![]() ![]() At any rate, familiarity is not a problem for How to Train Your Dragon, which effectively proves that any narrative scenario, however musty, can serve as well as the most twisty, clever plot. In no time at all, Hiccup and the dragon - he names it Toothless - have formed a bond that doesn't sit well with Hiccup's enrollment at the island's dragon-slaying school, nor with his father's attempts to destroy the dragons' nest and rid the island of the creatures forever.Īmazing that it takes that many words to synopsise an unmistakably familiar story. Instead, he adopts the lame creature, rigging a device that will allow it to fly as long as he's on its back. Those eyes are exactly what keeps him from becoming the first Viking to ever kill this elusive beast, for no sooner does the dragon look into his face than Hiccup realises that he can't possibly take its life. The next day, he journeys to the deep forest where the dragon went down, and becomes the first Viking to ever see this elusive beast, a sleek black worm with bright green eyes. ![]() That changes on the night of a certain dragon battle, when Hiccup's widely-ridiculed mechanical weapon (another mark of the well-intentioned fuckup!) manages to take down the most infamous, deadly of all dragons, a Night Fury. Hiccup's dad is the great Viking chief Stoick (Gerard Butler), and like all reedy children of heroic fathers in kids' movies, the boy is a well-intentioned fuckup whose chief claim to fame among his peers is that he has an amazing knack for getting in the way. Set in a hazy time period when Vikings roamed the northern seas (and spoke in Scots accents), the film is the story of Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel, unexpectedly great), a reedy weakling kid on an isolated island where the main occupation appears to be fighting the armies of dragons that come by at regular intervals to steal the villagers' sheep (oddly, sheepherding does not appear to be much of an occupation on the island, nor any other domestic activity, which wouldn't be weird if Hiccup didn't bring our attention to it). Make no mistake, How to Train Your Dragon isn't as good as Lilo & Stitch: but if that's a sin, then there must be a lot of filmmakers in Hell. The look and some of the tone of that film is omnipresent in How to Train Your Dragon, which is also not a coincidence: DreamWorks has perhaps now discovered what Pixar has always known, which is that they key to great movies is giving great directors a free hand. Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois are best-known, certainly, for 2002's Lilo & Stitch, the best Disney animated feature of its decade, not least because it is the most cheekily unconventional (and whose worrying lack of comfortably "Disneyesque" notes led to executives who didn't quite know what to do with it). Or rather, one Disney veteran, and one guy who has floated around here and there but clocked some time at Disney over the course of the years. I wonder how much of a coincidence it is that How to Train Your Dragon, this miraculous picture, was directed by Disney veterans. Of all the signs and portents that we are drawing near to the end of human civilisation (floods! earthquakes! economic strife! global unrest!) none has scared me more than this: at last, DreamWorks Animation has made a great animated film a Pixar-quality film, if I dare say it, despite fear of my blasphemy bringing down the fist of an angry god.
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