Movie Review: How to Tame Your Dragon

I have just returned from seeing How to Tame Your Dragon – the live action remake, and I thought I’d take a moment to share with you some of my thoughts. So, here is some facts first off—

The How to Tame Your Dragon Trilogy sits amongst my favorite stories told in visual format list, up there with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. So my bias towards liking the story of How to Tame Your Dragon is pretty high. I think the story, the characters and the world they inhabit is stellar.

Do I think we needed a live action remake, when the original animation is basically perfect?

This is often a question that is asked whenever Disney goes about anything they do, and I’ll be honest – I haven’t trusted much of anything Disney does in a long time. They unfortunately lost my trust when they botched Star Wars – I could go on about how badly I feel about that situation as a Star Wars fanfiction writer, as in someone who actually knows enough about George Lucas’ universe and respects it to write proper stories in it. Sorry. Sorry. Refocus.

Anyway, my point is, I’m fine with revamping and reimaging stories. I actually think that every generation should have access to updated stories. Movies, or, visual storytelling, has sort of become our new way of sitting around a fire and telling mythologies and tales to a large scale audience and that’s what I love to imagine whenever I go to the cinema. I like to imagine that we’re all gathered around a fire, and we’re all listening to the story-teller tell us a story.

And that story will morph and change as time goes on, it will be repeated over and over, again and again, as generations alter it, but the core should stay the same.

That’s actually what I think Disney seems to forget in their own remakes, they forget that the core of a story should remain the same.

I am happy to say that Dreamworks basically retold How to Tame Your Dragon almost frame by frame – no – I’m not joking. They kept the core of the story, they kept the essence of the characters—the core of the characters—and then they built on the world. It was really nice to see the creativity of the Viking Village of Berk feel real and lived in - for example, the costumes were gorgeous.

What I thought was an improvement was the final battle sequence, I’m not sure why, but it felt like there was a lot more weight to it, and the Alpha Dragon felt far more overwhelming and threatening. The visuals of Hiccup falling to his death and Toothless struggling to save him was gorgeously captured.

Unfortunately, this remake didn’t recapture the flying sequences. I was majorly disappointed in this – I was really expecting some spectacular sunset or sunrise cloud scenes and considering how amazing graphics are these days – I really wanted to experience that same feeling that the animation has of pure, wonderous delight and awe.

But—

I didn’t get that.

Which might be my only complaint, in a movie about flying dragons, it lacked a sense of wonder about flying.

Do I recommend seeing it?

Yes. If you’re a fan of the original, it’s highly worth seeing it. Its just fun, honestly, to see such a faithful remake and – Toothless is the most adorable dragon ever. He’s worth the ticket price alone. If you’ve never seen the original, it’s worth it because it is a good story with such a warm message at its heart. It's easy to feel isolated and alone even amongst our own friends and family, and Hiccup embodied that to me, his journey through the trilogy is one of my favorite coming of age stories and it's so worth bringing to life into live action.

If you've never seen How to Tame Your Dragon then, I can highly recommend going to see a good movie. This trilogy is one of those rare gems that is just really, really precious.

It’s a good story that would have been marvelous to listen to around a fire, once, long ago, in an age of myths and legends.

And so, I hope that we continue to always tell our tales – and retell them – again – and again – for every generation, so that they’ll always enjoy the stories that came before.