Well, this is embarrassing. I’ve pretty much spent my entire, brief review-writing career tearing apart movies that most people enjoy and bitching about every little contrivance, blowing it up far bigger than it needs to be in the sake of comedy. When I went to see How to Train Your Dragon last night in 3D, I wasn’t expecting any different. Like Wesley Snipes before he met Woody Harrelson in White Men Can’t Jump, I was ready to pounce on Dreamworks’ newest foray into animation, a studio that’s essentially still suckling the last drops of milk from the Shrek franchise, and write an entire article dismantling it like everything else that’s come my way.
Unfortunately for me, however, HTTYD is actually one of the bigger surprise movies I’ve seen this year that…gasp…doesn’t suck.
Well nuts to me. Thanks a lot HTTYD, now I have to write a whole article praising you instead of overanalyzing every little detail and dragging what’s probably a decent movie into an abyss of putridity. Prick.
HTTYD is the story of Hiccup, a skinny ginger wannabe Viking who’s about a tenth the size of everyone else in his Viking village and is voiced by the dork in She’s Out of My League. His father is voiced by Gerard Butler, an actor who needs to take a look in the mirror and realize he needs to skip out on the chick flicks and stick to things he’s good at (being a badass) and his classmates in dragon killing class are voiced by the fat kid from Superbad (Jonah Hill) and McLovin, also from Superbad. Craig Ferguson voices Gerard Butler’s assistant and apparently this is a huge deal according to the promos but I’ve never heard of Craig Ferguson so I don’t fucking care. Anyway, Hiccup as it turns out, is actually a hippy and can’t kill a dragon, which he befriends and names Toothless, despite the fact that it clearly has teeth. He could’ve named it Godzilla Junior or Raven or something badass, especially considering that it’s the most badass dragon in the world (despite the actual Godzilla-Dragon ripoff that appears at the film’s climax). Hiccup starts to figure out that dragons aren’t in fact evil, well at least not that evil, and are essentially just giant reptilian cats. Seriously. They like scratches behind the ears, fish, and catnip. Not joking.
Telling you any more of the plot would probably ruin what is, dare I say, a very enjoyable experience. The 3D is, and I say this with absolutely no bias in opposition of James “Douchebag” Cameron, better than Avatar. That’s right, James Cameron; you’re half-billion dollar epic science fiction fantasy that was meant to revolutionize cinema as we know it and bring you a boatload of Oscars was beat out at your own game by a tiny Dreamworks cartoon that had all the promotion of my facebook statuses (not a lot). The 3D in Avatar was often more distracting than entertaining and immersive and Cameron spent every moment he could slapping our faces with it, whether it was with those little jellyfish-seed things or bows and arrows flying towards the camera. It also only worked on three planes; there was a foreground, middle, and background. HTTYD, however, is better. The 3D isn’t distracting and feels far more natural than Avatar’s ever did. Yes, there are your occasional moments where it gets a little blurry but the depth is incredibly convincing, the flying sequences are far more engaging and, unlike in Avatar, don’t stay on screen so long that you get bored and start glancing at your watch and lovingly eyeing the “exit” signs.
Suck it, Cameron.
Unfortunately this is a critique, and though I can’t find anything glaringly wrong with the picture (it’s f*cking perfect), I feel obligated to complain about something in the name of entertainment. I guess if I had to dig deep, I’d bitch about the accents. Why do the kids have clearly American accents while all the adults are running around with deep Scottish accents? You develop accents based on your surroundings, I was raised by my grandparents who were both from New Zealand and as a result I have trouble pronouncing “er” suffixes without them sounding like “ah” (no, it doesn’t get me laid). Though I guess I can forgive the film’s inadequacy to provide the right accents considering it’s a movie about fucking dragons.
Fine, here it goes: How to Train Your Dragon is good. It’s well-written, the voice actors are perfectly cast, and the 3D is the best I’ve seen so far, even better than Douchebag’s (Cameron’s) “epic.” It really isn’t that funny but has a surprisingly high level of emotional depth that makes it so immersive that by the time it ends your actually disappointed that it’s over despite how badly you have to go to the bathroom after your $8 small soda. It’s probably the best film of the year, particularly out of animated films, thus far in 2010.
That is, of course, until Toy Story 3 comes out this summer to piss all over everyone else while laughing all the way to the bank.
Score: 9.5
