There’s nothing toothless about Dreamwork’s feel-good fantasy adventure.
A Viking village where strength is status and difference is weakness isn’t exactly a level playing field for a skinny, clumsy kid with a mind for engineering rather than axe-throwing and it’s telling that in a world obsessed with brute force, How To Train Your Dragon opens with its supposed hero wearily critiquing the world he finds himself in. While everyone else is swinging swords, Hiccup’s working with precision and intent, applying his mind instead of muscle to the day to day problems of life in Berk. The film doesn’t shout its message – it just quietly lets ingenuity and adaptation carry the day and, in the end, Hiccup doesn’t win out because he becomes like the others; he triumphs because he doesn’t.
DreamWorks’ 2010 film arrived at a time when Pixar was mid-golden run, and every other animation studio was flailing for identity. It could easily have been just another energetic fantasy with talking animals and marketable sidekicks, but something sharper took hold. Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, fresh off Lilo & Stitch, again smuggled something more sophisticated and deeper into the mainstream: a story that marries high fantasy with grounded empathy, all through a lens that doesn’t condescend to its audience – young or otherwise.
The relationship between Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and Toothless, a dragon as expressive a non-verbal screen partner as Gromit, is often framed in terms of friendship and trust, but that undersells the film’s real thematic charge. Their meeting is the forging of a bond created in empathy and a recognition of something kindred. Both are missing something: Toothless his tail fin and Hiccup a sense of belonging and in helping Toothless to soar again, Hiccup finds what he needs – an intrinsic confidence that he must be true to himself. Without ever straying into preachiness or after-school special patronising, How To Train Your Dragon makes a compelling and utterly convincing case for diversity and inclusion. It’s simply not interested in a world where difference is tolerated; it wants to show us one where differences are vital.
The fantasy tropes are familiar, but the execution is sharp enough to carve out space in a crowded genre. Stoick the Vast (voiced with weary gravitas by Gerard Butler) isn’t just the archetypal disapproving father – he’s a man trapped by a worldview that no longer fits, struggling with a son who doesn’t want to fit into it. The generational friction never tips into melodrama, because the script is smart enough to know that ignorance, confusion and fear, not cruelty, are what often drive these rifts.
And yes, while Toothless is outrageously merchandisable – a panther-shaped missile with catlike sass whose look and personality has more than a little Stitch in its ancestral DNA – the marketability firmly takes a back seat to the emotional authenticity of the character. There’s no cheap sentiment here, just a deft awareness that soaring scenes of flight mean more when they’re bound to characters who’ve had to reimagine what freedom even looks like. It’s important that Hiccup’s greatest triumph doesn’t involve besting anyone in combat, but in finding a way to help Toothless recover what he lost.
The animation, while rooted in the capabilities of the time, still retains a tactile charm – the dragons feel like creatures rather than cartoons, and the flying sequences have an infectious, kinetic giddiness to them. The real flex, though, is John Powell’s score, which does heavy thematic lifting without ever calling attention to itself. It soars, but it also bruises.How To Train Your Dragon never pretends the world is kind to those who don’t conform. It simply shows that the world can get better when they stop trying to conform, be true to themselves and have the support of their loved ones. For all its flying fire-breathers and raucous comic beats, it’s a surprisingly intimate story – one that finds heroism not in overcoming adversity, but in building something out of it. And perhaps that’s the quiet revolution at the heart of it: the film never insists Hiccup prove he’s just as good as anyone else. It simply shows that he’s what the world needs – not in spite of who he is, but because of it, an idea that finds its final expression when Hiccup suffers a life-changing injury in the finale of the film. It completes a story of redemption through partnership: Hiccup and Toothless, both diminished on their own, become unstoppable together. It’s not that one rescues the other, or that they compensate for each other’s lack, it’s that together, they create something new. How To Train Your Dragon doesn’t pity Hiccup or Toothless, and never turns their need for prostheses into overwrought symbols or punchlines. It simply shows that when you give people what they need to thrive, there’s no limit to what they can achieve.
