck in a pit, alive but unable to fly away due to having lost part of its tail in its fall. Unsurprisingly, Hiccup is unable bring himself to kill the crippled dragon, and soon a friendship blooms with the dragon now named Toothless. Hiccup has to then reconcile his newfound knowledge that dragons are not the malignancy everyone thinks they are, with the expectation that he’ll soon be killing dragons himself—as well as his father’s determination to finally eradicate the dragons once and for all.

Almost everything about the movie appears at first glance to be a mishmash of things that don’t seem like they should work, but somehow the very disjointedness plays in the movie’s favor. This is perhaps most apparently in the voice casting. It is simultaneously odd and compelling in that it’s difficult to imagine a single isolated culture that could simultaneously produce the voices and accents Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson (Gobber, the village’s blacksmith in charge of teaching dragon battle skils to the kids), Jonah Hill (Snotlout, a fellow youth), and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Fishlegs, another kid). Heck, it’s hard enough to imagine that our real earth has produced that variety of voice. It works, though, and if it is a bit of a disappointment that once again that an animated movie has been cast more on face recognition than on voice talents then at least none of the voices are so famous as to be distracting. Craig Ferguson may be the best thing in late night but it’s still probably true that most audience members will be unfamiliar with him.

The animation is also oddly different in style, but it also works. The characters, both human and dragon, are all very much cartoonish and stylized, but the scenery frequently strays far enough into photo-realism that it would be understand to wonder if the computer guys just dropped in real video of rough seas. It is an impressive feat to mix those modes so well that it generally still blends together into a cohesive whole.

To my eye, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders have also maintained a visual style from Lilo & Stitch, their last directorial partnership (they’ve also penned the script). First they continue to embrace a fuller human form in their character models; Hiccup isn’t bulky but he’s not really scrawny and angular as is so common in animated films, while many other characters are bulky without really being fat. A more noteworthy bit of recognition is Toothless, the dragon that Hiccup gets to know. If Stitch shapeshifted into a dragon, it is easy to imagine Toothless as the result, especially in the appearance of its head and mouth. It was a nice note of recognition, though obviously the Disney connection is not being promoted much (here at least; apparently it is front and center in Japan).

Though there is plenty of quiet time with Hiccup, How to Train Your Dragon is ultimately an adventure film and the action sequences take up a significant portion of the movie with three major set pieces. It is unfortunate that a lengthy montage of Hiccup learning how to fly on Toothless is visually so reminiscent of the similar sequence in Avatar (two reviews in a row referencing Avatar

The movie never really strays out of kids’ territory but it is more than enough fun that adults can enjoy themselves as well and while the morals of the story (yes, more than one) are standard they are presented with enough flair that you won’t feel lectured. How to Train Your Dragon does not extend the bar for any aspect of the genre but it operates at high levels across the board from voice acting to animation to drama and to comedy.