Movie review: 'How to Train Your Dragon' remake sullies animated film

UPI

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1 of 5 | Hiccup (Mason Thames) rides Toothless in "How to Train Your Dragon," in theaters Friday. Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
LOS ANGELES, June 9 (UPI) -- The 2010 movie How to Train Your Dragon was a landmark for DreamWorks, both in terms of animation and storytelling. The live-action remake with CG-animated dragons, in theaters Friday, proves indistinct and lesser than its contemporaries.
In the Viking village of Berk, Hiccup (Mason Thames) aspires to be a dragonslayer like his father, Chief Stoick (Gerard Butler). When he meets the fallen dragon Toothless, however, he learns humans and dragons can cooperate.
The animated film showed how fluid dragon flight could be. In live-action, it's just another visual effects movie, and one of the lesser ones.
Introducing live-action adds layers of separation compared to the consistency of the fully animated original. The artificiality of each element only exacerbates the separation.
When Hiccup rides Toothless, Thames is sitting on something that is not an actual dragon. Furthermore, he's not actually flying in the air either, so the background removes another level of reality.
The live-action elements also make the dragon flights more chaotic and choppy. The film is post-Game of Thrones, although young audiences probably haven't seen those dragons. Still, they've seen live-action dragons in the Harry Potter movies, which were also mediocre.
The animated film was bright and colorful but director Dean Deblois, one of the animated film's co-directors, chose a dim, grey aesthetic for the remake that looks like every other dreary modern movie.
It also makes the visual effects look more fake. Real life has light and color, not artificial, digitally murky fog.
Even non-dragon effects are sketchy. When Stoick leads the Berk navy into battle, those boats might not even be in a water tank. If they are, they still look incongruous with the background horizon.
The 2010 film adapted Cressida Cowell's children's book into a tidy 90-minute film, plus credits for all the animators who worked on it. Adding another 30 minutes was neither necessary nor warranted.
The longer run-time dilutes the story's significant message with overly busy shenanigans. The theme is the younger generation teaching their parents to live harmoniously with dragons, but by the time this comes into focus, it feels tacked on.
More time is spent on Hiccup and his friends training for dragon combat. Hiccup's ability to disarm dragons without using brute force is noteworthy.
The other Berk kids have been given insufferable traits. Twin siblings state their mother can't tell them apart. The joke is supposed to be that they're a brother and sister, but it lands with the same thud as the lunkhead complaining about "word books."
Astrid (Nico Parker) remains an empowering female character. These Vikings pay lip service to diversity, but an Asian character and a Black character are introduced, only to never have any prominent scenes later.
The filmmakers made a choice to adapt the book as an animated film the first time, and that was the correct decision. The remake literally removes everything that was special about the original.
Alas, Disney has introduced this process to all of its competitors, so now Dreamworks is remaking their own films too. Let's hope it ends there and we're not faced with live-action Minions eventually.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.