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#155 - How to Train Your Dragon
Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, 2010
In a world where Vikings are constantly at war with dragons, the misfit son of a village chieftain captures a dragon instead of killing it and instead begins to train it.
I had high hopes for How to Train Your Dragon. Supposedly the film that marked DreamWorks Animation moving away from the lightweight absurdity of films like Bee Movie and Shark Tale into more creatively mature territory and being somewhere on par with the best of Pixar, it made sense that I would expect this to be amazing. Of course, high expectations are nothing if not difficult to fulfil, and How to Train Your Dragon, good film though it was, didn't quite match my expectations. I guess a lot of that is due to its all-too-familiar core narrative about an unlikely hero doing something completely different to the rest of his peers and driving the conflict as a result. I know I shouldn't expect anything too complex from a family film like this one, but this narrative in particular has been in a lot of the major animated films recently and it's distracting how, for all the visual flair and whatnot on display, DreamWorks and even Pixar have been reusing it without much in the way of interesting variation. It doesn't necessarily mean the film as a whole is bad, but it definitely puts extra pressure on the rest of the film to deliver.
Fortunately, How to Train Your Dragon does deliver in virtually every other regard. The characters are decent enough in terms of development and animation, though none of them are quite as funny as I'd hoped they would be. It was a pleasant surprise to see the credits and note that Roger Deakins served as a visual consultant because the film looks as good as virtually any live-action film he's shot. The animation is nice and fluid and both the settings and characters are well-realised. Though I wasn't as amazed by the film as I thought I would be, I still thought it was a decent film that realised a sufficient amount of its considerable potential.
Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, 2010
In a world where Vikings are constantly at war with dragons, the misfit son of a village chieftain captures a dragon instead of killing it and instead begins to train it.
I had high hopes for How to Train Your Dragon. Supposedly the film that marked DreamWorks Animation moving away from the lightweight absurdity of films like Bee Movie and Shark Tale into more creatively mature territory and being somewhere on par with the best of Pixar, it made sense that I would expect this to be amazing. Of course, high expectations are nothing if not difficult to fulfil, and How to Train Your Dragon, good film though it was, didn't quite match my expectations. I guess a lot of that is due to its all-too-familiar core narrative about an unlikely hero doing something completely different to the rest of his peers and driving the conflict as a result. I know I shouldn't expect anything too complex from a family film like this one, but this narrative in particular has been in a lot of the major animated films recently and it's distracting how, for all the visual flair and whatnot on display, DreamWorks and even Pixar have been reusing it without much in the way of interesting variation. It doesn't necessarily mean the film as a whole is bad, but it definitely puts extra pressure on the rest of the film to deliver.
Fortunately, How to Train Your Dragon does deliver in virtually every other regard. The characters are decent enough in terms of development and animation, though none of them are quite as funny as I'd hoped they would be. It was a pleasant surprise to see the credits and note that Roger Deakins served as a visual consultant because the film looks as good as virtually any live-action film he's shot. The animation is nice and fluid and both the settings and characters are well-realised. Though I wasn't as amazed by the film as I thought I would be, I still thought it was a decent film that realised a sufficient amount of its considerable potential.