How to Train Your Dragon
If you’ve seen 2010’s animated “How to Train Your Dragon,” you’ve seen its 2025 live-action iteration. But that shouldn’t be a surprise, as most of Disney’s live-action adaptations have conditioned us to expect that, even when they deviate from their source film. What anyone reading this review wants to know is if Dean DeBlois’s new look at the material is worth your time. That requires a bit of unpacking.
It’s interesting how, in the span of a month, live-action adaptations of Chris Sanders’s and Dean DeBlois’s two films they share writing and directing credit on have come out. One of the things that distinguishes this from “Lilo & Stitch,” however, is having one of the original directors at the helm. That’s a positive, I think, as DeBlois took the original animated adaptations of Cressida Cowell’s world after the first film and fleshed it out further, creating one of the best movie trilogies of the 2000s. But that also comes with a pitfall- how much would this film change from the original? If at all.
The story is well-known to fans of the franchise. There is a collective of Vikings in the island dwelling of Berk. They often find themselves fighting off dragons who come to pillage their flock of sheep. Leading them is Stoic (Gerard Butler, reprising his role), a fierce dragon fighter. Stoic’s son is Hiccup (Mason Thames), who is the complete opposite of his father in every way. During a dragon attack, Hiccup downs a legendary Night Fury almost by accident. When Stoic goes off to find a dragon nest and put an end to this, Hiccup goes searching for the Night Fury, and Berk will never be the same.
One of the reasons I always loved both of these animated films (“Lilo & Stitch” and “Dragon” the first) is that they are about misfits who become friends. Toothless’s body language is full on cat-inspired, but his personality is as much of that of a goofball as Hiccup is. He tries to destroy Berk in that opening sequence because that is his nature, but as we see him more with Hiccup, we see that- as a sentient being- he’s as shy and scared as Hiccup at times. That’s why these two fit so well together. The bond between Hiccup and Toothless is central to the animated films, and DeBlois successfully translates it to live-action. It helps that Thames does a very good job as Hiccup, even if he is being asked to mimic Jay Baruchel’s voice more than making the role his own. Sanders and DeBlois had a gift in creating two unique films that capture similarly compelling friendships within richer thematic territory. While I think the live-action “Lilo & Stitch” is the better movie in how it adapts its original film, “How to Train Your Dragon” does a better job in how it maintains that central friendship.
Whether it’s Disney’s dozens of live-action adaptations or this film, what the majority reinforce is why these two fit animated choices were so right the first time. Even with DeBlois in the director’s chair for the film’s live-action treatment, there are certain things that worked better in animation. Revisiting snippets of the animated films after watching this, there’s a fluidity to the action in flight that live-action struggles to capture, in part because- due to the remove of being a fully imagined world in animation- the way skies, oceans and landscapes are designed and colored allows for a more fantastic rendering, even when they’re modeled after in real life places. That’s never more evident in this one than during Hiccup and Toothless’s first successful flight together, and when Astrid (played by Nico Parker in another very good live action interpretation of a character). There’s a clean sense of movement and landscape to those sequences in animated that DeBlois just cannot recapture in live-action, even if John Powell’s brilliant music still stirs us along.
“How to Train Your Dragon” 2025 was a largely successful, but ultimately flawed, reimagining of a film I cherish dearly. The central bond between Hiccup and Toothless still grabbed me. The dragon designs in this type of CG were fantastic. DeBlois did a very good job casting all the main characters for live-action. (Can he possibly get Cate Blanchett back to play Valka in the inevitable sequel adaptation?) Powell’s score is still pure magic. And even if most of the flying scenes don’t work as well, the dragon’s nest finale still found its footing. This is one of those films where my connection to the original film makes it hard to be truly objective, but this story just grabs me, and it always will.
