Dreamworks throws me for a loop again!

Rating: 9/10 (26 April 2010)

Considering for a moment "How to Train Your Dragon" and "Kung-Fu Panda" as a kind of couplet for Dreamworks Animation, they seem to be acquiring great skill in hitting these stories well out of the park.
This is great, solid stuff: Neatly buttoned and compelling storytelling, fine characterization, brilliant voice acting, and very well-done, crisp animation.
"How to Train Your Dragon" is full of action - engaging you virtually from the beginning - but it pulls back by presenting you what you don't expect: A son - "Hiccup" - of a Viking leader who is more book- and mechanically-smart than brawn. An engineer, a tinkerer, a genius in his own right. And, clearly, he's not destined to be a Leif Ericson.
Whether through happenstance, skill, or fate - you decide - Hiccup captures an "uncatchable" dragon, the Night Fury, with a smart little contraption he cooked up. In the process of catching it he goofs the entire effort of the village to fight the swarms of dragons.
Running off later, he finds the Night Fury, who it turns out was injured by his contraption. Lacking a full rudder - so to speak - He can't take to the sky completely. Hiccup cooks up another contraption that helps him fix the rudder and allows him to ride the Night Fury - now affectionately named "Toothless." Simultaneously he is going through "Dragon Training" where he is learning how to kill dragons, but ironically what he is learning from Toothless allows him to best his classmates by learning all sorts of secret moves on the captured dragons they train with - all of which allow him to effectively disable them without hurting them. Hiccup ends up being the village celebrity who can seemingly dominate the dragons without really trying to.
Coming home from a quest to find the Dragons' nest, Hiccup's father, a well-voiced Gerard Butler as Stoick, is beside himself with joy at how well his son is doing.
The story moves on from there from one exciting scene to the next, to the climax, where they battle the biggest dragon of them all.
I won't give the ending away but it's only slightly bittersweet - mostly poignant and not-too-nicely wrapped-up for popular consumption. Suffice it to say even in a war with fictional beasties there is a price to be paid. In the end, Hiccup comes out shining.
This really is a great, fun, engaging story that will keep you on the edge of your seat. It is not fluffy or silly-for-silly's sake (as, say, the "Shrek" series has mostly become). And, even though the action is fairly intense, your kids will very likely love it. It really is a fun, fun story. Don't miss it.