How to Train Your Dragon

In a world populated with Toy Stories, Ice Ages, and Shreks, it's relatively easy to gather the feeling that when it comes to computer animation, we've seen it all before. There have been so many gargantuan technical advances in the realm of fully pixelated productions over the last decade-and-a-half that it is growing increasingly possible to risk desensitization in the face of such computer-assisted wonders. But just when it seems like CGI can't scale any loftier heights, along comes a movie like How to Train Your Dragon to make 21st century computer animation look new again.

To put it bluntly, the visuals in this family flick from Dreamworks Animation are brilliant, breathtaking, unbelievably accomplished, and overwhelmingly opulent. Every texture, be it wood, fabric, skin, or hair, is perfectly rendered and undeniably beautiful. The third dimension is on exquisite display here (I had the pleasure of watching the movie in IMAX 3D) and the additional depth only serves to make each individual frame even more impressively immersive.

Of course, it would be nice if this Dragon came with a script as sharp as the visuals. The cutesy title reveals a cutesy premise: a scrawny, underappreciated member of a Viking village routinely attacked by dragons uses an invented projectile weapon to fell one of the fire-breathing beasts in an effort to fit in with his tribe, only to quickly discover that the creatures are misunderstood. The idea is sweet and filled with potential, but writers Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, who adapted the story from Cressida Cowell's novel, rarely locate any narrative inspiration beyond the basic concept.

The human characters are more irritating than endearing and the handful of jokes that are occasionally tossed into the fray are of the lowest common denominator variety. Don't expect any Pixar-style laughs at this one. It's purely lame one-liners and sloppy slapstick. But even then, most of these complaints emerge from the earlier moments of the movie, because once the dragons are invited to actually become characters, How to Train Your Dragon finds its footing regardless of its less-than-stellar screenplay.

The aforementioned scrawny hero of the story is named Hiccup (voiced by scrawny comic actor Jay Baruchel) and he has sadly spent his life as a social outcast. It doesn't help that his father is tribe chief Stoick (voiced by Gerard Butler, making no attempt to hide his Scottish accent, since most of the Viking elders seem to inexplicably hail from British shores), who measures a person's worth by their ability to slay dragons. When Hiccup manages to knock a dragon out of the air during a late-night attack, he sees the unexpected accomplishment as a solution to all of his problems.

But when Hiccup finally locates his captured prey, he finds that the beast is just as scared as he is and so he chooses to free the dragon. Such an act of previously unknown kindness sparks an unlikely friendship between Hiccup and the creature he nicknames Toothless. It's rather obvious where the story is headed from here and DeBlois and Sanders make no effort to mask the predictability of the plot, but it is in this fulfillment of the title that the movie begins to reach beyond the sheer awe of its visual scope.

Luckily, DeBlois and Sanders prove to be much stronger directors than they are writers, which means that even as the movie continues to falter in certain departments, it still manages to soar high into the air long before the thrilling conclusion. The entertainment-boosting game-changer is Toothless, who features some truly lovable creature design and is imbued with more heart and soul than all of the human characters combined. Even though the Vikings are rarely more than pretty pixels, the dragons (and especially Toothless) are big, beautiful beasts with loads of personality.

Once Hiccup sets a saddle upon Toothless' back and takes a ride over forests and seas atop his mighty pet, the moving magnificence of How to Train Your Dragon becomes impossible to ignore. The 3D imagery explodes outside the boundaries of the screen and the virtual camera captures every dip, turn, climb, and flip with astonishing precision. These moments of cinematic escape are so exhilarating that I feel I am exhausting a list of glowing adjectives in my attempt to describe them. Suffice to say that these sequences demand to be experienced on the big screen and that no other flaws in the movie can rob them of their pristine splendour.

With such energy behind the visuals, I wish that How to Train Your Dragon wasn't propped up on so wobbly a screenplay. The plot is handled well enough, but the human characters are unnecessarily flat and most of the voice work is best forgotten. I also wish that the movie's excuses for comedy were a little less uncomfortable and a little more funny. But I can't deny that DeBlois and Sanders know where their combined strengths lie and that those strengths have produced something very exciting that is sure to become a regular player on family movie nights. How to Train Your Dragon is a flawed movie, but from the ashes of those flaws rises a fiery beast that is so gorgeous, so spectacular, so visually unique that I can only urge you to see it and see it now.