Charming

Rating: 8/10 (22 August 2017)

How to Train Your Dragon is a triumphant piece of storytelling. It has humour, it has emotional depth, it has engaging drama, and its action set pieces carry genuine weight, without the film having to rely on them for thrills.
The star of the show is Toothless - I've watched this film a number of times, and he never fails to make me laugh, and to make me care. He is animated superbly, his movements and expressions giving him immense charm and personality without resorting to the caricatured anthropomorphism Dreamworks so often deals in. Indeed, the film as a whole strikes a perfect balance between cartoon character design and aesthetics - there are some breathtakingly beautiful scenes, especially in the landscape shots.
There is very little to find fault with in this film, except the children, who seem to have been lifted from a cheap American high school movie and dropped into a Viking setting, accents and all. That's not to say that the characters aren't engaging - Hiccup himself has huge personality as the protagonist, and the rest of the gang act as effective foils - it's just that they occasionally detract somewhat from the atmosphere. Then again, one could say the same thing about the rest of the Vikings sounding Scottish - fortunately, this isn't the sort of film that needs to rely on accuracy!
Ultimately, such little niggles don't detract from what is a superb piece of work. I will keep returning to this film again and again, because it is just such tremendous fun.