How to Make the Greatest Animated Movie Ever
The Summary
When it comes to producing emotionally engaging character-driven animated movies, Disney’s Pixar has the crown. They have consistently cunned out great films over the years, however, in my eyes, none of their films rivals the story told in Dreamworks’ 2010 hit How to Train a Dragon. How to Train you Dragon is a coming of age tale of an outcast Viking teen named Hiccup who struggles to find acceptance from his father and his village. He doesn’t match the description of your typical Viking build: biceps the size of boulders, shoulders as broad as mountains, and a face as hairy as a Wolly Mammoth. He is as thin as a toothpick with arms even thinner. Looking at him you feel more sorry for him than you do intimidate by him. He is from the village Berek, which has a huge pest problem, rampant village fire-breathing dragons terrorize the inhabitants nonstop! Killing a dragon is a right of passage on this island. But when faced with the opportunity of a lifetime to kill a dragon and win the praise and approval of his father and village, Hiccup can’t do it. He sees himself in the dragon, misunderstood. He then goes on to get to know and befriend the member of the species that his village hates and would kill on site. Hiccup’s story is a beautiful one told with the aid of an amazing score and impressive visuals.
The Music and Visuals
This movie excels in its use of music! The score is so perfectly in-sync with the movie you can’t tell which was produced first the soundtrack of the scenes. The score does such a great job of making you forget about the real world. As it's playing you are in Berk. You are a Viking villager tagging along with Hiccup and the main cast. The music holds the hands of your heart and leads you through the emotions of the cast. You feel the threat of the dragons in the opening scene as the music grabs a hold of you and shakes you frantically. You feel the eerieness and spookiness and Hiccup approaches the almost mythical Nightfury, that no one had lived to tell the tale of. You feel the young love budding as Hiccup takes his peer Astrid on a scenic flight through the clouds at sunset. The score works in tandem with the stunning visuals. The scene that gets me every time is the Romantic Flight. It is a short scene runtime-wise, but in-universe spans a few hours. The scene starts shortly after Astrid, Hiccup’s rival and crush earn the respect of Toothless, the Nightfury that Hiccup befriends. Toothless takes to two on a romantic trip through the clouds during sunlight. The clouds are an inviting pink hue. And the awe of Astrid's face sells the realism of the whole scene. She is the viewer! She is feeling what she is feeling! This film gets us into the heads of the characters in a way only a book written in the third person could!
The Father-Son Dynamic
By far the greatest aspect of the movie, the characteristic that makes it soar above its peers, is its Father-Son Narrative. Hiccup and his father Stoic are stark opposites. Hiccup is an oxymoron for a Viking, whilst Stoic is the dictionary definition of a village. Throughout the movie, these two are contrasted with each other. Hiccup is the Village laughing stock and his father is the revered chief. Hiccup is unsure of himself, throughout the whole movie he is trying to fit in with a people and culture that is contrary to his personality. Stoic on the other hand has always known who it was, what he was capable of, and has been unapologetic about it his whole life. Stoic would never second-guess killing a dragon. He grew up seeing them as devils that enjoyed burning down his village and stealing his people's cattle more than anything else. Dragons weren’t redeemable to him, they were heartless animals.
Hiccup is raised the same way, tries to subscribe to his family’s ideals, but finds he relates so much to these terrifying beasts. He sees another side to them, and a gentler side that his people never saw. This puts him in even greater opposition to his father. Stoic was always disappointed in Hiccup. Hiccup was not the son he always wanted. Hiccup knew this to be true and that's why he tried so hard to impress Stoic to no avail. Hiccup and Stoic seem to have nothing in common, and can never see eye to eye. They are never listening to each other and are both never on the same page when they talk to each other. Things change when Stoic prideful bites more than he can chew when he ignores Hiccup's warnings and takes an arm to take down the dragon queen and its nest. He grounds Hiccup and enslaves Toothless and takes him with him. Things quickly go south for Stoic but Hiccup and his friends find their way to the island on the backs of newly trained dragons to rescue Stoic and the villagers.
One of the characters notes that Hiccup is just as stubborn as Stoic. Stoic was humbled by his failure of foolishly putting his people at risk against his son’s judgment and realized that the so-called devils he was afraid of could be tamed and loved and love themselves. When Hiccup and Toothless and knocked underwater by the Queen Dragon, Stoic doesn’t hesitate to rescue them both! The son he had disowned became his dearly beloved son. His son’s best friend, the dragon, the best he hated, became the pet he respected. We see Stoic apologize for the way he treated Hiccup. We see him accept Hiccup for who he was instead of trying to make him something he is not. Both these characters' journeys to finally understand each other made this movie such a captivating watch!
My First Impression
Growing up it was rare that I would get a chance to watch movies. My family never really went to the movie theatres. I come from an immigrant household and during my youth money for entertainment was hard to come by. If the movie wasn’t on tv or wasn’t being streamed in the classroom, I wasn’t ever going to get a catch to see it. As I got older and more desperate to watch these films I figured out ways to watch them without waiting for them to be on tv or lucky enough for a teacher to bless us with a film for a treat. Being a smart and resourceful 5th grader I discovered that the local library actually allowed you to rent out movie discs! So I rented a copy and watched the film in my parent's bedroom as it was the only room in the house with a DVD player that I could operate. This movie blew your small fragile mind into a thousand pieces! I was captured by the characters, the scenery, the locations, and the soundtrack. I’ve had a good relationship with my father all my life. We never fight, I do as he says. I make him proud. And yet, despite my fairly positive childhood, I was able to emphasize Hiccup. The movie did such a great job helping me understand a dynamic that was alien to my own life. What initially drew me into the world of How to Train Your Dragon was the colorful and uniquely crafted dragons, but what kept in engaged in the movie was everything else! This movie will go down in my mind as one of the greatest movies ever made. They had interesting characters. It was a simple story at its core, with everything else acting like icing on the cake!