How to Train Your Dragon
Year: 2010
Rating: PG
Length: 98 minutes / 1.63 hours
There are a few movies I would consider pinnacle achievements in story, animation, and heart. When I saw How to Train Your Dragon (2010) in theaters, I knew I had just witnessed something special. It felt like DreamWorks had finally grown up from the bodily humor of the Shrek (2001) era and into something that could be taken seriously. It’s no wonder that I still consider How to Train Your Dragon to be one of my favorite films of all time.
I have always appreciated the stories that successfully convey the “brains over brawn” mentality without being too critical of either side. This film not only emphasizes a creator/tinkerer mindset, but the importance of empathizing with nature. That it made sense to kill dragons without the full context of why the dragons behaved the way they did didn’t make the “brawn” side of the equation the enemy in the way it normally would be. This kind of storytelling is incredibly hard to do, and this movie pulled it off flawlessly.
How to Train Your Dragon also felt like a step up in DreamWorks’ animation. Not only did everything look realistic, but the mannerisms of the dragons—especially Toothless—felt so accurately cat- and dog-like that the humor came naturally from that shared experience that all pet owners have. While Pixar may have cracked the “heart” of an animated film some time before this movie, DreamWorks really figured it out with this one. I still tear up in multiple spots as the heart of the relationship between the characters shines through. Sure, the “boy meets creature and becomes close friends” thread has been done successfully many times before, but not nearly this well.
The most heartfelt and thought-out DreamWorks movie ever made, I give How to Train Your Dragon 5.0 stars out of 5.
This movie appeared in Cinema Connections:
#035. Learning to Fly
#036. DreamWorks vs. Disney
