In a mythical Viking universe, one in which brave warriors in horned helmets speak with accents more suited to Scottish pub-hopping than Scandinavian military raids, there is a town called Berk home to a slight, self-absorbed and altogether different boy named Hiccup.
As Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) cheekily informs us during the opening narration – which assumes that increasingly common tone of self-consciousness as exhibited in everything from The Emperor’s New Groove through Zombieland to the upcoming Kick-Ass – Berk has a rather unusual pest problem, namely, frequent raids by a colony of giant, violent, fire-breathing dragons.
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How to Train Your Dragon Directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois. |
In true cartoon-Viking form, the inhabitants of Berk are in a perpetual state of martial law, exhorted to arm, train, and defend themselves by the town’s hyper-masculine chief, Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler, sending up the 300 role which instantly typecast him), who also happens to be Hiccup’s father.
Hiccup has no interest in swordplay, though his real inclinations are glossed over in the pursuit of broadly characterizing him as a thinker, not a fighter. What’s more, his incipient first crush, a fierce Viking girl named Astrid, considers him a wuss for his dearth of machismo.
If this sounds like a typical plot set-up for a tenderly saccharine coming-of-age story, it’s because it is. But all the groundwork is laid efficiently in the first 10 minutes or so. Then Hiccup manages to single-handedly bring down a Night Fury – the rarest and most dangerous kind of dragon – with a bolas cannon.There’s one drawback: it crash-lands somewhere on the horizon. Without witnesses, without proof, he is still just the same feeble Hiccup.
So Hiccup sets off to find the beast, and when he discovers that it’s not dead but simply injured, he can’t bring himself to kill it. Instead, he becomes friends with the dragon, naming it Toothless after its retractable fangs and building it a tail prosthesis so that it can fly again – with help from Hiccup as its rider.
However, after realizing that the constant bloodshed between humans and dragons is unnecessary – that dragons are not in fact the mindless killing machines they are thought to be – Hiccup still has to face up to his townfolk, including Astrid and his father, Stoick being (as the name suggests) particularly set in his ways.
As with 2008’s Yes Man, the narrative is so shopworn that you can see individual plot points coming from a mile away; you hope to avoid the formulaic stuff because slavishly conventional gimmicks are unnecessary when you are genuinely enthralled (though you won’t fall quite as hard for these fluidly animated Vikings as you may have for Jim Carrey and Zooey Deschanel), but no such luck.
Luckily, How To Train Your Dragon has more going for it than its storytelling. This is emphatically a boy-and-his-pet story like Transformers or Avatar pared down to its essence (Sam Witwicky and Bumblebee, Jake Sully and his Toruk).
Thanks to the subject matter – specifically, dragon riding – there is an abundance of exhilarating flight sequences and harrowing aerial battles that will take Avatar fans right back to Pandora thanks to some excellent 3D animation. (Truly, the flying scenes are hardly distinguishable from those in Avatar, when the cartoony human riders are scarcely visible.)
Most crucial, however, How To Train Your Dragon packs an important message about understanding your (supposed) enemies and bridging the gap – whatever it may be – accepting differences instead of fighting over them. All that, and without being overly didactic.
And speaking of preachy pedantry, James Cameron would do well to give this a viewing and take notes. With an ample dose of humour and no pretension to speak of, How To Train Your Dragon tells a heart-warming, if predictable, story about a boy, his dragon, and the way they set out to end a war and change a society.
You could think of it as Avatar oversimplified for children, but really, isn’t that what Avatar was to begin with?