You could say the 3-D animated kidpic “How To Train Your Dragon” is “Avatar” for simpletons. But that title is already taken, by “Avatar.”
In one of those movies that feels like the story (and maybe the jokes) was devised by the merchandising department, a nerdy young Viking named (in the first of many dull gags) Hiccup comes to doubt the ways of his dragoncidal tribe.
During a dragon raid (on the island of “Berk”), he lucks out and shoots down the most dangerous flame-tongued flying beast of them all — the Night Fury. Sounds like a kind of cologne popular at proms.
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This monster turns out to be a big friendly pet, a sort of bat-Labrador-kitty. He likes being scratched on the neck, he purrs, and his reaction when rolling around in a catnip-like grass is pure Cheech and Chong.
Gradually, Hiccup starts to learn the dragons’ ways, though he must keep this knowledge secret from the town where they’re the enemy. Hiccup also must participate in a dragon-slaying class, though he seems likely to apply for conscientious objector status.
If you can’t see that an allegory as blunt as a mace is coming at you, the 3-D glasses must have blurred your vision. At least the swoop and soar of the dragon-flying scenes, which parallel the best parts of “Avatar,” are fairly nifty, and the look of the film recalls the scary-funny cartoons of Terry Gilliam and Gerald Scaife. There are a couple of OK battle sequences.
They’re more busy and frantic than involving, because for all the velocity and derring-do, the characters are dull. Hiccup and his pet (whom he names “Toothless,” although the monster has retractable teeth) are the only ones who have much impact. The background is a blur of mild bores. Hiccup’s gruff, he-man father, Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler), wants his son to be tougher.
There’s a hanger-on who seems to have no role in anything except wisecrack delivery (he’s played by Craig Ferguson, who like Butler lets his Scotch accent go wild; oddly, everyone else sounds American) and an adolescent girl (America Ferrera) who is, naturally, tougher and feistier than any boy.
Also, there’s another wisenheimer in Hiccup’s training class who is drawn to look exactly like Jack Black, though Black’s price must have been too high because the voice is Jonah Hill’s.
The one interesting aspect of the movie, apart from the design, is that it puts so much effort into projecting a moral, such as it is. Hiccup begins to think about a different approach to dragon-human relations.
Shouldn’t the dragon wars stop? Shouldn’t we all live together in a warm, friendly human-dragon commune? Hiccup tells the dragons, “Everything we know about you guys is wrong” and believes the beasts are not killers — “They defend themselves, that’s all.” Of his own folk, he says, “The food that grows here is tough and tasteless — the people, even more so.”
Hurrah for all this. Really, it’s never too soon to get your kids to accept that their own culture is pathetic — and that the alien one their society is at perpetual war with is really friendly, peace-loving and misunderstood. Hiccup may not be much of a dragon-slayer but in the sequel maybe he’ll go on to a brilliant career in the State Department.
Am I the only one who sees the real threat? Come on, Vikings of Berk, wake up. These dragons are fire-breathing carnivorous monsters. Have you thought about just how much carbon they emit?