"How to Train Your Dragon" Review

"Everything we know about you guys is wrong."
Woah.

Review's under the break as usual, guys. This one was a doozy.

DreamWorks Animation has a long, long history of not impressing me. They struck gold early on in the 2000s with Shrek. I liked it a lot, especially for how well it managed to parody and subvert typical fairy tale tropes, plus it had a great cast at the time. Then, they oversaturated the franchise with sequels upon sequels, only one of which I found good. Everything else DreamWorks seemed pretty disinteresting, though I just blame the 2000s jitters on it, since Disney had a really weird time of it, too.

But, now we come upon How to Train Your Dragon, released in 2010 to resounding applause from... pretty much everybody. The thing's got a 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That's crazy. (Fun fact: it still didn't beat out the Pixar feature of that year since that feature was, you know, Toy Story 3. Sorry, DreamWorks. Really good try, but you can't beat Toy Story.) I admit, I was surprised when I found out the numbers, but it intrigued me enough that I rented the film out to give it a shot.

It delivered. Let me explain how.

Our hero is one Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, a physically-inept boy that's very clever with building things and engineering contraptions. Unfortunately, he happens to live in a society of literal Vikings, where machismo is king and your worth is measured by your ability to hunt and kill dragons, which the Vikings had been fighting for centuries. Jay Baruchel plays our hero, giving him an appropriately droll and sarcastic overtone. Hiccup's obviously not thrilled at being the way he is in a society that treasures muscles, much to the disappointment of his father, the Viking chieftain, played by Gerard Butler.

Hiccup's a wonderful character, giving justice to a social misfit who desperately wants to fit in with everyone else, but is just incapable of doing so. To this end, he resolves to capture and kill a dragon to prove his worth. He manages to snag a Night Fury, one of the most dangerous types of dragons, purely by accident. However, he finds himself unable to kill the dragon and eventually befriends the reptile, christening him Toothless. I could go on and on about how well the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless works, but you can just look at the header image to see it for yourself. They're adorable, droll, and they care for each other. It just works. This leads Hiccup down the path to realizing that maybe dragons aren't so bad after all.

The other Vikings include Craig Ferguson as Hiccup's mentor, Gobber, various talents as the voices of Hiccup's classmates in the dragon-fighting academy, and America Ferrera as Astrid Hofferson, the resident love interest. Funny thing about Astrid is that she's an awful lot more complex than she seems at first, and the chemistry between her and Hiccup just works.

You may have noticed a pattern by now. A large part of this movie just works for some reason. Like there's this incredibly amazing thing that's just in every single frame of this movie that makes it absolutely endearing. The animation is probably part of it. I wasn't a fan of the art design at first, but seeing it in motion won me over. It's gorgeous, probably some of the best work DreamWorks has done in a feature film. The fire and the dragons and the wind, you can feel it. And the music is just spot on (no songs, though; this isn't Disney!). It really manages to capture what's important about a scene and transpose it audibly.

I also really love the world building in this movie. Anyone who knows my taste in fiction universes knows I love little details. And there's so much of it in this movie! The relationship and history between the dragons and the Vikings are drawn so well. And the types of dragons are fleshed out to an extent you really wouldn't expect. Even the methods of fighting against dragons and the nature of dragons themselves are explored. It's surprisingly compelling stuff.

I don't really have much else to say! The movie's great and it works on so many levels. Not much to say about meta commentary, no big speeches on how it's subversive or gives a deeper message or anything like that. It's just a damn good movie that stands on its own legs without needing anything else. It doesn't need anything else. It just feels special and it works. They knocked this one out of the park.

I give How to Train Your Dragon nine lightning-and-death-Night-Furies out of ten.

9.0/10

If you want to know whether I thought it was better than Tangled, my opinion is that, no, it is not better than Tangled. Want to know why? Well, it's for the simple reason that Tangled is just so "my childhood" that it's ridiculous. I love Disney. Am I biased? Yes. But I prefer Tangled to this movie for the same reason I prefer Star Wars to Star Trek. Grew up on it.

See you guys next time.