http://www.rottentomatoes.com/
http://www.imdb.com/
Anyone who suffered through those annoying, intrusive ads for How to Train Your Dragon during the Vancouver Olympics has reason to fear DreamWorks Animation's newest computerized kids' flick.
From all that twee footage of Vikings on speed skates, the movie looked like an exercise in rabid cutesiness — with horns.
Thank Odin, it's not. Indeed there are Vikings, and indeed there are horns, but it boasts a sweeping visual grandeur — a richness and scope — that exploit 3-D technology without resorting to gimmickry. And if a few of the younger supporting characters look like Norsemen variations on run-of-the-mill high-school denizens (yowza, the resident hottie wears a spiked leather miniskirt), the film's kinetic animation and wholehearted emotional core add up to a thumping-good time at the movies.
The plot isn't exactly newish. Boy yearns for his father's love. Boy finds pet. Boy and pet then fly into the sunset, inasmuch as the pet has wings and the boy has access to a blacksmithing shop where he can craft a decent harness. Like everyone else on the Viking island of Berk, the two of them have preposterous names: Hiccup, a skinny dweeby teen voiced by Jay Baruchel (Hollywood's latest favorite loser), and Toothless, a sleek black number with an injured tailfin.
Normally, the goodly hairy people of Berk loathe dragons, which periodically flambé the village and fly off with bleating livestock. Adolescent Vikings-in-training are taught the art of dragon-slaying — by Gobber, a one-armed, one-legged, galumphing veteran voiced by Craig Ferguson — and urged to kill the suckers on sight. Eager to get a life (“I might even get a date!”) and thus impress his mountainous chieftain dad (Gerard Butler), Hiccup sets his sights on a feared, mysterious “Night Fury.”
But when the time comes to slit its neck, he peers into its eyes and finds a frightened, intelligent, misunderstood creature — a fire-breathing monster that only wants to be loved. This is the do-or-die scene: Either you'll fall hard for Toothless and Hiccup's tender bonding, or you won't. I'm betting you will. Like Coraline before it (and to a lesser extent, Avatar), How to Train Your Dragon uses its whiz-bang technology to amplify feelings as well as dimension and scale. The big optical wow is only the half of it.
Dragonwas directed byLilo & Stitchcohorts Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, who clearly have an aptitude for interspecies friendship. The multiple-authored screenplay is based very loosely on Cressida Cowell's popular children's books, but it owes just as much toE.T.: The Extra-Terrestrialand the John Lennon songbook. I half expected the kid to belt outGive Peace a Chance in his adenoidal twang.
Apropos accents, some of Hiccup's fellow Norsemen (specifically, Dad and Gobber) apparently hail from Scotland. I'm not complaining, given Butler's gurgled American line readings in The Bounty Hunter, but I do wonder whether DreamWorks now requires a burr for all stocky, Shrek-y characters with horned helmets — or ears that pass for them.
http://www.chron.com/entertainment/movies/article/How-to-Train-Your-Dragon-1542435.php
