The latest Third How to Train Your Dragon installment fails to soar
Congratulations to all the nominees and winners at this past Sunday’s Academy Awards. Sure, this could be another breakdown of the “winners” and “losers”, the decisions made (both good and bad), or any other number of things. But instead, this week I want to write about dragons.
Sequels are the lifeblood of early-year film releases, particularly when it comes to animated films aimed at children. Truthfully, sequels are the lifeblood of all family films. They are overwhelmingly popular simply because they’re an activity parents can use to keep their kids relatively quiet for two hours or so.
When it comes to family films, quality is almost always suspect. Most studios are under the (somewhat correct) impression that kids will watch anything. Find something mildly popular, like Angry Birds or emojis, slap together a story involving believing in yourself or the importance of friends, add some computer-generated cartoons, and you’ve got yourself a formulaic family film that will at the very least break even.
If you managed to make a profit, you’ve got a built-in audience for years and years. Stars line up to lend their voices for these films (thanks entirely to Disney and Robin Williams) because it’s relatively low impact and they can do it without traveling to a filming location or spending days in a trailer.
There are, of course, exceptions. Most Pixar films come to mind. DreamWorks also tends to release decent films. One of their more successful franchises is the How to Train Your Dragon series, featuring three films and a Netflix show, all of which are pretty good as far as animated children’s features go.
That said, the new How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World is the weakest of the franchise.
The series is something of a coming-of-age saga following Hiccup, a geeky Viking with a love for inventing. In the original film, his community is one built on dragon slaying. Dragons come for the sheep, the Vikings hunt them down, life goes on. Hiccup, of course, learns that dragons aren’t evil or bad, just misunderstood animals with a range of behaviors that can be domesticated and trained. Eventually Hiccup shows the Vikings how to adapt their way of life and adopt dragons as useful companions.
There’s a theme of ecology and respect built into the series that makes it far smarter than it initially seemed. Each of the sequels (and subsequent Netflix series) has built on this idea. There are dragons of all kinds, from dog-sized to mountain-sized, with a variety of adaptations and quirks, but they are all controlled the same way and have the same hierarchy in their “culture”.
The franchise has lots of rules, to say the least. This might be why How to Train Your Dragon 3 isn’t all that interesting. It doesn’t add much to the story as a whole, beyond introducing a female companion for Hiccup’s dragon companion Toothless, and the story itself was dull enough to make me and my wife check the running time on our phones simultaneously. It feels like an unnecessary part of a mostly good series, one that could have easily been handled on the smaller screen rather than shoved into a theater.
This isn’t to say there aren’t good parts. The film is stunning visually. This is something that most family films can’t always say. Trolls, for instance, seems almost static compared to How to Train Your Dragon. Even Pixar films like the recent sequel to The Incredibles didn’t wow in the way some of these scenes do. When the film soars visually, it’s easier to forgive the clunky narrative and mostly boring characterizations.
But it’s not all about the sequences. With Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse (a well-deserved Oscar winner), the film was so expertly stylized that every scene was knock-out. How to Train Your Dragon 3 doesn’t quite reach this level. Being a fantasy movie about dragons helps a lot—there’s a lot to explore in the world. But still, parts of it are rudimentary.
Speaking of Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse, it seems like the stakes for family films have been raised. It was such an exceptional film that it may no longer be enough to release films like those in the How to Train Your Dragon franchise.
But what am I saying? There will always be a market for family features that are far less good than How to Train Your Dragon as long as parents are willing to shell out their hard-earned cash for a bit of peace.
Here’s to endless sequels and remakes for The Grinch!