How to Train Your Dragon

We looked at Chris Sanders' new film, The Wild Robot, yesterday, so here's a look at one of his previous efforts, written at the time of the film's release.

It should be noted that How to Train Your Dragon has gone on to have two sequels, five shorts based on it, and a live action remake scheduled for late next year that will star Gerard Butler—one of the voices of the first one! (Is that a first? Does James Earl Jones in both versions of The Lion King count? Yeah, I guess it does.)

 

"Dragon Everyone to Your Level"

Okay, it's "Old Yeller" done in fire-breathing naugahyde. It's a kid's animation movie, so it's going to be fast-paced, lively and have a "Can't We All Just Get Along" ending (in a creepy Rumsfeldian "the enemy of my friend/enemy is also my enemy" way). The casting is terrific, especially of Craigy Ferguson as a Viking machinist (Wait a tick...Vikings were Scottish?). Gerard Butler has the role of father to the protagonist and plays it as if he was always pointing to Sparta on a map. Jay Baruchel (the star of She's Out of My League) does voice-cracking wonders with the voice of our hero, Hiccup, who is just not Viking material, but manages to subdue—even win the trust of—a dragon (seems the flying butane-breathed lizards have traits just like house-dogs and cats). Still, keep the extinguisher handy in case of fur-balls.

No points to How To Train Your Dragon for originality (as I haven't read the book, I don't know if that's where the problem flies, but I suspect it's merely that DreamWorks animations—2-D or 3-D, line or pixel—are so formulaic in construction at this point, splicing pop-culture and source, that they have a tendency to blend together at the same point in time as your eyes cross—is this a Katzenberg trait?). There's always an out-of-time attitude displacement to these things where every character has the traits of a stand-up comedian and the homogenized values of a sit-com, that you have to keep reminding yourself—"Viking, Vikings, Vikings." 

However, major points for execution. The technology of these things increases with one being released every six months, and How To Train Your Dragon has a nifty design scheme that reminds one of impossibly constructed children's play sets—the Viking village is the niftiest little chock-a-block city since "Sweethaven" in Robert Altman's Popeye. The dragons are cartoon lunacy out of Tex Avery and the full-blown Vikings, like Hiccup's Viking-father, Stoick, are madly out of proportion humans who'd wobble and flail if there weren't some pen-and-ink gravity keeping them up-right and bounding. 

Conversely, the other extreme is impressive, as well. The look of clouds and ocean waves has never looked more real—the look of coastal waters has never seemed more real, whatever coding and algorithms used to simulate the wave action are spot-on and indistinguishable from photo-realism. I saw How to Train Your Dragon in 2-D, but the 3-D must be quite impressive, it certainly was in Monsters vs. Aliens, and there seemed to be no over-loading of nose-brushing effects that has been the bugaboo of the process.

All around it's a satisfying effort that will please the kiddies, and provides enough entertainment value to keep adults from nodding off, or rolling their eyes. The cookie-cutter nature of the plot is the only thing that keeps it from being an absolute must-see.

300

Written at the time of the film's release...

"This won't be over quickly. You will not enjoy this" 

Two characters say this in 300, but it might as well have been me when I walked into the theater. I'm not a fan of Frank Miller, the comic-book artist-turned-writer who breathed new life into Marvel's "Daredevil" and DC's "Batman." I enjoyed his work on those, but around the time of his "Sin City" output, I began to think of his work as campily overblown and corrupt. When he ran out of ideas, he'd have one of his characters cut off a limb and do something that defied the laws of physics and that would serve as plot advancement. 

So, upon seeing the extremely faithful film adaptation of his "Sin City" graphic novels years ago, I just hung my head and thought that was the end of Miller doing anything good ever again. His hack-work had become too successful. A second Batman "Dark Knight" series was a sporadically illustrated mess, and his current work on an "All-Star" version of the character has been embarrassing. His scripts for the "Robocop" series were terrible. His co-directorial debut with Sin City was a frame by frame recreation of his original illustrations, and in those, there was power, no matter how thick-headed the concept or eye-rolling the dialogue that accompanied them.* 

It did point out, however, why films are one thing and graphic story-telling is another. Comics have the luxury of leaping from high-point to high-point. They suspend time to make way for mouthfuls of dialogue. They focus the eye and mind. Film does this, too, but at 24 frames a second, rather than the one comics afford. A film has to crash through that white border separating panels, and that's the difference between art and artifice. 

Now, Miller's "300" has hit the screen, and unlike "Sin City," director Zack Snyder has taken the concept, the tone, and Miller's design sense but gone his own way with the direction. Key frames of Miller's book are reproduced, but for the most part Snyder has found a way of taking Miller's tropes and making it move and breathing life into it. And it's Snyder's efforts to connect the dots and make Miller's flat-panels three dimensional that lets 300 rise above most comic book adaptations. 

It's still overblown. Some of the dialogue is not only bad, it's bad for today, much less ancient Greece. Example: When King Leonidas meets his opposing King, the bling-encrusted Xerxes--who's not nearly as gay as Miller made him in the book--he takes a look at the Persian's elaborate transportation and says "Let me guess. You must be Xerxes"--a line more weisen-heimer than kingly. 

But it beats the fade-out line on the eve of the final battle: "Unless I miss my guess, we're in for one wild night!" 

Oy. So bad it stings!

300 is a bit too enamored by the CGI-technology to create blood-spurts, but damn, if it doesn't move and hold your interest! There's one shot--of King Leonidas providing point (literally) to an attack done in one long take, and as he dispatches opponent after opponent, at each impact the film is speed-ramped to a crawl, which is as ingenious a way of recreating the framing ability of comics in a moving picture as has been devised. Sort of like Peckinpah's slo-mo cut-aways but self-contained in a single shot. 

So, what did I think of it? I enjoyed it! I may not like Miller's current writing, but one can't fault his illustrative sense, and Snyder brings it to glorious life. It may be gratuitous "homo-erotic war pornography," but it's sure well-constructed homo-erotic war pornography. It makes one anticipate Snyder's promised version of Alan Moore's "Watchmen," although one quails at the suggestion (and it's only been suggested) of Tom Cruise as the Machiavellian super-hero Ozymandius. Not even a Spartan could face that! 

* Miller did go on to make his directorial debut with a film version of the classic comic character "The Spirit".  It was just plain badness. And not in a good way.