How to Train Your Dragon

"Dragon Everyone to Your Level"



Okay, it's "Old Yeller" done in fire-breathing naugahyde. It's a kid's animation movie, so it's going to be fast-paced, lively and have a "Can't We All Just Get Along" ending (in a creepy Rumsfeldian "the enemy of my friend/enemy is also my enemy" way). The casting is terrific, especially of Craigy Ferguson as a Viking machinist (Wait a tick...Vikings were Scottish?). Gerard Butler has the role of father to the protagonist and plays it as if he was always pointing to Sparta on a map. Jay Baruchel (the star of "She's Out of My League") does voice-cracking wonders with the voice of our hero, Hiccup, who is just not Viking material, but manages to subdue-even win the trust of-a dragon (seems the flying butane-breathed lizards have traits just like house-dogs and cats). Still, keep the extinguisher handy in case of fur-balls.



No points to "How To Train Your Dragon" for originality (as I haven't read the book, I don't know if that's where the problem flies, but I suspect it's merely that DreamWorks animations-2-D or 3-D, line or pixel-are so formulaic in construction at this point, splicing pop-culture and source, that they have a tendency to blend together at the same point in time as your eyes cross-is this a Katzenberg trait?). There's always an out-of-time attitude displacement to these things where every character has the traits of a stand-up comedian and the homogenized values of a sit-com, that you have to keep reminding yourself-"Viking, Vikings, Vikings."


However, major points for execution. The technology of these things increases with one being released every six months, and "How To Train Your Dragon" has a nifty design scheme that reminds one of impossibly constructed children's play sets-the Viking village is the niftiest little chock-a-block city since "Sweethaven" in Robert Altman's "Popeye." The dragons are cartoon lunacy out of Tex Avery and the full-blown Vikings, like Hiccup's Viking-father, Stoick, are madly out of proportion humans who'd wobble and flail if there weren't some pen-and-ink gravity keeping them up-right and bounding.



Conversely, the other extreme is impressive, as well. The look of clouds and ocean waves has never looked more real-the look of coastal waters has never seemed more real, whatever coding and algorithms used to simulate the wave action are spot-on and indistinguishable from photo-realism. I saw "How to Train Your Dragon" in 2-D, but the 3-D must be quite impressive, it certainly was in "Monsters vs. Aliens," and there seemed to be no over-loading of nose-brushing effects that has been the bugaboo of the process.



All around it's a satisfying effort that will please the kiddies, and provides enough entertainment value to keep adults from nodding off, or rolling their eyes. The cookie-cutter nature of the plot is the only thing that keeps it from being a Full-Price ticket.



"How to Train Your Dragon" is a Matinee.

Reference: http://letsnottalkaboutmovies.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-to-train-your-dragon.html