How to Train Your Dragon 2 review
The sequel to Dreamworks’ 2010’s hit ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ picks up 5 years after the original left off, with a story of family, responsibility, friendship and Dragons. Lots and lots of Dragons.
The now inseparable pair of Hiccup and Toothless spend their days exploring the lands around the Island of Burk and generally evading responsibility, when they learn of the evil Drago Bludvist and his plans to attack the village to steal their Dragons. Hiccup goes to try and reason with him, but on the way meets a mysterious Dragon Rider who shows him that there is more to Dragons than he ever imagined, and who bares an uncanny family resemblance…
Objectively viewed, the sequel is an enhancement of the original in just about every way. It is more adventurous in plot, there are more characters, more settings, more intensity, more depth, more scope, more effects, more emotion. Just more of everything. And it is amongst the most visually stunning animated films that has ever been made, with so much dazzling spectacle and background information crammed in to every frame that it can be difficult to know where to focus. The cinematography team (headed up by Richard Deakins) take the audience on a swooping, soaring adventure that is probably about as close as most of us will ever come to riding on the back of a Dragon.
Director Dean Dublois is on the record as saying that this is the ‘Empire Strikes Back’ of what is intended to be a trilogy of films, and that is evident through both the expansion of the world, and the darkening of the tone. This film has themes and ideas that belie it’s PG rating, and may be another example of the ratings board underestimating animation’s ability to screw kids up.
This is not a sequel that has played it safe, but rather one that has matured with its audience. When Hiccup disobeys his Father and leaves his responsibilities on Burk to reason with the villainous Drago Bludvist and his Dragon army, many films would have lauded his decision as reckless but ultimately heroic. Yet in this film, his actions have devastating consequences that are allowed to play out and aren’t neatly resolved when the film ends. Hiccup makes a mistake, and is made to play a huge price for his naivety.
That’s not to say that the film isn’t fun for all the family: kids will laugh, teenagers will laugh, and adults will laugh – although possibly at different bits. Stunning character animation on the mute Tootlhless provides many of the film’s best bits, and the hormonal wrestlings between Snotlout, Fish Legs and Ruffnut provides much needed comic relief when the film gets darker or when you seem to have something in your eye and maybe need to turn away from the screen for a few minutes to recover but are totally fine thanks for asking.
As a consequence of everything being expanded upon, the multitude of characters aren’t given the time to develop – especially Drago Blodvist who, despite a fantastic name and impressive monobrow, is given little screen time and no motivation for his actions beyond being a big old meanie pants. The female character who bares an uncanny resemblance to Hiccup and is about maybe 30 years older than him is shunted aside when the third act begins even though some of the skills she demonstrated at the start of the movie might have been really quite helpful. And the supporting cast, despite the impressive array of famous voices that we’ve come to expect from a Dreamworks film, is really just there to provide a vague B plot to allow the storytellers something to cut to.
The original benefitted from narrative simplicity, a quirky charm, rounded characters and an admirable lack of villains. This film does not have any of those things, but neither does it try to. It’s no longer a film about a small boy coming to terms with his place in a small world. The sequel is about a man looking to forge his own place within a large and constantly expanding world. It achieves all that and then some.
Nerdy bit:
The new technology behind this film is worth a mention too, as the improvements that Dreamworks have made between this film and the last are vast, and undoubtedly one of the main reasons behind both the visual feast and the beautifully subtle animation that this film achieves. DWA substantially overhauled it’s animation software to partner with Hewlett Packard on ‘Apollo’. It uses “scalable multi-core processing” and is “the next revolution in filmmaking” according to Katzenberg. Much like Pixar’s Renderman software, it enables animators and other artists to view their work in real time, rather than making them wait up to 8 hours to see changes and, when combined with other software such as Premo and Torch, it allows a greatly enhanced “sense of fat, jiggle, loose skin, and the sensation of skin moving over muscle instead of masses moving together.” This is the first film that Dreamworks has made with this new technology, so there is no doubt that we are in for some visual treats in the years to come.
Fingers crossed that the money men keep to their promise to DuBlois and allow him to make the third film of this trilogy, despite a surprisingly underwhelming box-office performance.