Gives you that Pixar feeling.

Rating: 7/10 (11 April 2010)

The poorly titled animated adventure belies the simple boy meets dragon story as seen in trailers. This is a beautiful looking Viking epic, starting with an almost impossible opening sequence that juggles the introduction to all the characters, some jokes about viking life, all the while a huge dragon attack is taking place. As with any tentpole movie, effects or extravagant animated environments mean nothing if the story and characters aren't interesting. Here, our dragon trainer has a likable misfit nature that keeps the audience (both young and old) amused. That is one element usually missing in non-Pixar films. There are well formed characters throughout the ensemble, all of them showing personality and capable of generating good humour.
I went to the 3D showing, and was not expecting much more than a cutesy tale of a boy training a dragon. To be sure the cutesy stuff is in there, certainly not shying away from giving dragons Disney-like big eyes and even purring like a kitten. What I was pleasantly amazed to find was that there is a lively Viking adventure that has a whimsical spirit. The Vikings come off as more than 2 dimensional, and the sweeping 3D shots give a great thrill ride around jagged cliffs. The central plot is a Vikings journey by boat to fight the dragons, and most of the obligatory love interest and bully subplots don't get in the way. Perhaps one could complain about plot holes in how a young kid disappears constantly without anybody connecting it with his new dragon training abilities. Several convenient plot points allow the story to whisk us along, wasting no moment on screen to move forward boy-trains-dragon, boy-meets-girl, and boy-rebels-against-society story arcs.
If you can keep the audience entertained, then you can pull off the magic act of suspending disbelief, something harder to do with adults watching this type of animated fare, then you have achieved that Pixar feeling. One of the very few animated films not made by Pixar that have done this.
7 out of 10.