Imaginative and enjoyable

Rating: Null/10 (11 June 2010)

How to Train Your Dragon 3D (Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, 2010) is a spirited animation that puts a smart spin on a familiar story. A sensitive, apparently weedy teenager struggles to escape the shadow of his overbearing father - a dragon fighter. After the youngster shoots down a dragon, he's crestfallen that no-one believes his story, and sets out to find the beast. What he finds instead is a friend - the inaccurately-named Toothless - their relationship giving him the insider knowledge needed to mollify the monsters he faces in Dragon Training. The film shares something of its sensibility with Dick King Smith's comic novel Tumbleweed, while the fine premise is augmented by action sequences and anarchic humour in the manner of a Pixar film. While this can't touch Up or WALL-E, it's a distinguished take on the 'boy and his pet' yarn with a vivid backdrop, appealing characters (they may be stereotypes, but they seem real) and good jokes. And there's imagination to spare in the production design, which includes some memorable monsters - the main baddie being a particularly formidable chap. Though it's all CGI, it looks lovingly crafted, with a distinctive visual style. As Hiccup, Jay Baruchel is occasionally too old and studied, but the voice cast is mostly good, handling the chatty material well and proffering a multitude of energetic whoops and yells. Those cries, of course, are lent to the action set-pieces, which possess a genuine sense of magic. The scene in which Hiccup takes Toothless out of a tailspin is absolutely euphoric - a real gem. As for 3D, it's not really 3D, it's 2D objects in front of one another, but it works nicely here, particularly when it's subtly employed to draw us into the centre of the drama.