REVIEW: How To Train Your Dragon

BEEN THERE...

It’s vacation time for kids, so movies like How To Train Your Dragon are just the thing. But a kid has to be, maybe below 10 to enjoy it—especially the 3D version, and the accompanying adults might just get bored. It’s not at all a bad film, but too standardized and lacking in the flights of imagination that some recent animation films like Up and Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs managed to soar with.

The animation is fantastic, but then this is the area that DreamWorks excels in (though Pixar movies are always better). Their films are cute, clever, funny, have a nice li’l message tucked in, but stop just short of dazzling – think Ratatouille and Wall E, and the difference stares at you in the eye.

How to Train Your Dragon has been directed by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders and adapted from the book by Cressida Cowell – which shows that children’s literature is fuelling children’s films, a big lacuna in India.  A smart Viking called Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) lives in a pretty village called Berk constantly under threat of attack by fire-spewing dragons. Why would anyone name their son Hiccup?  Well, the dad’s called Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler) and is a hulky dragon hunter and there’s also the dragon master Cobber (Craig Ferguson), a mentor figure.

Hiccup doesn’t have his dad’s brawn or dragon-slaying skills, but does manage to shoot down a dragon.  When he finds the wounded beast in the forest, he can’t bring himself to kill it. He names the dragon Toothless and befriends it; Toothless in turn, teaches the boy that all dragons are not to be feared, and that humans should not try to annihilate them.  There is a message there, about understanding alien cultures, if a viewer wants to interpret it that way.  Kids could be made to understand through the symbol of the dragon, that the ‘other’ is not so different or scary; like Hiccup realizes that dragons are just like humans in many ways.

There are kid-pleasing scenes of Hiccup riding on Toothless's back and swooping through the hills and valleys—even finding themselves in a dragon ‘traffic’ jam in one scene.  The dragon is not made to talk like humans or in the Scottish accents of some characters, but the animators have given him a wide range of ‘readable’ expressions and an almost feline body language.

There isn’t much of a story, really, and there has to be a good vs. bad dragon denouement, and the old character graph of a boy coming of age, impressing Astrid the cute tomboy (America Ferrera), and learning how to be his own self in a macho warrior world. A lot to pack into a kiddie flick.

Comments

[Watch How To Train Your Dragon]

This movie will always be my favorite, it wasn't there to prove anything, it wasn't try to impress, but it did so in its own way. We drew ourselves into all the characters. Fantastic Movie !!