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Movies & TV

How To Train Your Dragon

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (Dreamworks, 2010) D: Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders, w/ Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler (voices). Rating: NNN DVD package: NNN Rating: NNN


As computer animation, this is extraordinary. Every frame is incredibly detailed and richly coloured, textured and lit. The human characters look like cartoons and move like people. The dragons look goofy (except for the sleek and feline hero dragon, Toothless) and fly with fluid grace. The opening dragon attack scene is as complex and fully realized as any animation you’ve seen.

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But the movie itself offers only mild laughs, thrills and charm. Presumably, the creators kept it soft for the target-audience tots.

Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel), a scrawny, inept Viking kid, lives in a village under near-nightly attack by dragons. He secretly befriends one, though his village is determined to kill them all.

Baruchel is funny and a decent voice actor, but strangely, he sounds purely American, and occasionally lapses into 90s-style empty irony. When everybody else (except love interest America Ferrera, who has few lines) sounds clearly British, their accents undermine our engagement with the story.

The set-pieces, clearly shot for 3-D, work well without it.

The making-of docs and commentary are informative without going into too much depth.

EXTRAS Commentary, cast doc, animation doc. Widescreen. English, French, Spanish audio and subtitles.

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