Packed to Bursting with Enjoyability

Rating: 8/10 (30 March 2010)

How To Train Your Dragon (Imax, 3-D, 1:38, PG) — Other: Adventure, 2nd string, original
It's taken a quarter of a year for 2010 to produce an SF&F movie that I can honestly recommend, but it is my pleasure to be able to do so for How To Train Your Dragon, an Imax 3-D offering from DreamWorks Animation. It's by the same creative team that did Lilo & Stitch, and the 1st sight of the eponymous dragon should give you a frisson of déjà vu if you saw that little delight back in 2002.
The story opens with a voice-over narration from a character we will soon meet, Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), son of Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler, and that's pronounced "stoic", not "stoyk"), leader of a viking village that's beset with what Hiccup understatedly calls a pest problem. As he mentions this, 1 of the 2 sheep contentedly grazing before us suddenly gets snatched away by a barely seen dark shape from above. Yes, it turns out that the "pests" are dragons. The village has been there for 7 generations, but Hiccup notes that all the houses are brand new, and we shortly see why, as flaming dragon breath takes out several of them. Still, the tribe soldiers on. "We're vikings", Hiccup tells us. "We have stubbornness issues."
We finally see Hiccup himself, a toothpick of a lad, being chivvied by his hugely burly elders into the cover of the town smithy, where he's apprenticed to Gobber (Craig Ferguson). Hiccup is in his early teens and wants to prove himself a fighter, but it's quickly apparent that he's more adept at draftsmanship, creative thinking, and gadgetry. (I also note, with some pride, that he's a fellow left-hander.) He's rigged up a net-casting trebuchet, and he thinks he's winged one of the overflying dragons, but it didn't fall anywhere near the village, and without the corpus delicti everyone razzes him about his claim to have bagged a rare Night Fury breed — the kind that's never seen ... and never misses.
The foregoing is about the 1st 7 minutes of the movie, and the rest is equally densely packed. I'm not going to go into any more detail, because there are several twists and turns that you really need to see to appreciate. However, given the film's title, it's hardly giving anything away to mention that Hiccup sets out the following day to look for his downed dragon and discovers him very much alive but hobbled, trapped in a rock-walled glen, and desperate for succor. He's been told "A dragon will always, always go for the kill!" "So why didn't you?" he muses, as he hauls a load of fish to his new-found friend.
We discover that there are many different kinds of dragons, from the bloated, buffoonish Grundle that serves as the Read Me file for the dragon-fighting trainees up to the Monstrous Nightmare, only a notch below the Night Fury in awesomeness. They are all wonderfully rendered in their splendid variety, just a visual treat. Nor does the eyefeast end there. This is a gorgeous movie, resplendent with color and natural beauty. Billowing cloudscapes and scenes of flight into the aurora borealis are glorious.
The hero is plucky, resourceful, and resilient, and so is Astrid (America Ferrera), the blond viking lass who's the tuffest kid in town but also the most empathetic. The old man is gruff, inarticulate, and set in his ways (that would be the old ways), but he dearly loves his misfit son and wishes only the best for him; he's also one hell of a warrior.
For some odd reason, all the kids speak colloquial English, but all the adults have a thick Scottish brogue — no hint of Scandinavia in any of it. Perhaps that's yet another wrinkle in the movie's offbeat sense of humor, which is never thigh-slappingly hilarious but produces plenty of smiles and grins.
This is anything but a "message" movie, but there are lessons to be learned from it. They're like the medicine hidden in the spoonful of sugar. You get better while feeling good about it. Yum!