Apparently tired of Disney having all the fun (and the box office) with its live-action remakes of its classic animated films, DreamWorks has gotten into the game with Dean DeBlois’ How to Train Your Dragon, with as little apparent purpose as the Disney remakes – other than to make money, of course.

In the opinion of this critic, the year 2010 was the (latter day) heyday for animated movies. Not only did Disney release the vastly underappreciated Tangled, and not only did Pixar release one of its most emotionally potent movies in Toy Story 3, but DreamWorks gave us the original How to Train Your Dragon, also co-directed by DeBlois (with Chris Sanders), which felt like another fresh new initiative in the burgeoning digital animation landscape. Fifteen years later, animation is far more mid, and there’s certainly nothing we get in a remake of Dragon that we didn’t get far better the first time.

As is the case with the Disney remakes, the story follows that of the original pretty much beat for beat. The action takes place on the Viking island of Berk, which is beset on an alarmingly regular basis by dragon attacks. Not just a single dragon, which would probably be enough. No, the dragons swoop this island like seagulls, dozens at a time, leaving the villages in rubble but killing surprisingly few of the people (zero, usually).

To fight this scourge, the community has a training program for its young prospective warriors. In their late teens, these young Vikings learn the trade by fighting actual captive dragons in an arena in the village … an arena that is, for some reason, never reduced to rubble in the dragon attacks. Hiccup (Mason Thames) wants to join this number despite his slight frame and his pacifist nature, in part because he’s the son of the chief, Stoick (Gerard Butler), to whom he is a constant disappointment. If you wanted him to become a great warrior, Stoick, maybe you should not have started him out in the world with the disadvantage of the name Hiccup.

Trying to prove both his mettle as a person and his worthiness for the training program, Hiccup longs to take down a Night Fury, a powerful dragon that has never been seen due to the blending of its black coat with the night sky. Hiccup does appear to have one in his sights and fells it with a catapulted net, though no one sees this and no one believes that he’s actually done it. But Hiccup goes out searching for the crash-landed dragon, and finds it in the woods, weak and still tangled in its netting.

When he goes in to kill it and bring the village to see his trophy, he finds he can’t do it. Instead, he continues visiting the injured dragon, which has a broken tail rudder that prevents it from escaping the gorge in which it landed. As he steadily forms a relationship with the dragon, whom he names Toothless – even learning to mount and fly it – he realises that these dragons are not their enemies and have only been acting in self-defence. He needs to prove that the dragons don’t pose a threat, while also keeping Toothless a secret, since he knows his father and the other villagers would not show the dragon such mercy.

One consequence of switching from animation to live action is that it raises the stakes for realism. While animation has the artifice built right into it, live action bears more of a burden of making us believe what we’re seeing. And if you go into How to Train Your Dragon with that (perhaps too stringent) mindset, you are bound to be disappointed. If the continued attacks, perhaps as often as fortnightly, from dozens of dragons strike you as unlikely not to kill anyone, you’ll be even more aghast at the moral dereliction of allowing green teenagers into arenas with dragons, particularly dragons who are pissed off over being caged. How this training program doesn’t leave all the trainees dead on the first day, let alone after weeks of training, is beyond me.

If How to Train Your Dragon were creating more of a sense of wonder, this sort of nitpicking might not be such an issue. It’s not that everything here isn’t staged with exactly the level of big-budget professionalism you would expect. It’s that these days we say: So what? Dragons are not exactly strangers to us on film, and just creating digital versions that look like the dragons in the animated original is not enough of a departure to really get our attention.

There’s a similar mediocre charisma to the cast. Thames has the pluckiness and halting speech patterns to make for a likable hero, but he goes in one ear and out the other. Butler offers nothing he didn’t offer when he already voiced this character in the animated version, which is to say, a good incarnation of his native accent and not a lot of sensitivity. In fact, Stoick’s persistent disbelief in his son, despite mounting evidence that Hiccup is doing something important, is one of the more frustrating conceits this screenplay asks us to swallow. Nick Frost is a slight injection of life as the guy training the trainees, though only slight, and Hiccup’s rivals as well as his would-be love interest (Nico Parker), who is also one of his rivals, don’t get all the way there.

But sure, go see How to Train Your Dragon. Why not? If you’re a parent, you’ll appreciate that this most violent of scenarios contains almost no violence, toward either humans or dragons. Pretty toothless indeed.

 

How to Train Your Dragon is currently playing in cinemas.