"How to Train Your Dragon" Talkback (Spoilers)

I saw this movie today, and I have to say that it is the best Dreamworks movie I have ever seen. It was almost on the level of a Pixar movie to be perfectly honest. Not a single pop culture reference or fart joke in sight.
 
Saw this with my folks tonight- absolutely loved it, definately the best Dreamworks has done, ever. What a wonderful family film, something which I haven't seen in such a long time.

Oh, and the dragon reminded me of one of my cats, so that helped :anime:
 
Saw it with my friends. Thought it was fantastic, all the way through. I especially like how Hiccup didn't escape his near death unscathed.
 
That's not speculation when that's how it's explained. That's why the book (The Dragon Manual as shown in the movie I mean, not the real book) exists - because each dragon acts different despite having similar attitudes. They do not mature into a Green Death.

The dragons are fine with humans as long as they understand each other. Even the exchange "dragons killed us, we killed dragons" showed that they're not so different, and by removing the thing that prevented their freedom allowed them to have peace with the humans.
 
On a related note - anyone else interested on how varied they actually made each dragon, not only about size, but about features, the difference of their flames, etc.?
 
There's no evidence that one of the types of dragons doesn't eventually mature and metamorphosize into the big dragon, which is not necessarily the Green Death. Such metamorphosis is not unknown in insect societies. The book is also spotty in its information (note the missing info on the dragon Toothless is and lack of info about the hive) and clearly wrong about the dragons' attitudes. The vikings clearly haven't studied the dragons in anything like a scientific manner, they haven't seen the hive, and the dragons might have such a long lifespan there are events in their lives the Vikings weren't there to witness. And it's possible the dragons take different forms based on their roles in the hive but still stem from the same point.

Let's face it. All that's there in the movie is a hivelike dragon society with a central figure that one character refers to as a queen. Why would they have that line of dialogue if that wasn't what they were trying to get across?

The dragons being "fine" with humans might make a happy ending, but the cruelly treated POW dragons being the first to accept human riders is just kind of ridiculous. The dragons in the book could talk. The dragons in the movie seem to be very stupid, doglike at best.
 
It was an intentional choice by Chris and Dean. They wanted to make the dragons (specifically Toothless) more inscrutable and animalistic. Since HTTYD is confirmed to be getting the full treatment (TV show, Sequel, Live Event, etc) I'll be curious to see if they try to retcon speech to the dragons. It is obvious they are intelligent as Toothless does quite a lot of anthropomorphic gesturing like sarcastically copying Astrid's gait when she leaves in disgust.

I'd be curious to see if they take a similar tack to the Temeraire series, where dragons will only learn language if they hear it while in the egg and the 'feral' dragons have no speech.
 
Finally saw this last night. It was a movie I've been looking forward to for quite some time, especially given that it seemed to be a break from the rather cloying self-aware Dreamworks animations. So there were no big actors headlining the trailers, no talking animals, no irreverent pop-culture references or attempts to look edgy.

But overall, it was good. Not a masterpiece but good in the sense that it was a well-executed setpiece but lacked the bite (no pun intended) to make it all the more distinctive. I knew I was expecting a "They're not what they seem" thread woven into the plot, but I never expected it to be done in the most ham-fisted, shallow way possible. Even the villain seems tacked on in this regard, and this line between Stoick and Hiccup really irked me:

Stoick: They killed hundreds of us!
Hiccup: And we killed thousands of them!

Is he clearly insinuating that his father and the vikings, who are waging essentially acts of self-defence against the dragons to keep their village running or so forth, but just happen to glorify dragon killing, is WORSE than the dragons themselves? What? I'm sorry but really now, you're making Stoick to be like a genocidal superchief or cliched villains like Quaritch and the CEO in Avatar, and Radcliffe from Pocahontas who have a McGuffin to drive the plot and motivate them to do the most heinous. Here Stoick is more nuanced than that, and it kindof hampers the inherent message of the film. I mean, if they had dumbed it down a notch and actually made the dialogue y'know... smarter and had Hiccup say something like, "And we've killed that number in kind!" In essence it hurts who is essentially a well-written character in a way, and just turns the movie's morals into a fine pap.

Still, I cannot deny the charm of the visuals, the action, and the characters at times, and I still like it enough to at least warrant a recommendation. And if anything though...

It will be better than MegaMind. I guarantee you that. I watched the teaser before HTTYD, and cringed.
 
I am. Usually I cringe at dragons they try to make look outlandish because there's no way it could possibly work, but they kept a nice balance between practical anatomy and crazy stuff. :3

Although the behemoth was too big to fly. Whatever, it was a plot device and the fight was cool. :p



Eh, I saw that argument as more oldschool vs. newschool, and the father/son tension coming to a head. Teenagers oftentimes latch on to causes that are noble, but beside the point. Hiccup's statement isn't wrong, nor is it dumb exactly, but it's in character. And it was a travesty that despite the might and bravery of the Vikings, none of them had the guts to investigate dragons any further than what it takes to kill them - which ultimately lost lives on both sides. He's calling BS on the Viking tradition but being clumsy about it - which, as I said, is in character. *shrugs*

I thought the way he was handling the situation in the ring was good up until he said "I'm not one of them". That was a mistake as far as the (Viking) audience was concerned, but he was angry with his people and acted rashly. Just as Stoic acted rashly when Hiccup wasn't doing what he expected him to do.

Stoic was never really made out to be a bad guy - he was just a dad trying to figure out his son, and keep the village safe. That was made pretty clear from the get go. I mean if he was a bad guy, why'd they make all of the conversations between Stoic and Hiccup so awkward? XD
 
But what made you assume that the dragons are metamorphosis though? Especially considering when it was only mentioned as an analogy rather than a fact just to get a point across. I still stand by the Monster Hunter Wyvern analogy, since it's closer and it is actually quite a common explanation.

The fact that the characters treat each dragon as a different species due to different behavior and physiology should be a sign of being different.
 
Metamorphosis makes sense because of the insectlike hive structure and the queen. It makes sense that the queen gives birth to all the dragons in the hive and they have different shapes based on their roles. At the point when a new queen is needed one of the types of dragons, maybe the little green ones, start to change and grow and secret themselves away at the bottom of the hive, where they lay eggs and are fed by the other dragons. Like queen ants and bees, basically.

The Vikings don't know about the queen until the end, though, and that information might have changed their assumption that all the dragons were different species. Almost all of their information about the dragons is clearly wrong.
 
The only wrong aspect in their part is that dragons are pretty friendly when it doesn't see itself in danger. Otherwise they got most of the characteristics right.

And again, officially it's never a mother, as stated before.
 
Huh?

He just simply used that to counteract his father's view. It doesn't necessarily mean that either one is a worse monster. He just wanted to point out that the dragons themselves were "victims" too.

Also, you'll notice that the dragon population is probably a lot more than the vikings.
 
The guide is a martial guide for killing them, though. It only talks about their defenses and its recommendations are mostly "kill on sight." It's not a scientific manual and not proof that the Vikings really understand the physiology of the dragons.

The movie doesn't take any position that would lead one to believe it is not, as stated, an actual queen dragon. Only that it's sort of a nasty queen dragon that eats its workers occasionally and scares them. There's no information in the movie to contradict that.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
 
Excellent film. Best 3-D and DreamWorks movie yet. It was truly an epic animated tale. I'm glad I didn't go by the trailers' judgement. You can expect a full review by next week.
 
Hmm ok.

However, about the manual, it was mostly for killing, yes, but it still contained details that were still accurate. Hell, despite being a horrible adviser, Fisheyes was quite knowledgeable in dragons and quite correct that they served as useful tactics.
 
I believe that even though the dragons were prisoners of war, they were never really hurt. They got free food and actually be minorly trusting of humans. That's why they were easy to tame and quick to attack the queen.
 
I think you must have got up to go to the bathroom and missed the parts where the kids are encouraged to attack the dragons and one is to be killed as part of the training.
 
One thing I really loved was the variety and effort they put into each dragon species, as well as the creativity of the ones hiccup only read about in the book, although I assume they might be in the game version.


Was this based on a children's book? I thought I heard it was.

Hopefully we get a sequel to this.
 
I've seen the movie twice and never left the theater both times. The dragons are, as previously mentioned, animals which are kept in separate cages and never see the other dragons. The total attacking that happens in training is going through a maze trying to knock a dragon out, trying to make another dragon use up all its shots, and throwing water on a dragon with two heads. The dragons, since they are animals, do not probably understand any of this.
 
Back
Top