The How to Train Your Dragon movies will probably end up one of the more underappreciated film trilogies ever. Seriously! The first film has lengthy sequences of no talking bonding between dragons and humans, and the second one takes a beloved character out of the picture halfway through. These movies could have phoned it in and sold millions of Toothless dolls but instead they chose to care and in doing so have created a perfectly lovely trilogy, capping the story off with the very good final film.
The Hidden World is the legendary rumor Stoick (Gerard Butler) told a young Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) about. It is a place where dragons get to live free of human interference. At this point in the story, Birk, Hiccup’s home that he rules over, has become overrun by the sheer number of dragons and people, forcing the city to migrate to a new location. That’s not the only reason Hiccup wants to move though: a hunter named Grimmel (F. Murray Abraham) has set his sights on Toothless, luring him in with a female Night Fury which Toothless becomes smitten with.
The fun part of making these movies has to be animating the various creatures and worlds they inhabit. Even the human residences sit upon craggly majestic rocks that look stellar when cinematically shot. We get introduced to new dragons here that again, and the filmmakers make them just scary enough that they could be nice if they were treated better: all the colors, shapes, and various levels of eyeball game are used in the making of these creatures, instantly giving them personality in a world littered with copious personality already. But the best part about dragons? The flying! In The Hidden World’s Case, we’ve got a full on Oregon Trail situation happening, with thousands of dragons and people flying across the world, which looks as majestic as some of those great documentaries about migrating animals. Toothless’s courtship with the “Light Fury” as they call her takes place in a beautiful lightning cloud which fits the creatures perfectly, providing a scary but beautiful backdrop for the wordless dragon flirting. The highlight though is the dragons’ hidden world, which you enter from a crazy waterfall, and is equipped with so many beautiful colors and creatures you can’t help but mouth “whoa” when you’re being flown through it. Adventure is way more fun if you happen upon something special, and How to Train Your Dragon provides you ample opportunity to see something really special.
The 2nd How to Train Your Dragon had a tricky line to walk, expanding the scope of the first film by introducing a crazy amount of new characters, dragons, and worlds, while trying to maintain the magic of the first film. With all these competing ideas, the central relationship between Toothless and Hiccup got sidelined for most of the movie. The Hidden World places that relationship firmly back at the story’s center. Writer/Director Dean DeBlois dives deep into their friendship, showing how co-dependent the pair have become, in good ways, but in somewhat toxic ways too, as they both use each other as crutches, untrustworthy of their own skills; during an amusing flirting session with a Night Fury, Toothless looks to Hiccup for advice on what to do. In addition, this big looming question keeps coming up: Hiccup wants humans and dragons to live in harmony together in the hidden world, but is that relationship even possible with people like Grimmel out there consistently hunting and murdering dragons? One thing I love most about these films is how they are unafraid to evolve and take big risks in storytelling, and the movie builds to a big climax in the third act that continues to evolve the story in poignant ways that elude a kid friendly happy ending in the way you’d expect. It’s clear that someone is really thinking about these movies behind the scenes, and Dean DeBlois’s strategy of making all his characters, even the bad ones, make smart, logical, emotionally complex decisions kept the How to Train Your Dragon series fresh and interesting, until the very end.
The movies have been trying really hard to push people with pets to see movies about pets (A Dog’s Way Home, for example). Those movies always fail to capture a real relationship between a pet and a human, going for over the top schmaltz. I would argue the How to Train Your Dragon films are some of the best examples out there about the bond that can form between people and their pets, never condescending and always taking that relationship seriously. The Hidden World should pull a few tears out of you because of how emotionally beautiful the story is. But as a pet owner? You’ll spend your commute home thinking about Rex. Or Spike. Or Kitty Purry, weeping about how rare and special your relationship is.