Review of How to Train Your Dragon (2010) by Adam K — 22 Mar 2014

Glad I gave this a more careful watch.

Httyd has two central themes, both pretty old hat, and it has nothing novel to say about either. Hiccup's arc is a classic struggles of adolescence/coming of age story, but it's handled with such deftness and respect that it comes off really effectively. The distant father who just doesn't understand, the girl he's way too dorky to impress, the societal mold that doesn't fit, it's all been done before. But Hiccup and the Vikings all have such a genuine charm that it's impossible not to buy into these things. Hiccup's friends are all going through the same teen bs, and they each have their own flair for it.

Beyond Hiccup's more general arc, most of the emotional pull of the film comes in its straightforward recreation of the animal rights struggle. While a more general perspective would seem to show the dragons as an independent faction, as intelligent or more so than the Vikings (they seem to grasp human language immediately and pick up on battle plans instantly). But the film constantly paints them as animals, using an overwhelming set of visual tropes to evoke cats (curling up for a nap, scratching under the chin, the laser pointer trick), dogs (panting, begging for food), horses (saddle and rider, willful steed with mind of its own), and wolves (stealing sheep in the night).

These tropes invite the audience to see the dragons as lovable pets, whose lives we value--something we, in a post-animal rights movement society, are trained to see very easily. The central conflict in the story comes because Viking society cannot see this. It still exists in a world where wolves are vermin to be exterminated, and it literally has no concepts to discuss animals as anything but resources or enemies. Hiccup stumbles for answers when Astrid confronts him about the reason he took mercy on Toothless; he can't explain it because he has suddenly accessed a whole set of cultural ideas that exist in our brain but not in his. Httyd is a reenactment of the cultural shift from Wilderness and its creatures as enemies of civilization to the Preservationist Romantic worldview that informs all of the endangered species narratives we grew up with. Since we are on the winning side of that argument, the narrative is thus a fantasy of instant cultural enlightenment.

A bit more specifically, applying pet animal tropes to wild animals is the root of a modern epidemic of exotic pet ownership. Dragons have big eyes and like to be scratched and cuddled, but they also have an intelligence and independence, along with fearsome capabilities that together make them seem more appealing than thoroughly domesticated animals, which, like httyd's sheep and birds, seem dopey and helpless in comparison. I'm not arguing that httyd is responsible for people seeking out exotic pets; it is merely rehashing the relatively old conversations that are. It's just an interesting comparison.