Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Directed by: Dean DeBlois
Written by Anna Harrison
35/100
At what point do we say enough is enough? Should we have stamped our collective feet down after “Cinderella,” Disney’s first of their live action remakes that kicked off a wave of redos? Or was it the soulless “The Lion King” that should have sparked the death knell? Maybe it was the other remake of a Dean DeBlois animated movie this summer, a “Lilo & Stitch” that sucked the heart out of the original. But at least all of those movies tried to do something a bit different than their predecessors. Different plots, different visual styles, different songs. The new “How to Train Your Dragon,” meanwhile, takes the original 2010 animated movie and slavishly recreates it beat-for-beat, shot-for-shot, and line-for-line. If it’s any good, it’s only because the original is good—and if that’s the case, is it actually any good at all?
We open on the Isle of Berk and our incompetent hero, Hiccup (Mason Thames), son of the Viking chieftain Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler, reprising his role from the animated) and the most un-Viking-like citizen of Berk. He’s scrawny and unable to defend himself from Berk’s greatest pest issue: dragons. Hiccup prefers to use his brains rather than his unremarkable brawn, and while this tendency has ostracized him from his village, he has his eyes on the kind of prize that will make everyone finally respect him—he wants to kill a Night Fury, the deadliest dragon there is. That, surely, will get not only his dad to notice him, but also Astrid (Nico Parker, unfortunately miscast and wooden), the coolest girl in Berk.
But such is Hiccup’s lot that even when one of his many contraptions finally wounds a Night Fury, no one believes him. Hiccup goes to try and find the thing and prove to everyone that he’s not crazy, but instead of killing the dragon he discovers, he—too soft-hearted for Vikinghood—decides to befriend the animal he dubs Toothless.
If you’ve seen the animated movie, you know the rest. There are only the tiniest of variations between the two: an extended scene between Astrid and Hiccup here, a very awkward and baffling scene of Stoick explaining why the village has non-white residents there, and quite a few references to the next movie. (Bafflingly, the film decides to omit a scene of Toothless and Hiccup discovering that dragons don’t deal well with fire aimed inside their mouths, which will set up the defeat of the third act villain. The foreshadowing simply doesn’t exist here.) By and large, this makes for a decent enough movie in a vacuum… because the original “How to Train Your Dragon” is a good movie.
But animation does not, no matter how hard DeBlois might try, translate exactly to live action. In animation, characters’ expressions can become overly exaggerated and no one bats an eye; here, while Thames is charmingly hapless enough, he is hampered by the fact that he lives in reality and an exaggerated jaw drop or eye roll would look stupid. The dragons, too, become more limited in their features, and any emotion from them is hampered by a desire for so-called realism.
Toothless, at least, escapes this—and that’s because it looks like they just copied and pasted his same animated model into the live-action, just with a bit more scale detailing. But this begets another problem: fidelity to the source material makes the aesthetics of the movie incongruous with one another. Sets and costumes are recreated faithfully, but what looks at home in the exaggerated world of animation becomes silly when worn by or interacted with by real people. Hiccup’s outfit and Thames’ obviously-straightened hair look cheap rather, and even Toothless’ faithful design puts him too much at odds with how stiff the other dragons look in their expressions. The movie can never strike the balance between fantastic and realistic; if you’re going to swallow Julian Dennison as fellow teen Fishlegs in ridiculous layers of clothing to make him look larger than he is, why try for verisimilitude in the romantic flight between Hiccup and Astrid, which has the color drained from it and thus the romance? (At least John Powell’s score remains as excellent as always.)
So what is the point of it all? Why change mediums at all if you aren’t going to make use of the new one? Why remake a movie that came out only fifteen years ago, and whose conclusion only released in 2019? There’s only one answer: money. Well, no, make that two answers: money and a disrespect for the general audience. Does Universal think we will just lap this up without any self-reflection on the state or art in Hollywood?
Well, judging by the box office receipts, yes. And so the cycle will self-perpetuate: someone makes an animated movie that does well, someone remakes that animated movie for no reason other than money, the remake is pointless/ugly/does nothing the animated couldn’t do, audiences jump for joy, and studios are emboldened to do it again. Have audiences gotten dumber, or have studios just trained them to accept tablescraps without complaint? At what point do we push back and ask for a little faith in our taste in art?
At this point, it’s looking like that might never happen. But, hey, at least “How to Train Your Dragon” wasn’t a Disney remake.
“How to Train Your Dragon” Trailer
You can follow more of Anna’s work on Letterboxd, Twitter, or Instagram, or her website.
