The most offensively overrated animated movie ever to grace the silver screen

Rating: 4/10 (16 November 2014)

I am not a DreamWorks fan. At all. I get irritated when people compare them to Pixar, because when's the last time DreamWorks did anything memorable?! I've never even liked Shrek much! Most would answer my question with this: The most overrated animated movie of all time. It's about a Viking civilisation who have a on-going battle with dragons. A hapless son of the Viking chief begins an unlikely friendship with a dragon and realizes there's more to them. How To Train Your Dragon proves Pixar aren't the only ones who do great visuals, as it looks absolutely great. The story is deeper than one might expect and some of the flying sequences make you feel like you're flying with the dragons. It's a good visual experience and has a couple of good bits, but that's pretty much all I enjoyed. The main problem is that this doesn't tell me anything I haven't been told before. I've seen all these characters before. This story and moral has been done to death. When's the last time I saw animated humans and animals becoming friends? Or flying sequences? Or underdog stories? Maybe last week.
The 90 minute run time is too short for an epic storyline. Too much of the film is rushed into montages and a lot of scenes feel rushed as a result. The film's emotional impact is minimal as the dialogue lacks flair and it moves along too quickly. The characters are some of the most clichéd I've seen in an animated movie, with the love interest having zero chemistry with the rather formulaic hero, although he's coolly named Hiccup. The script is so flat it might as well have been sat on by a dragon. It's not funny or particularly exciting and it feels like the same family feel good fare DW spit out at us year after year, their films like products on a conveyor belt leading out from a factory. This is not some great ground-breaking movie, rather a relatively ordinary and to be truly honest pretty darn boring affair. It looks great, but the story is irritating (Hiccup only gets accepted when he does something heroic) and everything about feels uninspired. It is another trip into cliché town from DreamWorks. The only difference is that this time we're riding a dragon. What a waste of time!
4/10