If that makes it sound like How To Train Your Dragon has a lesson or two about empathy in store for viewers, there’s a reason for that. But they’re smoothly integrated into a visually rich, emotionally gripping, thoroughly irresistible adventure tale. Adapted from a book by Cressida Cowell and co-directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois—the team behind the similarly winning Lilo & Stitch—How To Train Your Dragon retains a dash of the modern, winking attitude that’s served as the not-always-welcome trademark of DreamWorks Animation, but its emphasis falls squarely on heartfelt storytelling and sumptuous images.
The latter element makes the strongest first impression. The humans have a pleasing, expressive cartooniness, and the dragons share a slightly forbidding, alien appearance, switching from dreadful beasties to overgrown puppies with subtle shifts in expression. Especially endearing: Toothless, the wounded dragon Hiccup first befriends, which makes it easy for the film’s middle portion to become a boy-and-his-dog tale, as kid and dragon come to understand each other against one expansive vista after another.
It’s a great-looking film—and an impressive use of 3D—but ultimately, the story makes it memorable. Dragon drops viewers in the middle of an impossible situation grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding, then saddles an unprepared, easily wounded kid and his scaly, big-eyed sidekick with the task of fixing it. There’s a lot at stake here, and the film never loses sight of that amid all the dragonfire and whooshing flight sequences.
