DreamWorks Animation spent the 2000s building a house style out of jokes and pop-culture asides. How to Train Your Dragon, released in 2010, mostly sets that aside. Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois directed the film and wrote it with William Davies, working from Cressida Cowell’s 2003 novel. The result is a Viking coming-of-age story that trusts a boy and a dragon to hold the screen without a comic sidekick carrying the load.
Trailer, via DreamWorks Dragons.
Hiccup and the Night Fury
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III is a 15-year-old outcast in Berk, a village raided by dragons that steal livestock. His father, Stoick the Vast, is chieftain. Hiccup builds mechanical devices under Gobber, the blacksmith and Stoick’s advisor.
During a raid, Hiccup downs a rare Night Fury with a bolas launcher. Nobody believes him. He finds the dragon in the forest and cannot kill it. The dragon pins him, then spares him. That reversal is the film’s whole engine.
Hiccup later finds the creature in a cove, grounded because the bolas tore off half its tail fin. He names it Toothless for its retractable teeth and builds a harness and prosthetic fin so the two can fly together.
A Training Class and a Crush
Stoick enrolls Hiccup in dragon-fighting class before leaving with his fleet to find the dragons’ nest. The other students are Fishlegs, Snotlout, the twins Ruffnut and Tuffnut, and Astrid, whom Hiccup likes.
Hiccup struggles at first. Then he studies dragon behavior through Toothless and subdues the class dragons instead of fighting them. His peers start to admire him. Astrid gets suspicious and jealous. Stoick’s fleet comes home empty-handed.
The Voices Behind the Village
Jay Baruchel voices Hiccup, Gerard Butler voices Stoick, and Craig Ferguson voices Gobber. America Ferrera plays Astrid. Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Kristen Wiig and T.J. Miller fill out the young Viking cast.
The directors wanted the secondary cast’s improvisation in the film, so they brought the actors together for recording sessions often. Cinematographer Roger Deakins came on as a visual consultant to push a live-action feel. John Powell wrote the score.
A Premiere and a Long Road to Screen
The film runs 98 minutes. It premiered at the Gibson Amphitheater on March 21, 2010. DreamWorks executives began circling Cowell’s book series in 2004, and producer Bonnie Arnold took an interest in the property after Over the Hedge in 2006.
Where the Film Lands
Ranked against the studio’s own output, How to Train Your Dragon sits above the gag-driven comedies and below the sharpest work Pixar was making in the same years.
- The bond between Hiccup and Toothless — the film’s strongest asset, and the reason the ending lands.
- The flight sequences, which use Deakins’s live-action notes and Powell’s score to real effect.
- The dragon-fighting class, which is functional but the least interesting stretch.
- The adult Viking comedy, which leans on Butler and Ferguson more than it needs to.
The middle section drags. The training montages repeat a beat the film already made. But the core relationship earns its turns, and the prosthetic fin gives the story a concrete idea to hang on: trust as something you build and maintain.
This is a good film with a clear-eyed view of what it is. It does not need the jokes.
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