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| Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) and Toothless in How to Train Your Dragon (2010). |
This review contains spoilers.
The How to Train Your Dragon animated trilogy – How to Train Your Dragon (2010), How To Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019) – have all been box-office hits, but critics have mostly ignored them, and I suspect that the only other adults who know about them discovered them along with their children. One colleague reported that when he sat down to watch the first one with his little boy, he was thoroughly delighted to find a treasure after all the animated crap he’d had to endure, and I imagine that many other parents have been similarly – and happily – caught off guard. I came to them through the good offices of one perspicacious critic, Michael Sragow, who praised the latest one, released a year ago, in his column in Film Comment. Once I saw the first one I was hooked. The forces behind them are the Young Adult author Cressida Cowell, who has written a dozen How to Train Your Dragon books, beginning in 2003, and Dean DeBlois, who co-wrote and co-directed the first of the movies, with Chris Sanders, and went it alone on the two sequels.