How to Train Your Dragon

How to Train Your Dragon



How to Train Your Dragon is a story about a Viking boy named Hiccup on the island on Berk. Hiccup, while ambitious and determined, is small and thing, hardly desirable traits in a Viking. What’s worse is that he is the son of the Viking leader, Stoic the Vast, and it is obvious that he will be incapable of leading the Vikings in battle against the dragons that perpetually invade their island.

However, as I said before, Hiccup is determined and uses his inventive skills to down the most rare and deadly dragon known to man. When it comes time to make his first kill, he can’t do it and let’s the dragon go. Hiccup quickly learns that the dragon is injured and cannot fly out of a canyon. He resolves to help this dragon and learn more about him. At the same time, Hiccup is enrolled in dragon slying school, but he uses tricks he learns from his dragon to subdue the training dragons, rather than fight them.

As time goes on, Hiccup becomes friends with his dragon, even going so far as to name him Toothless. When Stoic learns where the dragons have been nesting and resolves to destroy every last one of them, it is up to Hiccup and his friends to fight on behalf of the dragons and change how the Vikings and dragons coexist.

I loved this movie.

I had only seen the one preview for it and one of the promotional videos on the movie’s website before going into it, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I honestly expected this movie to be on the same level as something like Cars- which I liked, but when I’m not watching it, I don’t think about it much.

How to Train Your Dragon is the best movie I have seen in a long time. It beats Avatar. It beats Star Trek. Frankly, it beats most animated movies of the past decade. The characterization is spot on, the animation is wonderful, the characters are relatable, the story is complex and well told, the design is fun and colorful, and the music is stunning. I bought the soundtrack the day after seeing this movie.

It’s that good.

Do I even need to go on? Do I need to spout poetry about the design of the dragons? Do I need to analyze why Hiccup is relatable? Do I need to go through the history of our great stories and cite what makes this movie both familiar and refreshingly different in an oddly traditional sense?

Because I could. In fact, I may end up doing a sort of dragon storytelling research project because this movie has reminded me of exactly why I fell in love with the beasts in the first place. It is inspiring and glorious.

EVERYONE should go see this. I mean that. I can’t praise it enough.