DreamWorks knows How To Train Your Dragon to perfection
- 23 March 2010
- Gerard Wood
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III is an oddity on the Island of Berk, an inhospitable place some twelve days north of Hopeless and a few degrees south of Freezing to Death, located solidly in the Meridian of Misery. To his father’s everlasting shame, Hiccup is, well, a hiccup in a long line of crass, crude and, let’s face it, perfectly normal Vikings. Brainy when brawny is the norm, scrawny when almost everyone is gargantuan, Hiccup is a thinker when it’s drinking, not thinking that comes before (probably during) and after the action!
In short, and short he is, Hiccup is a misfit teen with some serious questions about the accepted way of things.
If there's one word to describe the way of things on Berk, that word would be harsh. The weather is foul, the land is unsuited to farming (and what does grow is tasteless, a lot like the locals), and then there are the pests. Dragons! Dragons like you’ve never seen them before, all shapes and sizes, and all of them with an insatiable appetite for livestock and destruction. The dragons take livestock and destroy the village (with a little unintentional help from Hiccup) and the Vikings fight the dragons. So why do the Vikings remain? Quite simply, if a little perversely, they enjoy it! Hiccup’s father, Stoick the Vast, is the definitive Viking: muscle and brawn, with an unquestioned hatred of dragons and a delight in slaying them. Killing dragons is a way of life and the Vikings set about it with relish and good humour.
In a nut shell, that’s the setting for How To Train Your Dragon, the latest 3D offering from DreamWorks Animation. Dragons take from Vikings, Vikings kill dragons, and there’s not much more to life if you’re from Berk. Unless you’re Hiccup.
Hiccup might be a misfit, but he too wants to be accepted and that means killing dragons, so he sets about it in his own unique way, using brains and ingenuity rather than brawn. But when the chance comes to kill the most feared of dragons, the Night Fury, destiny steps in and unable to kill the beast he befriends it, and the friendship between Hiccup and Toothless, named with characteristic humour, is the turning point for Vikings and dragon-kind.
DreamWorks has quite frankly outdone itself with How To Train Your Dragon. Directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois wrote the story loosely based on the 2003 book by Cressida Cowell and they’ve crafted something exceptional: charming, endearing, thrilling, in short, emotionally engaging. You’ll find the same humorous play with language that we’ve come to expect from DreamWorks in such classics as Shrek, but the humour this time around is less knowing than in Shrek, perhaps more subtle and whimsical. Unexpectedly, there is almost as much drama as humour and the script superbly blends the two, particularly in relationships that are both poignant and funny. A case in point is Hiccup’s relationship with his father, Stoick, a single parent who struggles with fatherhood and understanding a son who fails to meet any of his expectations.
The voice casting is almost faultless. Jay Baruchel is outstanding as a very droll Hiccup, Gerard Butler reinterprets his gruff and macho performance as Leonidas from 300 with great humour (and must have had a ball working on this movie), America Ferrera is excellent as Astrid Hofferson, Hiccup’s feisty and no-nonsense love interest (if he’s lucky), and Craig Fergusson captures with relish the crassness of Gobber the Belch, a seasoned warrior-blacksmith who typifies the good humoured if crude Viking warrior. I say almost faultless because the contrasting accents between the adults, all strong Scot’s brogue, and the teenagers, with their contemporary American speech and attitude, was initially perplexing, but the performances are so good that this is quickly accepted and, somehow, it works.
And yes, How To Train Your Dragon is animated 3D, and I have to say that it’s a relief that we seem finally to have left behind 3D gimmickry (in which things fly out of the screen for no good reason), using the technology instead to tell a story. The visual depth is stunning and the land and sea-scapes spectacular, with a harsh beauty. But it’s when Hiccup and Toothless take flight that the animators truly excel, with scenes of flight almost as exhilarating as those in Avatar.
If there’s anything not to like about How To Train Your Dragon, I’m at a loss to identify it, and for pure entertainment it’s simply unbeatable.
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