You may have already heard, but the results are in: for better or worse, the new How to Train Your Dragon is practically the exact same movie as its 2010 namesake, just with fleshy actors and more realistically animated dragons this time.
Whether that works for you will largely depend on your mindset about live-action remakes and whether they are worth a watch. But on the story and character level, if you like the original, it’s hard to believe you wouldn’t like this exact same thing.
The questions become not about changes, but about translations.
How do the dragons, especially Toothless, translate from animation to live-action? Toothless is basically a 100 percent perfect translation, much like Stitch last month. The other dragons also transition fairly seamlessly, although the realism ups the ferocity of many of them and could strain credulity on the whole dragon-training thing. Particularly with the Monstrous Nightmare.
How does Mason Thames do as Hiccup? Pretty darn good. It started a little rocky as he delivers the opening narration nearly word for word, and some of the animated jokes lose a little punch without an animated delivery to go with them, but he comes into his own and feels like Hiccup for most of the runtime.
Does Gerard Butler work as a live-action version of his own character Stoik from the original? Yep. Butler gives a really strong performance as the Viking chief, with nothing really lost from the animated movie.
What about Astrid and the other dragon trainers? The dragon trainers were my least favorite part of the original movie, as they got a lot of the potty humor type banter that I felt knocked a bit of gravitas off the end product. These trainers serve the same purpose, but I actually liked them a bit better overall in live action as it slightly toned down their offensiveness. Snotlout has a fun running joke with his father. Astrid looks the most different from her animated counterpart, but Nico Parker does a good job with the role.
How is the dragon flight scene? Pretty awesome. Almost everything about it, including the score, is 1:1. It’s well-shot, and I think for a brief moment, the live-action might enhance the feeling of flying. The animated version still probably wins for pure cinematic beauty, but this is a good effort.
If this was an original movie, we would all be pretty happy with what we just saw. As it is, there’s going to be a bit of a divide solely based on the fact that it is a remake, and why bother? But where 2019’s The Lion King lost the heart of its original, How to Train Your Dragon never loses sight of what makes the original special.
As far as I’m concerned, this is the best live-action remake of an animated classic to date, and maybe Disney can learn from it to just not tinker with the material—just translate it into a new medium and bank that cash.
Although I have another proposal—instead of continuing this endless stream of remaking animated material in live action, can we pull a switch-a-roo and start remaking live-action classics in animation? There’s actually so much more potential when translating in that direction, going from the restraints of live photography to the boundless creativity of animation. Let’s give that a shot, studios.
