Rating:
★★½
USA. 2025.
Crew
Director/Screenplay – Dean DeBlois, Based on the Film How to Train Your Dragon (2010) Written by Will Davies, Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders, and the Book How to Train Your Dragon (2003) by Cressida Cowell, Producers – Marc Platt & Adam Siegel, Photography – Bill Pope, Music – John Powell, Visual Effects Supervisor – Christian Mänz, Visual Effects – Framestore (Supervisors – Dom Hellier, Andy Kind, Francois Lambert & Glenn Melenhorst), Animation Supervisor – Glen McIntosh, Special Effects Supervisor – Terry Palmer, Production Design – Dominic Watkins. Production Company – DreamWorks.
Cast
Mason Thames (Hiccup), Nico Parker (Astrid), Gerard Butler (Stoick), Nick Frost (Gobber), Gabriel Howell (Snotlout), Julian Dennison (Fishlegs), Bronwyn James (Ruffnut), Murray McArthur (Hoark), Peter Serafanowicz (Spitelout), Naomi Wirthner (Gothi), Ruth Codd (Phlegma), Andrea Ware (Burnheart)
Plot
The tiny island village of Berk is terrorised by attacks from dragons. Hiccup is the son of the chief Stoick and an apprentice blacksmith. Hiccup’s ambition is to be a fierce dragon killer and to such end he invents various devices to kill dragons in the smithy. Hiccup employs one of his harpoons during an attack. He then comes across the dragon wounded in the forest and discovers he has shot down the mythical breed known as Night Fury. He befriends the Night Fury, nicknaming it Toothless, and creates a prosthesis for its wounded tail. Eventually Toothless allows Hiccup to place a harness on and ride it. Meanwhile, Hiccup’s father enrols him in apprentice dragonslayer class. The things Hiccup learns from Toothless allow him to win by taming the dragons by peaceful means rather than killing them. Things are endangered when Astrid, the girl Hiccup has a crush on, discovers Toothless and is determined to kill him.
The animated How to Train Your Dragon (2010), an adaptation of Cressida Cowell’s children’s books, was a reasonable success for DreamWorks when it came out – among the Top 10 films at the box-office that year. The film’s co-director Dean DeBlois went on to solo direct two sequels with How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019).
Disney have been enjoying great success throughout the 2010s and 2020s with live-action remakes of their classic films. The fad stretches back to the 1990s but took off in a big way in the 2010s with the likes of Maleficent (2014), Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Aladdin (2019), Dumbo (2019), Lady and the Tramp (2019), The Lion King (2019), Mulan (2020), Cruella (2021), Pinocchio (2022), The Little Mermaid (2023), Peter Pan and Wendy (2023), Snow White (2025) and Lilo & Stitch (2025).
As far as I am aware, How to Train Your Dragon is the first animated film that isn’t based on a Disney work to have undergone the live-action treatment. There was Ghost in the Shell (2017), but that was more adult minded, and before that the only example I can find is Charlotte’s Web (2006) – although there have been plenty live-action films based on animated tv series ever since The Flintstones (1994). (See Animation in Live-Action). It says something about how much Disney is churning through material that we are getting a remake of an animated property only fifteen years after the original came out and a mere six years before the last sequel was in theatres such that Gerard Butler who played Stoick in the original is still in the same age bracket that he be cast in the same part here.
I had just come from watching the soulless live-action version of Disney’s Lilo & Stitch a week before and had no high expectations of How to Train Your Dragon. Instead, I was gently surprised and found it more likeable than I expected. The one thing that need be said is that this version follows the 2010 animated original on just about every single beat. It is exactly the same film, bar minor tweaks, even right down to the same look of the dragons and design of the training arena.
Having made the film once before and directed its two sequels, Dean DeBlois knows all the right place to play the emotion. The scenes around the village at the outset are noticeably colour desaturated in contrast to the original’s vibrant colour palette, although this improves later in the film. The film’s heart comes in the scenes with Hiccup (perfectly cast with Mason Thames who finds just the right callow earnestness) and Toothless hitting all the same emotive beats. The dragon effects end up being surprisingly good.
How to Train Your Dragon reaches its climax and soars in ways that most of the Disney live-action remakes do not. They feel like characterless cover versions where people in cosplay have replicated a few scenes from the film. Dean DeBlois at least goes for the heart of the story and gives us what made the original work. The downside of this is that it leaves where the only feeling you have afterwards is to say “Well, I watched this film once before. Now I have watched it enacted the same way in live-action.” It is an overused cliché to say that creativity is dead in Hollywood. If it isn’t quite then something like How to Train Your Dragon is surely as close as it gets.
Trailer here
