How To Train Your Dragon

How To Train Your Dragon

Lilo and Stitch is my second favourite non-Pixar Disney film, behind Emperor’s New Groove. The creators of Stitch are behind How To Train Your Dragon (HTTYD), evident in the design of the main dragon Toothless, with its flat, cuddly shark ’s head and bestial traits variously showing behaviour associated with cats, dogs and bats. Whilst it’s heartening that despite the often told coming of age story, the film avoids the usual anthropomorphic tendencies with Toothless being a definite animal.
The first thing that you notice in HTTYD is the accents, and while Gerard Butler fits his role as our hero’s father, village chief, with “SPARTA” sized gusto, it seemed a weird choice to make the Scandinavian vikings Scottish. This will likely go over the heads of most of the intended audience who are just as likely not to notice this as the lack of raping and pillaging, but there are bound to be a few nerdy boys and girls telling mum and dad that vikings weren’t from Scotland. The nerdy boy lead, of course, is American, and curiously sounds quite old and neurotic for a ten year old Scottish viking boy (the character Hiccup is played by teen comedy regular Jay Baruchel who looks younger than his 28 years).
Laughs are there but not plentiful, the fellow dragon slayers in training are broad stereotypes including competitive twins, a knuckle-headed braggart and a tomboy love interest, thrills and spills are relatively low-key (flight feels more threatening than the dragons themselves) an the creature design for the various types of dragon smacks a little of Pokemon and above all, the story of a misunderstood outsider discovering their true worth is age-old in children’s movies (in this case the warrior chief’s son Hiccup is embarrassingly poor as a trainee dragon slayer, but finds another way to deal with the swarms of dragons that plague their village).
Despite all these little bugbears HTTYD is an enjoyable film with enough going on to keep the older children’s film fan interested.