Good family-entertainment

Rating: 7/10 (18 March 2011)

I've seen this movie a couple of times now, all of them in normal 2D since I think every movie should be judged by its basic format free from any gimmick. I really liked this movie a lot, although there are a couple of aspects that were a setback to me which I'm gonna list below.
First of are the cliché's, How To Train Your Dragon has a lot of cliché's particularly in its characters; you have the tough girl that everyone likes, the aggressive bully, the nerdy fat kid, the annoying 'funny' twins. These are all things that regular movie-goers probably won't mind, but for me they felt kind of tiresome and I felt that it didn't add a lot to the overall picture, nor do I feel that any of them were particularly funny or entertaining as characters.
The other thing that I didn't really like was the voice of our main protagonist Hiccup (Jay Baruchel). This is somewhat a hit or miss, because he does seem to do a pretty good job with the voice, and at times he does come across like he's having a good time but to me his nasally voice gets a bit irritating. But this is just a minor personal preference. The voice-cast overall is pretty damn good though, if you can at least appreciate the humour of vikings with over the top Scottish accents.
These are the few downsides of the movie, but How To Train Your Dragon luckily has a lot of entertainment to offer. To begin with, the visuals are great. Particularly the flying-scenes are easily the highlight of the movie, which I think most people would agree with me. Besides that, the movie has just the right pacing, giving us good insight into the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless. The creators also avoided turning this into a typical love-story which I liked, and the ending is spectacular to say the least.
How To Train Your Dragon is a excellent movie for the entire family like you would expect from a company like Dreamworks. Well worth the money and time.