A Study In Average Sequels, How To Train Your Dragon 2 Predictably Underwhelms.

The Good: Moments of character, General plot construction
The Bad: Predictable, Moments of forced humor, Erratic animation quality
The Basics: How To Train Your Dragon 2 continues the story of Hiccup and the dragons near Berk by introducing an unexpected ally and a ruthless new villain.


It is a pretty impressive thing when a single film’s release can change the direction of a production company. In the case of Dreamworks Animation, the somewhat ridiculous (but entirely impressive) winning streak the company had ended rather abruptly with the cinematic release of How To Train Your Dragon 2. Personally, I am surprised Dreamworks did not get their comeuppance a few years back when Prometheus (reviewed here!) was released in the U.S. opposite one of the Madagascar sequels, but regardless of my opinions, it took years later and the ridiculous 22 Jump Street to end the box office dominance of Dreamworks Animation.

Now comes the time for the Monday Morning Quarterbacking; was it the film or the statistical inevitability that led How To Train Your Dragon 2 to fail to take the top spot (or get there in its second week of release). Given that I was not the world’s hugest fan of How To Train Your Dragon (reviewed here!), I tend to fall on the side of statistical inevitability and weather for why How To Train Your Dragon 2 is being perceived as a box office failure (and causing a stock dip in Dreamworks!). Summer has not been intensely hot yet, so families aren’t feeling the push to go out to the air conditioned movie theaters with their children, whereas young adults and nostalgic adults with money in the mood for ridiculous comedies will drop dollars regardless of the weather. Another factor in play is audience age; How To Train Your Dragon was produced at the peak of the children’s book series popularity and the kids who grew up on that series are a few (significant) years older, which makes them less eager to go see the sequel. Regardless, even without having seen the first film in years, How To Train Your Dragon 2 holds up surprisingly well on its own. How To Train Your Dragon 2 might not be a stellar movie or an incredible sequel, but it is a not-disappointing work that is entertaining enough to be diverting, if nothing else.

Opening with a spectacular sports sequence, the Vikings of Berk are at peace with the dragons they have trained. Young dragon riders like Astrid and Hiccup ride their familiar dragons in Quiddich-like sports much to the delight of the Vikings of Berk. Stoick The Vast, Hiccup’s father, is enamored with the idea that Astrid might someday be his daughter-in-law and he wants the young Hiccup to take his place as Berk’s protector. After the entertainment, Astrid and her dragon find Hiccup and his dragon, Toothless, at the edge of the realm. There, seeing a fire, they investigate and Astrid’s dragon is knocked out of the sky. Astrid and Hiccup meet Eret, a dragon trapper who is working for Drago Bludvist. The youths leave with their dragons and report back to Stoick that Bludvist is amassing a dragon army.

When Stoick is upset by the news that Bludvist is raising an army, Hiccup and Astrid head back to Eret’s ship to try to negotiate with him for a meeting with Drago Bludvist. The negotiations quickly fall apart when Hiccup’s friends arrive (and are almost captured) and Stoick himself tries to mount a rescue attempt for the not-captured Hiccup. After learning of the dark relationship Stoick and Bludvist once had, Hiccup is headed home when he and Toothless are attacked by a mysterious, masked dragon rider who leaves Toothless to die in the icy water. Hiccup finds himself in the custody of a woman who claims to be his mother and her horde of dragons. Valka tells Hiccup of how she came to be with the Alpha Dragon twenty years before while Hiccup’s friends worry about his whereabouts and prepare for a war with Bludvist. With a conflict eminent, Hiccup and his friends work to enlist the aid of Valka’s dragons to stop Bludvist from conquering Berk with his army of enslaved dragons.

How To Train Your Dragon 2 is not bad as much as it is predictable and formulaic. With the first film virtually ending the conflict between the dragons and Berk, the sequel has a predictably external conflict. The introduction of Drago is an interesting adversary, though the fact that he comes into the narrative a decent amount of time after the much lighter antagonist, Eret, causes the film to have a few pacing issues. Because the film is very much a family-friendly film, Drago Bludvist is characterized as a psychopath without being shown to be much of one for most of the movie. Instead, he is a generic, short-tempered Viking lord who employs mercenaries and is told to viewers to be a crazed villain. He is rough on his subordinates and his goals are sinister, but he mostly fills the generic villain role without being shown on-screen as being truly monstrous.

At the other end of the spectrum is Valka. Hiccup’s mother is a protector of dragons and might well be best embodiment of Stockholm Syndrome seen in recent years in film, but she is presented with a similarly simple nature. Valka is a pretty universal good character, despite her twenty year absence from Hiccup and Stoick’s lives. A realistic amount of time is spent re-assimilating Valka to Viking culture (getting her away from considering herself a dragon), but that leaves shockingly little time for the actual conflict between Drago and the heroes of Berk (while keeping the film at a family friendly 90 minutes). The result is that the characters in How To Train Your Dragon 2 are almost universally simplistically rendered.

Hiccup seems much younger than the twenty years old he is supposed to be, until he has the threat of invasion to respond to. Predictably, Hiccup rises to the occasion of saving the dragons that Valka has been living with. That predictability makes How To Train Your Dragon 2 seem unremarkable and some of the lines – most notably the romantic obsession Ruffnut has for Eret – seem like throwaway bits of filler. As one might figure for a family film, How To Train Your Dragon 2 is largely lacking in complexities. Hiccup is interesting in that he is a pacifist among Vikings, but even having not seen the first film in years, that seems more a function of his initial characterization than actual character growth.

On the acting front, the talents employed by Dreamworks Animation are predictably impressive. Djimon Hounsou’s deep voice is perfect for connoting menace in every line Drago speaks. Cate Blanchett is good at delivering exposition as Valka, but director Dean DeBlois fails to capitalize on her ability to deliver lines with real emotion by not giving her character the chance to make some of the moments sufficiently deep. Returning actors like Jay Baruchel, America Ferrera, and Gerard Butler are pros who return to their roles easily, even when they are forced to deliver simplistic or unchallenging lines.

It seems like much of the purpose (within the universe of How To Train Your Dragon) of How To Train Your Dragon 2 is to raise the visual stakes of the world of Berk. The Alphas certainly do that, though their visual majesty is trumped by their use as background props for some of their most significant battle moments. Unlike something like, for example, Star Wars where the director might let the special effects department play long enough to create a lavish sequence involving the mammoth visual elements of the Alphas, DeBlois establishes the scale of the Alpha then uses the two massive dragons as background elements (deferring to their control over the rest of the dragons to express their influence in the film more than their physical presence).

Ultimately, How To Train Your Dragon 2 is incredibly average and the result is a movie that suffers as one might expect a sequel to: it is a return to a familiar place where one is left feeling like they did not need more of an expanded story than they already had.

For other Dreamworks Animation films, please check out my reviews of:
Rise Of The Guardians
Rio
Rango
Shrek Forever After
MegaMind
Shark Tale
Shrek

4.5/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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A Surprisingly Adult Premise Makes Lilo & Stitch An Intriguing Disney Film!

The Good: Set-up, Moments where it commits to the premise, Character work, Decent character design.
The Bad: Predictable plot and character arcs, Sacrifices its mature elements for safety, Surprisingly violent for a children’s movie, Erratic animation quality.
The Basics: When an alien falls to Earth and ends up adopted by a Hawaiian girl in need, she finds family and the viewers find Lilo & Stitch unable to commit to its own premise.


I can admire when an established studio takes a real risk with its fan base. Disney certainly took a big risk with Lilo & Stitch, which was a science fiction animated Disney adventure that had a number of elements atypical to a Disney animated film. I find no small irony in the fact that the night after my wife sat me down to watch Lilo & Stitch, a film with a number of comparative elements to the Star Wars Saga, for the first time was the day before Disney bought Lucasfilm. If Lilo & Stitch is any indication, future Star Wars films will be troublingly safe, formulaic and problematically rendered. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what most people say of the Star Wars movies now!

Lilo & Stitch is a science fiction story, though, with the character of Stitch being an alien. The film has a number of familiar elements, especially in the basic plot structure and character types, but the film opens with a comparatively audacious opening that is exceptionally engaging for Disney and science fiction fans. The Disney fans who do not give up on the film for how far from the norm it begins, are rewarded by a movie that develops into exactly like what one expects of a Disney film. As one who was impressed by the strong opening for the film, I ended up a bit more disappointed by the direction in which Lilo & Stitch went.

Experiment 626 is the creation of Jumba, a mad scientist who is incarcerated by the Grand Council of the galaxy. When the measures used to contain Experiment 626 fail, the small creature with two legs, four arms, giant ears and eyes and a mouth full of deadly fangs escapes and ends up crashing on Earth, on one of the Hawaiian islands. There, the creature comes into contact with Lilo. Lilo is a young girl, being cared for by her older sister, Nani, and getting into quite a bit of trouble. After biting a dance classmate and nailing shut the front door on Nani, Lilo’s family life is menaced by former CIA-turned-social-services-agent Cobra Bubbles. Agent Bubbles wants to make sure Lilo is adequately cared for by Nani and he is not at all impressed by their first meeting.

Given three days to shape up her family, Nani allows Lilo to buy a pet from the local animal shelter. There, she adopts the blue alien Experiment 626, whom she names Stitch. As Stitch is hunted by Jumba and his dimwitted police guardian, Pleakley, he causes Nani to lose her job and Nani goes on a quest to find a new job to keep her family safe and secure. While outrunning Jumba, Pleakley, and Captain Gantu of the space fleet, Stitch begins to bond with Lilo and come to understand that his destructive actions have consequences.

In the age of ADHD, Lilo & Stitch would seem to be exceptionally relevant. Unfortunately, the film fails to truly stick with its own premise. Jumba defines Experiment 626 as the ultimate destroying machine. Fast, strong, and destructive without remorse, Stitch is characterized initially as an agent of chaos. However, the simple lack of cities on the island seem enough to reform the creature from unstoppable evil to just periodically annoying. For sure, writers Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois might well be making a comment on how children who suffer from ADHD simply need a change in their environment. However, that does not work. Neither does Lilo’s approach which seems to be to try once, then guild the alien into doing what she wants.

I am, by no means, saying that Lilo & Stitch would be a stronger film if the main character never developed, but the speed of the development utterly undermines the premise of the film. Jumba, Pleakley, Gantu, and ultimately the Grand Councilwoman herself all arrive to do what they can to stop Stitch because the threat of him being out of their custody is perceived as so great. And yet, stuck on the island, there is remarkably little trouble the creature can get into and, more importantly, less it appears inclined to. So, Lilo & Stitch seems an overblown response to a significantly overstated problem.

As one expects from a Disney animated film, Lilo & Stitch is intended to show the strength of family, in this case a broken, small, Hawaiian family. Lilo is easy to empathize with; she lost her parents relatively recently and the film take the time to make some really perceptive comments on such situations. While Bubbles is initially characterized as a monolithic antagonist, his goals are always honorable; to make sure that Lilo is being cared for in the best possible way. When Lilo notes that she likes Nani better as a sister than a mother, it opens a complicated range of emotions and discussions. It is easy to empathize with Lilo, who has lost her parents, and equally easy to empathize with Nani, who is not much older than Lilo (there is a perception that she is in her late-teens, early twenties compared to Lilo, who is in (I believe the film said) first grade). Nani has lost her parents and been saddled with a child at a time in her life when she was very much ready to move on. It is hard not to empathize with that.

Lilo & Stitch opens with the threat of a big villain, who is easily pacified, and epic space battles and a lot of sound and fury that make the film seem like it will be intense and engaging throughout. Unfortunately, it settles pretty rapidly into very standard Disney fare and Lilo and Stitch bond and the alien learns the importance of family. It is very much the Disney formula, with the inclusion of the usual conceits, like the all-powerful authority figure that sits most of the film out (Grand Councilwoman) and the wisecracking sidekick (Pleakley).

The voiceovers in Lilo & Stitch are one of the superlative aspects of the film. All of the vocal talents, from Daveigh Chase (Lilo) and Tia Carrere (Nani) to David Ogden Stiers (Jumba) and Ving Rhames (Bubbles) are clear, emotive and distinctive. Lilo & Stitch benefits from having a decent caliber of actor performing the lines for the occasionally obvious and sometimes action-packed animated film.

But for all the leaps Lilo & Stitch takes to be audacious, clever, and interesting, it rapidly degenerates into exactly what one expects from a Disney animated movie. With a soundtrack of Elvis songs instead of characters singing, Lilo & Stitch makes the fantastic seem credible before it abandons the attempt, making a film more average than audacious.

For other Disney animated films, please visit my reviews of:
Tangled
Toy Story 3
A Christmas Carol
Up
The Princess And The Frog
Bolt
WALL-E
The Incredibles
Monsters, Inc.
The Lion King
The Little Mermaid
Lady And The Tramp
The Sword In The Stone
Sleeping Beauty
Fantasia

6/10

For other film reviews, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Not Terrible For Children, How To Train Your Dragon Is Essentially Avatar For Kids.

The Good: Decent animation, Fun
The Bad: Very simple, Predictable
The Basics: A good, but not wonderful, animated film, How To Train Your Dragon is a fun kid's movie.


One of the few problems with being a discriminating reviewer is that readers tend to want strong opinions on things. They want a movie to be the greatest thing the reviewer has ever seen or the worst piece of trash that they can easily avoid. But being a discriminating reviewer with solid standards often means that an honest review of a movie is going to classify a film in the big, nebulous range that is "average." So few movies are outright terrible and so few are the true masterpieces we want them to be. As a result, it's easy to skip over reviews that honestly evaluate films and consider them average because they don't fall to the extremes. Sadly, that is where I find myself after taking in the new Dreamworks film How To Train Your Dragon. The movie isn't great, but it's not horrible. It is very average.

One of the nice things about being known in my community as a reviewer and being a friend of the local library is that when the library got its film license, they got onto a list that gets them preview screenings at a nearby theater from time to time. As a result, I scored early passes to How To Train Your Dragon and I found myself amid a quintillion of excited children for a screening (those who know me know this is a fate usually reserved for when I have done something terribly wrong in life as I loathe children, especially at the movies). How To Train Your Dragon is based upon a book series by the same name and I guess in anticipation of the movie's release, the library had had a reading group with the kids. I, however, have not read any of the books in this series and so this is a very pure review of the movie only. It is also worth noting that the kids who had read the book split pretty evenly down the lines of those who loved the film vs. those who were annoyed by how little it stuck to the book in places. Again, I cannot speak to that, so the movie . . .

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III a smart aleck in the Viking community where he is growing up as the son of Chief Stoick The Vast. Hiccup is awkward and his father wants him to man up by putting him in dragon combat with the other youth. This goes generally disastrously for Hiccup and his peers, though Astrid - a girl Hiccup is smitten with - fares fairly well. While out exploring Berk one day, Hiccup encounters the ultra-rare Night Fury dragon, who Hiccup befriends. Instead of fighting the dragons, Hiccup learns to train his, Toothless.

In the process of training Toothless, Hiccup begins to grow into his own as a leader, which makes him more attractive to Astrid. This makes Snotlout deeply jealous and while Hiccup and his friends begin training dragons, as opposed to fighting them, Stoick and Gobber lead the Vikings on a rampage against the dragons. Hiccup and his friends must band together to stop the extinction of both the dragons and the Vikings.

How To Train Your Dragon is an animated film by Dreamworks and it follows more in the line of films geared toward the younger audience that appreciates the kid-becomes-hero story as opposed to something like Shrek Forever After (reviewed here!), which has a lot of jokes for adults (even if it was the same joke over and over again). Audiences are likely to be underwhelmed by this animated film, which is clearly the start of a franchise, because of the formulaic plot which has remarkable similarities to the plot of Avatar (reviewed here!). Unlike that animated film, How To Train Your Dragon is clearly supposed to be animated and characters move in a world with physics that follow animated movie laws as opposed to being painfully real. So, while the animated spectacle of soaring with the dragons is pretty cool, not even the children flinched at characters getting knocked around by dragons; the violence is very cartoonish and they will have likely seen similar violence even in commercials.

But, in many ways, this is a very obvious movie. The character development is as formulaic as the plot and it includes the obvious romantic subplot between Hiccup and Astrid, which is tested by the conflicts in the plot. This is a very typical "hero in the process of becoming" and another in a long strain of children's movies whereby the smart, geeky and picked-on youth are encouraged that they can develop into good people through use of their brains. The villains are over-the-top and thus more laughable than truly menacing and as a result, How To Train Your Dragon does a good job at presenting the basic morality play most parents want to see in a children's movie.

On the plus side, the movie is entertaining and it does a good job of showing that brains can beat out brawn and that being different is not necessarily a bad thing (well, unless you smell real bad). And there is a whole concept of "treat animals well" which is always a welcome theme in movies designed for children, so there is that as well. And the animation is good: the colors are bright and there is a decent sense of movement.

As well, the voice acting is good. Jay Baruchel (who seems to be having a good month) leads the cast as Hiccup and he manages to sound appropriately geeky until the moments he needs to sound credibly in charge. America Ferrera stands out in How To Train Your Dragon for her vocal spunk and she steals her scenes as Astrid. Everyone else is good, but they fall within the expected range of voice actors in a big-budget Hollywood film.

Ultimately, I give this a soft recommend because it was fun and I had a good time watching it, but there were no real surprises. This is a good popcorn kid's movie, but it's not one that has much in the way of wit or enduring greatness to it and one wonders if making a franchise of it is truly a good idea; there's not much this one didn't already do.

For other animated film reviews, please be sure to check out:
Little Nemo: Adventures In Slumberland
The Sword In The Stone
Despicable Me

6/10

For other film reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2010 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.




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