How to Train Your Dragon_________________

How to Train Your Dragon

Dreamworks - 2010

Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler and Christopher Mintz-Plasse 
Cressida Crowell, author of the How To Train Your Dragon series of 8 books to date, states this in her interview, unequivocally, “The relationship between Stoick and Hiccup…. is the heart of the book”.  She was glad that Dreamworks “captured that” in their animated creation of the same name, directly adapted from her books.  The film is a huge hit.

The movie, How to Train Your Dragon, is a great and fun story, with depth and pathos, and really very funny.  It moves without dull moments, the animation is top notch 3D, without being a headache to watch.  The visuals are some sort of blend of pure 3D and traditional animation that smoothes the whole thing out and makes it so visually appealing.  As far as the writing, you can’t get a better story.  There is the touching father/son relationship that Cressida talked about, which makes the father look a bit vacillating as he goes through acceptance, rejection, and then acceptance again, according to the whim of the moment.  His world is based on pride of strength.  The hero of the story is Hiccup, of course, because the secret, inside knowledge of the truth is always on the audience’s side, and because the father figure can afford to be wishy washy.  That’s how many of us have experienced parenthood from the child’s perspective, parents that screw up and change their minds, even when we know better.

But what is it we know better of here?  Early on we are privy to another level of knowledge in the story that is the great foundation of conflict, and is the much larger backdrop to the familial struggle.  What is even deeper than the healing and coming together of a father and son?  It is the ingrained, sociopathic reaction and prejudicial treatment of dragons by the Vikings.  Hiccup, with an air of sardonic passive aggressiveness delivers the line himself several times when he says, “We’re Vikings, that’s what we do.”  He is referring of course to age-old habits of social behavior, based on a misconception about the dragons.  In one conflict with his father Stoick, the classic tit-for-tat conversation occurs.  “They’ve killed hundreds of our people!” “And we’ve killed thousands of THEM!”

We find that the dragons are dictated by a much larger force that is driving them to plunder, at the heart of their kingdom, an evil and oppressive force that calls them with a siren signal to come feed it, as old as the mountains themselves maybe, and deeply hidden.   This all seems familiar somehow.  Is it political, or simply personal?  That is a question best left to the screenwriters, or maybe Cressida Crowell herself.  Often archetypes are not explained, like metanarratives they lie underneath like belief itself, driving and pushing, without a word of explanation, and surprising sometimes even to the authors themselves.  So I feel compelled to ask them, William Davies, Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders, and Cressida, if there is a political motivation that might be thinly veiled there, or a social statement.  I can easily assign one myself by asserting that the treatment of the Dragons by the Vikings resembles the WASP treatment of blacks in America, or the conflict in Ireland between Catholic and Protestant.  What I want to ask the authors, however, is if they have a particular take on this conflict in the story, its resolution, or where they might be drawing that from.

If I can get an interview or quotes from them, I’ll be back with more.  In the meantime, knock yourself out on this one, and see it with a kid.  It’s worth it!

5 stars