If you look at every ancient civilization, you'll find that they all have one thing in common. No, not slavery. Well, they do have that in common, too, but all of them have dragons in their folklore. Large, reptilian beasts that breathe fire and generally cause trouble for everyone that isn't flame retardant. Dreamworks's "How To Train Your Dragon" is a nice spin on the old tale.
Cut to a quaint Norse village, filled with houses made of wood and hay and generally looking very Vikingish. This village juts out into the water on a peninsula and as the narrator explains, it snows most of the year, but generally is a nice place to live...if you exclude the dragons, of course. Every so often the village is attacked by various species of nasty, toothy dragons looking to steal sheep and burn houses - which is kind of ironic because that's always what I picture Vikings doing when they go off to pillage and rape (the Viking national past-time). All the Vikings in the village look like the characters from "Ax-men", which I suppose fighting off dragons all the time might do to you.
They all look like big, burly loggers except for one: Hiccup (Jay Baruchel). He is as scrawny as you can get with a Viking diet (most likely modeled after the actor himself), and being the runt of the litter, he doesn't have the muscle strength to kill dragons. This is very disappointing for him because his dad, Stoic (Gerard Butler), kills dragons as easily as you or I eat a bag of chips. Hiccup, not being blessed with Schwarzenegger muscles, was blessed with brain power. To make up for his inability to swing an ax, Hiccup uses a catapult he invented to shoot down the most dangerous dragon of all: a night fury. When he finds the downed night fury, Hiccup finds he can't kill it and instead lets it go and nurses it back to health.
Dreamworks is no Pixar but every once in a while they get it right and "How To Train Your Dragon" is the right way to do things. I was absolutely captivated by Hiccup's dragon. Any recent comparison would be the bird from "Up". He just charms your socks off. Throughout the whole movie, as Hiccup learns to ride the dragon (whose name is Toothless), I kept thinking to myself, "I want one, I want one, pleeeeease dear God, hook me up with a dragon." Toothless, although never speaking a word, is the most important character in the movie by far, and provides the most fun.
"How To Train Your Dragon" can get pretty cheesy at points, but you can easily let it slide. I did, because in the end I truly felt for each of the characters. It is not an Oscar-winning movie, but it is a good, solid film, with endearing characters, fantastic animation, and a nice twist ending that keeps it out of sappy Disney territory.
Gosh, I want a secret dragon that lives in my woods that I can train and ride all day, it is like the ultimate kiddy dream.
3 out of 4 stars
-Christopher O'Connell
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