How to Train Your Dragon

Last week my brother and I went out at night to see “How to Train Your Dragon 2,” I thought that I will review both of them this week. Before I get to the latest one, I bet all of you are wondering what I thought of the first one, released in 2010, right? Well, here’s what I thought:

Some movies seem like they were meant to inspire video games. The only thing missing are the controllers and the scoring system. If you watch “How to Train Your Dragon,” you will think that it was a game that was meant to inspire a movie. The reason why is because a lot of time is given towards aerial battles between tamed dragons and evil ones, and not much to character or story development. However, it looks good; it’s bright and has high energy. Ebert said in his review of this film, “Kids above the easily scared age will probably like the movie the younger they are.”

Here is another action animated movie with an incredible young hero, based on a series of popular kids’ books. You probably will recall the heroes in this genre being teenagers. Usually, the kid is 10, saying that he is stronger, wiser and braver than the older folks, and is really fast at learning when time comes to discover or mastering a new form of fighting. We are born to know how to control dragons and spaceships, but we forget that when we grow.

Our main character is Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, voiced by Jay Baruchel, a young Viking who lives in Berk, a village on the mountainside that is around heights and penthouses where aggressive dragons live. Hiccup lets the audience know that his village is old, but the houses are new. You will probably find this alarming. His father, Stoick, voiced by the great Gerard Butler, is the leader and the dragon master Cobber, voiced by the best late-night talk-show host ever, Craig Ferguson; the villages have been fighting dragons since ancient times. It looks like an unfair battle; the dragons are huge and breathe fire, and the Vikings, while having a lot of muscle, only have clubs, swords and spears. You would think that they would be smarter than dragons, but how would you know that just by listening to them.

Butler looks like he is doing the exact same character he did in “300,” as Ebert described, “beefed up by many a hearty Viking feast.” He joins Ferguson and the other Scottish actors speaking English with a strong Scottish accent, since anyone who knows a bit of Viking history knows that English was used among the Vikings. By looking at them, Vikings look like they had a testosterone outbreak causing hair to come out really fast. You could even use their nose hairs to knit up a nice sock, but then again, why would you want to do that? Ebert said in his review, “Oh, how I tried not to, but as I watched these brawlers saddled up on great flying lizards, I kept thinking, "Asterix meets Avatar."”

Now the basic story is that Hiccup is told that he needs to stay inside during a dragon attack. However, he grabs a cannon, fires away at the dragons and apparently shoots one down. By going into the forest to find the dragon he shot down, and finds a dragon around his age, chained up. He frees it, they become friends, and he finds out that dragons can be nice. With his new dragon friend Toothless, he comes back to Berk, and the good dragons team up with the Vikings against the bad dragons, who, as Ebert puts it, “are snarly holdouts and grotesquely ugly.”

One of the evil dragons is covered all over with huge warlike knobs, has six eyes, three on either side, looking like a Buick, as Ebert described. One part of the movie is where a Viking hammers on the eyeball with a club. Not a good thing to look at. The battle ends as all battles must, with the bad guys together and our young hero saving the day. The flight battle sequences are put together like a World War I scuffle, with swoops, climbs, and barely missed impacts with rocky peaks and other dragons. Ebert stated in his review, “For my taste, these went on way too long, but then I must teach myself that I do not have a 6-year-old's taste.”

In the end, if you haven’t seen this movie, check it out. I didn’t get to see it in the theaters, but I hear that the 3D in this movie was magnificent, even so much to surpassing “Avatar’s” 3D. Then again, I guess you would have to look at it from the perspective of a mostly computer-generated movie to a complete computer-generated animated movie. Still, this movie is great to watch with the whole family. How is the second one? Check in this Friday when I review it.