Review: The How to Train Your Dragon Movies Might Not Have Been Accurate to the Books, But They Are Awesome (Spoilers)

I’ve been meaning to do a post about How to Train Your Dragon because it was one of those franchises that I absolutely loved as a kid, but never got around to until know. I suppose it’s because there are three movies, five spinoff shows/specials, and the book series that it was based off of, all of which (referring to the movies and shows) build on Hiccup’s character and the understanding of his motives, making it hard to do just one review of one season or one movie. Even the books are kind-of hard to review in light of much more well-known movies since they differ in so many ways. Nevertheless, I’m going to try to give my review of the three movies without getting too much into the spinoff shows that honestly serve to give a lot more context to the movies.

#1: Hiccup and Astrid

I could do an entire post about why these two are another enemies-to-lovers story that works really well considering how they interact with each other through the entire franchise, but I’ll try to keep it short and sweet for now.

Hiccup and Astrid are two characters that are integral to each other. At the beginning of the first movie, Hiccup is seen as a scrawny weakling who’s a disappointment to his father and he’s bullied quite a lot by the other kids. This lasts until he captures Toothless and starts acing all of his dragon training lessons thanks to what he learned from him. This makes Astrid jealous because she used to be the best at fighting dragons, one thing leads to another, and she finds out about Hiccup’s befriending Toothless. From there, we get a beautifully orchestrated scene where she learns that not all dragons are bad, they can be trained, and it’s at this point that she starts falling in love with Hiccup, who has had a crush on her for a while. Towards the end of the movie, she helps encourage Hiccup when all seems lost and helps his character arc from being the runty misfit to being seen as the future chief of Berk.

In the second movie, Hiccup and Astrid have been aged up considerably, five years having passed from the events of the first movie to the events of the second movie. She still plays a crucial role in being Hiccup’s voice of reason and is his most outspoken supporter. Their playful banter in the beginning of the movie is adorable as it’s clear that she’s a loving, openminded, and supportive girlfriend and Hiccup adores her. Finally, in the third movie, her supportiveness continues, and they get married, ending the character arc that Hiccup has been on since the beginning of the trilogy.

#2: The Animation

The animation gets progressively better as the series goes on, but that isn’t to say that the animation is bad in the first movie. At the time the first movie was made, Dreamworks was in competition with Disney when it came to animation. That meant that when they got the idea to make HTTYD 1, they made sure to give it 110%, even going to different real-life locations to make sure things looked realistic. One of the people working on the first movie even put a piece of tape on his cat’s tail to see how it would react so he could figure out how to animate Toothless when Hiccup put the new fin on his tail.

However, the most painstaking part of the entire animation process was animating characters’ hair. Great attention to detail was put into this and it took three months to animate Stoick’s beard. In the second and third movies, you can even see the peach fuzz on Hiccup’s face in different lightings.

As if that wasn’t awesome enough, you can see how characters change and grow throughout the story by how they’re dressed. Hiccup’s outfit changes more so he can always be on Toothless when he needs to be, but Astrid’s outfit changes quite noticeably throughout the entire series as she becomes less tense and warlike and more feminine. In the beginning, her hair is shorter and darker, she’s wearing eyeliner, and has spikes everywhere, but towards the end of the trilogy, she loses some of the spikes, stops wearing eyeliner, is less tense, grows her hair out, and just looks more elegant.

#3: The Score

The musical score has become one of the most recognizable scores in cinema history. Its timing is perfect and serves to highlight the parts of the movie that are essential to the plot or are highpoints worth remembering. For something in a kids’ movie, it gets a 10/10.

Until next time,

M.J.