by Alice-Ginevra Micheli, Contributing Writer
As Disney begins to rethink their “reimagining” strategy, it looks like DreamWorks has decided to throw their own hat in the ring and bring to real life one of their most popular franchises involving a boy and his pet dragon: How to Train Your Dragon. With the original movie having come out over a decade ago, it’s unsurprising that the franchise’s massive success has sparked the idea of essentially making much more money from the same story, especially after the success of the aforementioned Disney ones. But was it all worth it?
Just like in 2010, the live action How to Train Your Dragon follows stumbling teen, Hiccup (Mason Thames), who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a deadly dragon, soon to be named Toothless, working together to bring humankind and dragonkind together to a new tomorrow.
Now, the immediate question on most people’s minds would be how this remake compares to the original, which would be closely followed by whether or not it was worth the extensive money, casting, and work. Not to mention a final question as to whether animation director — and director of the originals — Dean DeBlois would be able to make the necessary leap over to live action, and not fall into common animation-to-live-action pitfalls. To quickly answer: The film does fine, but perhaps not enough to justify its existence.
Beginning with the “human” performances, we have a relatively fine cast who seem to have watched the original a bunch of times, and then attempted to deliver their lines as similarly to that as they can — something that is innately possible due to the script being almost unchanged from the animation. Thames does fine as Hiccup, mimicking the animated version of his character in a way that is almost uncanny in its depiction. The same goes for Gerard Butler’s Stoick (who we can’t forget literally voiced the same character in the other version) and Nick Frost’s Gobber; both manage to perform very similarly — if not exactly as seen before — which kind of creates some weird moments of expression throughout the film. The same can be said for pretty much the entire ensemble, where it seems clear that DeBlois gave certain direction to his actors that was a little too cartoony for something of this nature.
Further, there are slight changes made to Astrid (Nico Parker) as a character, where they’d tried to give her more agency than she had before, which is fine as a concept, but ultimately poor in execution. While Parker does well enough, her character is quite empty, and almost pandering to women in the audience, calling to mind certain questions of gender bias that ordinarily haven’t been at the forefront of this particular kids’ dragon movie. This is especially the case when you consider where the story will eventually go with the relationship between Astrid and Hiccup, and who they end up being to one another. It ends up feeling like studio pandering to an audience who simply wasn’t asking for it.
It’s also worth mentioning that there is a clunkiness to the camerawork. Certain quick cuts and angle changes that one can get away with in an illustrated or computer-generated format are exceedingly more obvious and jarring when done so in a “real-world” setting. It’s not so terrible on a casual watch, but will likely become more evident the more someone sits down to watch it.
So with that said, was anything even changed in the adaptation? In a (couple of) words: Not really. While there’s been a slight change to dialogue here and there, and a slight motivation change for the lead female character, it’s not enough to create any sort of distance between this and the original.
In fact, upon reflection, it seems like the majority of this review was consistently comparing the original to the new version of this story. However, this is because the movie is almost a shot-for-shot remake of said original. Every scene, every line, every breath taken is almost identical, and including a new Viking elder character, or “realistic” dragons, is unlikely to make a fan of the franchise pick up this version for a rewatch, when the crisp, well-aging, animated version is literally right there.
Rating: It Was Just Okay
How to Train Your Dragon is currently playing in theaters
You can read more from Alice-Ginevra Micheli, and follow her on Instagram and Letterboxd