Review: 'How to Train Your Dragon'
That'll do, Toothless. That'll do.
The dragons are back! Those who follow my often quite personal movie reviews will know that the original film this live-action adaptation is based on, How to Train Your Dragon from 2010, is one of my three all-time favorite animated movies. Have you read my reviews closely enough to deduce the two others? Hint: I’m a big fan of Chris Sanders.
It was the story of the Viking kid Hiccup and how his empathy, kindness, and generally un-Viking-like qualities came to be his strength among the other big, burly, axe-wielding Vikings, who had a tradition, nay, an obsession, with hunting the wild dragons of the wilderness that constantly attacked their small Viking village to steal their sheep.
Being the son of the biggest, burliest, most axe-swinging-est Viking of them all, the Chief Stoick the Vast—then, and now again in the live-action adaptation, played by the man, the myth, the legend, Gerard "This is Sparta!!" Butler—life wasn’t exactly easy for the little guy.
Quick detour before I go on: right after writing those first three paragraphs, I was hit with intense stomach pain and rushed off to the local emergency room. Long story short, I got a nice, morphine-filled ride to the hospital in Oslo. Two days later, I was back home, one inflamed gallbladder and one giant gallstone lighter. If this affects how I write this review, I’m not sure. Expect increased painkiller-fueled gonzo, at the very least. But my editor (which is me, in this case) suggests I add this bit… and not more gallbladder-related humor. Come to think of it, I don’t know any gall-related jokes in English. Suggestions?
Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, Hiccup—here, played by Mason Thames. Well, with the local island community being attacked by dragons every other night, with burly Vikings, horned helmets and all, desperately trying to defend the sheep against their predations, it’s expected that every able-bodied Viking must grow up to become a fierce dragonslayer. And if they’re already grown in height, well then, they'll grow in width!
Not so for Hiccup, though. He just hasn’t got the Viking in him, as everyone keeps telling him, so he has to work as an assistant to Gobber the Blacksmith—here played by Nick Frost. And if you look at the animated film and wonder why his character is missing a different leg than in the original, well, Nick Frost had just undergone knee surgery prior to shooting the film, so you work with what you've got and change what you must, right? The more you know, and all that.
But in the most recent fierce dragon attack, Hiccup—much to the chagrin of his father Chief Stoick the Vast, his blacksmith mentor Gobber, and all the other Vikings, including the other dragonslayers-in-training kids (I’ll get to those in a moment)—wheels out his newest contraption: a twin-linked bola launcher. Or, in less nerd-speech, a kind of cannon that will shoot out two sets of three balls connected to sturdy rope in the hope of tripping up and downing any dragon it hits. And when the near-mythical "Nightfury"—the most dangerous and lethal dragon ever—makes an appearance, Hiccup sees his moment… he shoots and hits. And unlike many of his co-Vikings, he thinks, then acts.
With the other Vikings off in their longships on another search for the dragons’ nest, Hiccup is left in the care of Gobber to train with the other Viking kids to become dragonslayers. But what they do not know is that Hiccup, after that shot, left in search of the downed dragon, finding a wounded Nightfury. And quickly, empathy triumphed over tradition and fear, and a beautiful—and secret—friendship was born.
Sharing his time between befriending the Nightfury (which he calls Toothless due to its retractable teeth) and training to become a dragonslayer, using non-lethal tricks he learns from his secret interaction with the dragon, he quickly becomes one of Gobber’s best students.
The other kids watch in dismay as Viking traditions—most often revolving around shields, battle axes, and screaming madly at enemies—are dismantled before them.
His fellow students in the subtle art of dragon-slaying, you ask? They are wannabe S-tier student (and Hiccup’s crush) Astrid (played by Nico Parker), the rotund and nerdy Fishlegs (Julian Dennison), the self-proclaimed prince charming of the Viking world, Snotlout (Gabriel Howell), and not-at-all-similar twins Ruffnut (Bronwyn James) and Tuffnutt (Harry Trevaldwyn).
As Hiccup befriends Toothless, he secretly forges a prosthetic tail wing for him, and the two become one whole, with Hiccup becoming his rider. And if you’ve seen the original, you know how epic the first flight scenes are—perfectly captured in this new live-action adaptation.
And I think this is the time to put in a paragraph or so about the often-perceived elephant in the room, right? Live-action adaptations. There are so many opinions about this—from "cash-grabs that destroy childhoods" to "a new way to experience beloved animation films." For the most part, I tend to fall on the cautious yet positive side when it comes to these films.
The previous one I watched was the Lilo & Stitch one, which is the original of yet another one of my three favorite animated movies ever. However, while the film was entertaining, changes were made in a manner that both altered scenes and characters, leaving much of the original feel out of it. There were feels, of course, but not to the extent of the original.
With How to Train Your Dragon, director Dean DeBlois wanted to go a different route. Having directed the 2010 original with Chris Sanders, DeBlois had been clear about his initial dislike of live-action adaptations, and when asked to do it, he quickly said yes—because he thought if anyone should do it, it was him. And his approach was to make an almost beat-by-beat recreation, updating and adapting what was needed, but keeping the story, the humor, and the emotion from the original as intact as possible.
Did he succeed? I mean, the original is perhaps my favorite animated film of all time. Viking-ness is in my blood, so to speak, being a Norwegian, and I usually write for a Danish website. We learned this stuff in elementary school, after all. My big brother is even a modern-day neo-Viking. While he is the grumpier, more serious kind of Viking, I always wanted mine with a touch of Monty Python humor and horns in their helmets! Strange, right?
No, not so strange, really. I grew up spending more time in Dungeons & Dragons than most other kids. Dragons were always my favorites. I wanted to be a dragon rider. So watching the new How to Train Your Dragon, emotionally, I swung wildly from a jaded, arms-crossed skeptic muttering "this won’t recapture the magic" to a misty-eyed fan whispering "Yes! Toothless! My friend is back!" as if I’d just reunited with a childhood pet.
And when Hiccup and Toothless started to fly, I cried. I actually cried. This was perfect. And I thought, this was how you do a live-action adaptation. Present it to a new audience, but keep the magic, keep the scenes, and don’t change character and emotional beats just to update or to follow some of the current zeitgeist.
There will be those who hate this just because it’s a live-action adaptation, but there will be many more, I’m sure, of those who love this. People like me will sit there, grinning like idiots, as Hiccup and Toothless take to the skies in a story that is all about empathy, friendship, and the casting off of both prejudice and old traditions.
So, let’s get to the conclusion here before this review spills over and becomes a full-blown Viking saga. How to Train Your Dragon is, in my view, the best live-action adaptation of an animated movie I have ever seen. It’s like Dean DeBlois looked at Disney’s recent offerings, said, "Hold my mead!" and showed them how to do it—with a healthy dose of skepticism to this new-ish genre. I believe that you don’t have to make a lot of jarring changes to the source material—its characters, humor, emotions, and story—to make it fly!