How To Train Your Dragon Movie Review Essay

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON the movie

How To Train Your Dragon the movie represented animated films at their best. I loved the movie, How To Train Your Dragon. I rented the How To Train Your Dragon DVD that included behind the scenes footage in the special features section of the menu and the artists literally reveal that they have done some things never before accomplished in animation.

• Innovations like incredibly realistic clouds in the sky and various types of effects for fire are examples of dynamic things to look out for in How To Train Your Dragon the movie.

The HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON film’s characters are voiced by an all star cast including Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill and America Ferrara.

The plot of How to Train Your Dragon the movie centers around the Vikings.

• Vikings in a certain village and many generations of their ancestors have spent their time protecting their land and people from dragons.
• It had been a war.
• In How To Train Your Dragon the movie, the leader in this Viking village is named Stoic and he has a son named Hiccup.
• In their culture, your name means a lot and we are led to refer to the idea that a Hiccup is not a good thing.
• We must all go through life with a few hiccups (the negative stuff).

The young boy Hiccup in How To Train Your Dragon the movie has to deal not only with a demeaning name but with the fact that he is just not like everyone else in the village.

By nature, the Vikings are very strong and muscular people but Hiccup is small and skinny. His father has never taken him seriously as a prospective dragon slayer.

In How To Train Your Dragon the movie, the movie character Hiccup is determined to win his father over and earn his approval.

Hiccup often ventures out alone in search of a most feared dragon in hopes that he will conquer it. This dragon known as the Night Fury is the most feared because it is the least known to the Vikings.

In How To Train Your Dragon the movie, the Vikings have even written a manual about the various dragons for training purposes as they teach the younger generation to become dragon slayers by attending camp with staged battles.

In the manual, the page for the Night Fury remains blank because no one has ever encountered it before. They do not know its height, its length or its fire breathing power for example. It is all a mystery.

Well, behold, little Hiccup encounters a Night Fury dragon one day. The dragon is already injured and lying on the ground after Hiccup’s weapon invention disables it. Hiccup has an opportunity to kill the dragon but he has a change of heart when he looks into its eyes.

The dragon never forgets that Hiccup forgoes the opportunity to kill him and therefore the dragon does not harm him the next time they encounter each other.

The injured dragon can no longer fly so Hiccup begins bringing him some whole raw fish. Soon Hiccup has his own endearing name for the dragon – Toothless. The dragon has huge and sharp but retractable teeth and initially has Hiccup fooled into thinking he might have none.

In the far-fetched but completely endearing and heartwarming story of How to Train Your Dragon the movie, Hiccup and Toothless become fast friends. Hiccup crafts a replacement wing for Toothless and helps him to fly again, of course under his leadership and direction and thus how to train your dragon.

The challenge that Hiccup faces is to defend Toothless from the Vikings and teach the Vikings that the dragons are not necessarily the enemy- that they attack because they are attacked……

By the end of the movie, there is no more war between the dragons and the Vikings. They peacefully coexist where the Vikings can now ride in the air on the backs of the dragons and consider the dragons to be their pets. It takes a whole lot of drama to get to this point. Hiccup had to try to reveal his beliefs that dragons can be trained and that Vikings can get along with them if they don’t attack them and betray their trust.

Hiccup convinced his friend Astrid of this eventually but it took a lot more doing for him to convince his father Stoic and everyone else. At one point, Hiccup’s father had even considered Hiccup to be a traitor. He told Hiccup that he is not a Viking and that he is not his son. He wanted to know why Hiccup wanted to protect the dragons when the dragons had historically killed hundreds of the Vikings but Hiccup reminds his father that the Vikings had historically killed thousands of the dragons and the dragons instincts were to defend themselves.

Among the many animated movies I have seen, I really enjoyed How To Train Your Dragon.

I rate it 5/5 stars *****