“Not a passion-free adaptation” – Review: How to Train Your Dragon

How to Train Your Dragon is a faithful adaptation of the original animated film from the same director, Dean DeBlois. It captures the same story and does a fairly good job of recreating the stylized look of the animated characters for the big screen. Which begs the question, what’s the point?

Disney has spent the better part of a decade remaking many of its iconic animated works into live-action, with mixed success if we’re being generous. Many of them fail to keep the same spirit as their animated originals and make story changes that are often to the detriment of the themes and storytelling.

Now, Dreamworks has gotten onboard the remake train with one of their most beloved properties. They largely avoid many of the same mistakes that plague the Disney films. They rely on on the same creatives that were involved with the original, and Gerard Butler even returns to play the viking leader Stick.

Yet apart from more diverse casting and aiming for a certain fidelity to realism that results in overly dark shots (a common problem with modern blockbusters), there is essentially nothing to differentiate this from the original film. How to Train Your Dragon hits many of the same beats that make the first movie endearing. Seeing the protagonist Hiccup form a bond with Toothless is charming, and Mason Thames does a good job playing off a CGI dragon. The costume designers do a fairly good job of translating the impossibly large, broad figures of the Vikings into a live-action context. The dragons themselves look good, too. Seeing finished special effects is a pleasure, with only a few flying shots lacking believability.

It has been merely 15 years since the original movie, and six years since the last animated film. There isn’t a huge generational gap to bridge. Nor does this story benefit from looking more realistic; if anything, the movie suffers from losing the visual stylization of animation. While this filmmaking team does a much better job of translating that than Disney remakes usually do, this still feels too much like something we already have. There are no story changes that enhance the film or add to the maturity. The film may be darker visually, but there is hardly anything to say that it is darker thematically. The central themes of xenophobia and learning to embrace those different from us are intact, but they do not operate any differently.

Again, this movie was an enjoyable experience, but it felt like a largely pointless exercise since there is nothing to differentiate it from the animated film. While money may always be the driving factor for mainstream Hollywood films, and having a family movie to occupy kids’ time always answers a demand, one always hopes for something more, even in the commercial system. This isn’t a passion-free adaptation, but one wishes it was far more ambitious.

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