How to Train Your Dragon - Movie Review

0:00 [Music] How to Train Your Dragon is directed by Dean Dublah and is the liveaction adaptation of the original film from DreamWorks, which he also directed alongside Chris Sanders. As an ancient threat endangers both Vikings and dragons alike on the aisle of Burke, the friendship between Hiccup, an inventive Viking, and Toothless, a night fury dragon, becomes the key to both species forging a new future together. So, we're officially living in the era of liveaction remakes of animated films. Disney has made so many of them. I did see Lilo and Stitch this year. I didn't mind it. For the most part, liveaction adaptations of animations don't really interest me that much unless I feel

0:46 there's a lot of potential there because animation is so so precious to me and it's not respected enough. And I think the idea of taking everything that was animated and trying to make it in live action form is a fruitless one and one that generally is made for money purposes. That's the more cynical side of me talking. I would like to hope that people who make movies really want to make them, but in the case of How to Train Your Dragon, the fact that the original director has come back, and the fact that it is definitely, and I'm sure you'll hear this from other people, a 100% copyandpaste movie, and that it really does feel like a shot forshot version of that original film just in live action. You can tell there is a lot of love for this movie, and this is being made by somebody who genuinely obviously really cares about this franchise because it really is his. like

1:31 he has seen this and shephered this from the very beginning and you can feel that in every frame of this movie because obviously it's basically like the animated film was used as a previs for this movie. But the idea of taking something that worked one way and essentially doing it again just in another way and not really changing anything does not guarantee that it will work. We've seen movies like that in the past, remakes of famous films that have been essentially shot forshot that haven't always worked. There's plenty of examples of that. The reason this one does, I think, is because this world lends itself to live action. There's been TV shows and movies with Vikings and dragons, medieval times and sword and sorcery, weaponry, all kinds of

2:17 stuff. We've seen this type of world in a film before and the idea of it existing in live action really works. When you look at a film like Disney's remake of The Lion King, the realistic lions singing and trying to give off that type of emotion, that really worked in animated form. And watching it in live action, there was a strange uncanny valley thing happening that just didn't really translate well. That was a movie that for me didn't need to be in live action. When it comes to this, this works really great for a lot of reasons, and one of them is because the dragons, mostly, especially Toothless, look the way they do in the animation. They're not trying to make like the realistic, grounded version of Toothless, which I think was a very wise choice. The other

3:02 big risk to copy and pasting your own movie into liveaction form is casting. Can you recreate these characters that we've loved so much from the animated? Jay Berishelle's voice is so distinctive as Hiccup. That doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work, but Mason Thmes really does a fantastic job here making the character his own. And it was so wise to cast Gerard Butler in the same role he played in the original because that voice is so very much him, but also him in this getup. It just works. It makes perfect sense. I can't imagine them getting anyone else to play that character. Nico Parker as Astrid, also fantastic. The cast all around is doing great work at fitting into these characters shoes and putting their own distinctive spin on it, but also not

3:48 stepping so far out of it where you feel like, okay, like that wasn't like what I expect. And this is it's a tough it's a tough cell really to kind of say like, well, yeah, it's good. It was great before and they just kind of did the same thing again. And I can see how like a very critical person might look at that and think like, well, that's not really trying hard enough. You should have done your own thing or something new. you just copied yourself. And I can understand that viewpoint. It's valid. I get it. But I can also understand how easy it would be to really mess something like this up. Even if you are using your original film as a guide, the casting is so important. The look of the dragons, the production design, the costumes, all of this has to feel absolutely perfect for what it's supposed to be. And there was nothing

4:35 that felt out of place to me. It really is just another way to enjoy this story that I've always really loved. There's no surprises here if you've seen the original, but that's okay. I think a lot of people are just going to be very satisfied to see this story again in a new way and told with a lot of respect and care by the man who's been shephering this franchise since the very beginning. So guys, check it out in theaters when you get a chance. Thank you so much as always for watching. Look forward to more videos very soon. And if you like this, you can click right here and get stuckmanized. [Music]