How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
There were times during “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” that I was worried that writer-director Dean DeBlois didn’t have a firm grasp on the endgame he was heading towards with the final film of his trilogy based on Cressida Cowell’s book series. That terrified me, because, as with Pixar’s “Toy Story” films, the first two films in Dreamworks’s best franchise were flat-out perfect. But by the ending, he found the emotional footing in this film, and the result left me in tears in a way that even “Toy Story 3” didn’t take me. This is an imperfect film, but it’s a note perfect trilogy.
The story of Hiccup, a viking who doesn’t fit in with his tribe in the land of Berk, and Toothless, the dragon he shoots down, and then befriends after vikings and dragons had been adversaries for generations, is one that has affected me deeply over the past decade. The film is not just a fun fantasy film, but about how Hiccup grows from being the unsure son of chief Stoic, to being a worthy successor who finds a way to lead vikings in his own way. Toothless is a huge part of that process, and the emotional connection between the two is what has driven the series. Toothless is an outlier, as well; a legendary Night Fury, the most feared of the dragons, he is the dragon Hiccup “trains,” and he allows us entry into the way dragons can be domesticated like any other animal. Toothless is basically a cat, and my wife and I see a lot of him in our own cat, Midnight, even down to a physical disability that makes him a little more dependent on humans than other animals.
“The Hidden World” takes place a year after Stoic (Gerard Butler) died, and Hiccup (voiced by the wonderful Jay Baruchel) took over the role of chief with Toothless, his mother (Valka, whom he had found in the second film, and who is played by Cate Blanchett), and Astrid (voiced by America Ferrera), his girlfriend, by his side. The village of Berk has become overrun with dragons as Hiccup has led them to save dragons from enslavement over the years, and it’s becoming more and more of a target for people who want to keep the dynamic between humans and dragons the same as it always was. In this film, that person is Grimmel (the great F. Murray Abraham), who is a famous dragon killer, and has especially prided himself in his ability to hunt and kill Night Furies using a secret weapon to lure them in. With Toothless as the alpha among Berk’s dragons, he is very much on Grimmel’s radar, and he deploys his weapon in catching him.
Part of what made me uneasy throughout some of “The Hidden World” was how DeBlois introduced the Light Fury that has been front and center in the trailers for this film, as well as had the titular hidden world, which Stoic believed existed, and felt Hiccup was destined to find, as the MacGuffin of this film. It took a while for these story threads to come into focus in terms of how they mattered to Hiccup and Toothless’s story for me, but as soon as they did, wow. The budding relationship between Toothless and the Light Fury is as fun as it is set up as in the trailers, and ties into the flashbacks DeBlois puts throughout the film of Stoic talking to his young son. We start to see Hiccup and Toothless as less just friends, but Hiccup as a parent who had to nurse Toothless back to health in the first one, and protect him from the outside world. The Light Fury disrupts that, but also shows the two a glimpse of life without the other. Toothless seems to be doing fine; Hiccup struggles, much as a parent who has relied on others to help them might. The last 20-30 minutes of this movie is as strong and emotional as the same stretch was in the second film. Just thinking about it for this review, listening to John Powell’s fantastic music, I cannot wait to revisit it in a few weeks.
I’m planning on going deeper into the trilogy when the film hits theatres proper in a few weeks. (I saw it with my wife at a Fandango screening Super Bowl weekend.) For now, I’ll have to wait to see this again, hopefully with fresh viewings of the first two films, and experience fully the storytelling greatness Dean DeBlois has brought that has hit me on such a strong emotional level. I cannot wait, and I hope that Hollywood leaves well alone, letting DeBlois’s trilogy sit as one of the great franchises in film history.
