Directed By: Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders
Starring: Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, America Ferrera, & Craig Ferguson
MPAA Rating: PG
My Rating: 9 / 10
It's a rare occasion when we get one truly great animated film in a year. But, it's nearly impossible for us to get not one, but two great ones. Fortunately, that has happened in 2010. The first was Toy Story 3, and the second is now How to Train Your Dragon. As I've been making a mad dash to see as many Oscar contenders as I can before the big night (and to prepare for the highly-anticipated and esteemed...at least by me...Crooked Shoes Awards), one film I really wanted to check out was this one. While unimpressed with pretty much all of the marketing (It didn't click with me.), I was surprised by the overwhelming love it got from critics, and even more surprised by its box-office gross. Clearly, if any film was going to be able to go head-to-head with the formidable Toy Story 3 come Oscar night, it was this one. Now, I know why. Packed with exciting action scenes, heartfelt relationships, and some of the best animation I've ever seen, How to Train Your Dragon is a surprising and beautiful film that, like Toy Story 3, symbolizes everything I love and admire about animated films.
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III (Jay Baruchel) is just about the dorkiest guy in the Viking village...a big problem since it's populated with hungry dragons, and since his father, Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler), is the greatest dragon slayer there ever was. To prove himself to his father (and to hopefully get a date), Hiccup sneaks out during a dragon ambush and shoots a Night Fury dragon, the most dangerous and feared of all dragons, down from the sky. The next morning, when he finds the dragon, he can't bring himself to kill it...and instead, names it Toothless and keeps it as a pet. As the war between the Vikings and the dragons intensifies, Hiccup realizes that dragons are not the terrible beasts they thought them to be...rather, they are helpless servants of a much bigger, more evil dragon that they must feed constantly, lest they be killed. Can Hiccup convince the other Vikings to join forces with the dragons against a common enemy, in order to create a peaceful coexistence between the two worlds?
At its heart, How to Train Your Dragon is the story of a young boy who doesn't fit in, and must try to change his world with his own individuality. This is the kind of material that Dreamworks would normally pollute with dull pop culture references and lame scatological humor. Fortunately, they seemed to recognize the poignancy of the story, because this is one of their few films that is actually comparable to (and, in some cases, better than) the classics created by Disney/Pixar. While Dreamworks usually makes films that are flash-in-the-pan affairs, catering to the audience of right now (Pop culture references age badly within months, after all.), rather than creating lasting films that will withstand the test of time, How to Train Your Dragon is perhaps their most valiant effort yet. Directors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders clearly understand that, when working with animation, you are not making a film any different than a live-action one. To paraphrase Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich, your characters might be animated, but they have to have something human to say.
On top of its touching story, How to Train Your Dragon is brought to life with lush, gorgeous animation. Colorful, extravagant, and meticulously-detailed, it often consumed me in its striking visuals. The dragon designs are creative and brought to life with a fresh animation style. Usually, humans in animated films look, at least, a little awkward. Those in Dragon don't fully escape this, but they are designed to be thoroughly cartoonish anyway, so they come off feeling almost intentionally weird-looking. Some images are so striking, you won't soon forget them, as in the final showdown against the evil dragon, shown in parts via silhouettes in the cloud-covered sky. DeBlois and Sanders put time and thought into each scene, and thus the film really pops off the screen, in a way that most animated films fail to. If you can't tell, I really liked this film. It's one of the few family films that work well for both children and adults. Plus, parents have nothing to worry about when letting their children see it, since the filmmakers wisely and thankfully avoided any dragon fart jokes or thinly-veiled sexual references. That, in and of itself, deserves a warm round of applause.
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