Nathan Wilson: How To Train Your Dragon Review

...[W]hen the early marketing for How to Train Your Dragon began, I thought I would probably take my kids, but we wouldn’t be in a rush. We might even wait for the DVD. But Easter brought a four-day weekend and the issue was decided. The family loaded up and journeyed to the nearest theater displaying the 3D version.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I was stunned. I had expected it to look good. I had expected it to be exciting. But I hadn’t suspected a sophisticated reverence for traditional fairy tale. Not having read the book (I will now), I don’t know where the credit belongs, but HTTYD managed to paradoxically invert narrative assumptions while remaining true. And this is where I should warn you of spoilers. If you don’t want me to tell you what happens, go see it for yourself. As for the rest of you, read on.

I was expecting a contemporary morality tale (that my children and I would gripe about in the car). Dragons were going to turn out to be good after all (just misunderstood). We would learn some sort of Avatar lesson about accepting all living things as equals (superiors if they’re blue). But that’s not what was served up. Instead, dragons were bad. They raided the village stealing sheep. They burned it down constantly. They killed people. Lots of people. And here’s one of a few things that stunned me. Why did they do these evil things? Well, because they served The Dragon. The big one. The huge, ancient, evil one. And the story progresses not with one small boy (Hiccup) successfully communicating to his father (Stoick) that dragons were misunderstood, but with that boy crushing The Dragon’s head and . . . losing his foot in the process.

Victory in this story came when all the lesser dragons are freed from that ancient one. And they aren’t freed into autonomy or equality with man. They are freed into service to man—they become pets, friends, and well-treated beasts of burden. They are trained.
-- Nathan Wilson