Great animation but lacks a believable premise

Rating: 6/10 (15 April 2016)

There was nothing too wrong with this movie (exciting plot, great animation, likable characters) but it failed to move me. Hiccup is a Viking teenager from the island of Berk. Unlike the tough, beefy men for whom fighting dragons is a way of life, Hiccup is lean and scrawny. He tries to live up to the community's expectations but fails miserably each time. His encounter with a dragon challenges him to see things from a different perspective and propels him to revolutionise his community.
I find the premise - that human beings were wrong about the nature of dragons for centuries - not quite believable. To be fair, we have been wrong about many things in the course of history, but to be so wrong about a creature that you encounter on a very regular basis pushes the limits of believability. It just seems so silly that no one realised that the dragons could be tamed/trained except a naive teenager. This fundamental problem is what marred my enjoyment of a movie that otherwise had a lot of things going for it.