**If you haven’t seen the “How to Train Your Dragon” films, beware of spoilers below about all three films.**
I loved Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois’s “How to Train Your Dragon” immediately when I saw it in 2010. It was a wonderful piece of storytelling and animation that hooked me in immediately, and in the same way their 2002 Disney film, “Lilo & Stitch,” did as it established an unlikely friendship between misfits. I awaited the sequel which would come in 2014, but it was just a great film for me among other great films.
By the time “How to Train Your Dragon 2”, this time written and directed only by DeBlois, hit theatres, I was in a different place in my life, and the continuing adventures of Hiccup and Toothless had a little more heft with me. In addition, the story DeBlois told was heavier, as Hiccup had to wrestle with his ability to lead the tribe while they go through the transition of being one that hunts dragons to living with them. That’s a rough thing for a young man to do, or even a not-so-young man like me in 2014, when he’s put into a position of greater responsibility to those he cares about, and who depend on him.
What had changed for me in the four years between the first two films? For one, I was further along in my emotional development that had been in progress after a hospitalization put my physical and mental responsibilities to myself into focus, and I realized that doing nothing, and ignoring my issues to my body and soul, were no longer an option. I was in a romantic relationship for the first time in my life, and it was having an impact on how I viewed life, and myself. The biggest change was that on October 13, 2013, my father passed away after over a year of heart issues, leaving just my mother and I and a messy house to look after. Loss has always been difficult for me to process, but the responsibilities to help my mother in getting the house, and bills, in order to make things easier on her, in addition to everything going on in my life at the time, compounded the stress, and forced me to really realign things emotionally in order to step into the role I was thrust in. When I saw “How to Train Your Dragon 2” eight months after his passing, it was that last part that played a role in how hard the movie hit me. In it, Stoic is killed suddenly, thrusting Hiccup into the role that he wasn’t prepared to take on, and the fact that Toothless, who was under control of another, was the one that killed Stoic made it even harder for Hiccup. The scene of Stoic’s funeral, and Hiccup’s sendoff of his father, gets me every time, and touches on the complicated nature of a son having to step into his father’s shoes before he is ready. Like Hiccup, I wasn’t ready for that responsibility, but I had to get ready quickly.
There was another element of “How to Train Your Dragon 2” that was so impactful, however. In the movie, Hiccup also comes across his long-lost mother, Valka, whom they thought had died in a dragon attack when Hiccup was a child. Turns out, she loves dragons, and has created a sanctuary for them. This brings another real-world parallel into play, as Hiccup has struggled with the fact that he is so out of step with the person his father is as a leader, and in how he viewed dragons. Valka helps him fill in those gaps. Like Hiccup, I’m much more my mother’s son than my father’s. There are parts of my father in me, to be sure (my appreciation of the outdoors, my work ethic, my leadership qualities), but my heart, my creativity, the part of me that inspires blogs like this, that is all my mother. Because I grew up with both parents, I never had that lack of understanding about who I was, and which parts of me came from each parent, but the idea that I came from two very different people is something that this movie puts clear into my thinking, and it’s one of the reasons this franchise hit me on such a personal level at the time it did.
Which brings us to the final chapter in DeBlois’s trilogy, “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World”. I have no doubt that DeBlois is being honest when he says that this is it for his trilogy- he tied the bow on this story perfectly- but I really hope other people hold true to those wishes. We will see how it turns out in June, but “Toy Story 4” terrifies me because the way the third one finished in 2010 was so perfect to that story. Hiccup and Toothless’s story is over; I really hope it stays that way.
The thing that I think threw me as I was first watching “The Hidden World” is that, while the bond of Hiccup and Toothless is still at the center of this film, it’s Toothless’s journey that takes center stage here. While the introduction of the Light Fury in this film serves the story DeBlois is telling in the human realm, her importance is ultimately more in Toothless’s arc. From the moment Toothless and Hiccup first saw one another, we’ve seen Toothless from the perspective of Hiccup’s journey from a boy to a man to a chief. “The Hidden World” is about how Toothless, like Hiccup, needs to find his way again as a dragon. He’s been so reliant on Hiccup for so long because of his damaged tail that happened when Hiccup shot him down in the first one that we see him only as subservient to Hiccup rather than his dragon equal. When the Light Fury enters his life, he gets his wings under him again, forcing Hiccup to not only make some tough decisions for how their lives will progress moving forward, but also see how he can be his own person without him.
I’ve now been married for over three years, and the end of this third year has been a tough one. We’ve been hit by challenges, and on multiple fronts, and it hasn’t been easy to keep my strength up. My mother has been living on her own since we got married, and that dynamic has been a big challenge, with her ability to function on a daily basis being the most recent challenge. Actions that require courage are a part of the equation, and it hasn’t been an easy emotional journey. Our respective limitations are being tested, and where that heads in the long run is still to be determined. But watching “The Hidden World,” I couldn’t help but think about these real-world tests in my life as being reflected in the ones Hiccup and Toothless and Astrid, Hiccup’s girlfriend, and Valka find themselves faced with, and it’s that ability to identify so much with the stories onscreen that make me put DeBlois on the same level of great animators as Hayao Miyazaki and Pete Doctor and Brad Bird and Satoshi Kon and Henry Selick, people who understand the power of animation not just as an ability to push the boundaries of what type of images you can put onscreen, but what types of stories you can tell, and how animation is a medium for all audiences, not just kids and families.
Roger Ebert once called movies empathy machines. Movies like the “How to Train Your Dragon” trilogy go beyond that, though. In 2009, Pete Doctor’s Pixar film, “UP” was a work of wish fulfillment for me, as its story of an old man travelling with a young boy after his wife dies had as profound on me as Hiccup and Toothless’s story has. You see, my grandfather passed away in 2000. We were very close, and got closer after his wife died in 1991. In those nine years, he became a world traveler, going on trips he always wanted to make, and seeing sights they wanted to see together. I never went on those trips with him, but he would always tell us about them and show us the pictures when he came to visit us. When I saw “UP,” I felt like I was finally going on one of those adventures with him, and emotionally, it closed the book on one journey I was going through in those intervening years since he had died in 2000. Ten years later, another filmmaker’s work has taken up that mantle. That both are animated works feels like more than just a coincidence. I cannot thank them enough for how much their work has meant to me.
Viva La Resistance!
Brian Skutle
www.sonic-cinema.com
