It’s amazing what a difference shooting on location can make. If one thing has defined most of the live-action remakes of animated classics we’ve gotten over the past decade, it’s been a general sense of pointlessness. While these new movies often make tons of money — and in Hollywood, that’s point enough — all too often they feel artistically bankrupt, technological boondoggles that can’t hold a whisper to their originals. How to Train Your Dragon, the live-action version, is the rare remake that makes sense with human actors and actual locations. Swooping over the inlets and forests and thundering cliffs of Northern Ireland (standing in for the film’s fictional island of Berk and other Scandinavian environs), we’re reminded that there’s value in the real, even in the context of a VFX-filled children’s fantasy about magic dragons.
Some of that might also have to do with the fact that the 2010 film was computer-animated, and thus didn’t have that old-school hand-drawn magic, so less is lost in the translation to live-action. Still, that beloved hit, directed by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, who had previously made Disney’s Lilo & Stitch (a profitable but soulless remake of which, oddly enough, is also in theaters) managed a nice mix of zip and heart, giving its characters enough physical and emotional heft that their fantastical perils felt palpable. And because we were involved in their fates, we could imagine ourselves in their shoes – which is surely one reason why that movie proved such a hit, and why so many parents found themselves repeatedly watching it over the years with their kids.
The new film, directed again by DeBlois, scrupulously sticks to the narrative formula. At times it feels like a virtual shot-for-shot remake, complete with identical dialogue exchanges. Our young hero, Hiccup (Mason Thames), is maybe not quite as scrawny as he was as a cartoon, but he’s still just slight and hesitant enough, a far cry from the heroic dragon slayer that his chieftain father, Stoick the Vast (played by Gerard Butler, who also voiced the character in the animated films), wants him to be. Determined to show he too can kill a dragon, Hiccup traps and injures a Night Fury, a uniquely evasive and dangerous breed of dragon, but realizes he doesn’t have it in him to kill the thing. Instead, he secretly befriends the beast, which he calls Toothless. He learns to communicate with and control it, and begins to envision a whole new relationship between his dragon-obsessed village and the flying, fire-breathing reptiles they’ve been at war with since time immemorial.
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It’s the same story, the same characters, and many of the same shots. It’s even the same music, pretty much: Composer John Powell returns to revive and expand his already-legendary score. But instead of a regurgitation, this remake feels right — as if the story has truly come into its own. Now, we can experience the exaltation of taking flight over this majestic landscape, and that awe plays a key role in the plot. The first How to Train Your Dragon felt at times like it wanted to be more than animation: It hit theaters just a few months after James Cameron’s epochal blockbuster Avatar, and it tapped into a similar yearning to disappear into a universe where one could tame and ride fearsome, colorful mythical beasts. The two films had been produced concurrently and independently, and both adventures hit familiar sweeping, rousing beats. (There’s even a bit of How to Train Your Dragon in Cameron’s sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water. All these outcast-tames-a-mythical-creature fantasies swim in the same wish-fulfilment currents.)
DeBlois gives this universe, with its villages and great halls and rough tools and enormous weapons, real shape and weight. He shoots Butler’s Stoick from angles that accentuate the character’s height and width; at times the chieftain looks like a mythical beast himself. Butler brings a burly tenderness to the part: He’s intimidating, but we feel his vulnerable concern for his soft son right from the get-go. Finally getting a chance to physically perform a role he voiced in multiple animated movies, the actor seems downright liberated.
The CGI dragons are also well-integrated into this tactile world, though they’re maybe a little less colorful and fanciful this time around, in keeping with the heightened gravity of live-action. Toothless looks pretty much the same: an adorably big-eyed, round-faced, expressive critter that will somehow remind you of your favorite pet. But he doesn’t feel out of place, and somehow, his innate cuddliness drives the basic humanity of the story, never letting us forget that at heart this is a fairy tale that has only grown up a little. That is not an easy balance to strike: to stir the emotions of a movie’s original fans while giving this new iteration real purpose. All in all, this live-action adaptation works remarkably well — a rare feat.
