Tries to make up in cheese what it lacks in rhythm.

Rating: 2/10 (21 June 2010)

I liked "Kungfu Panda" and loved "Ratatouille", so please note that I am not opposed to animated, heartwarming stories about underdog heroes, even if they're fairly predictable like the former is.
This film is not a disaster on all accounts, in fact it did more things right than wrong, but its main problem is so huge that in my eyes it became a total failure, hence the low rating.
The problem with "How To Train You Dragon" is not only its predictability, its abundant use of clichés with even the main characters, or several moments in the story when a character's coherency is light-handedly broken for the sake of yet another cheesy moment or even simply because the writers couldn't come up with another idea to forward the main plot.* The main problem with this film is its lack of rhythm which made it feel both hectic and stretched in the same time. Especially the cutting back and forth between the tender scenes with the boy and his pet on the one side and his fight-training on the other felt askew. Maybe in 3D it doesn't matter that much, because the brain is busy with something else, but I watched it in 2D.
Maybe a director's cut could solve this, but I doubt that a director's artistic vision is something valued highly at Dreamworks.
* the father-son conversations after Toothless' first appearance in public and before the final fight for examples.