How to Train Your Dragon

You can never tell how a movie will hold up once you take it out of the theater. Lost in Translation remains one of my favorite movies because of how much it moved and inspired me when I saw it in the theaters, but I've never been able to engage with the movie to the same degree when watching it at home.  Being in a dark theater, surrounded my strangers and unable to pause the movie or step out without missing something, created a kind of captive intimacy that's hard to recreate at home.

I worried about How to Train Your Dragon for slightly different reasons - I knew the story would be engaging and fun to watch, but I worried about the flying sequences.  How would those scenes - which on first viewing captivated and moved me - play out on my decent-sized-but-not-huge-and-definitely-not-high-def-TV?  Would they feel perfunctory and overlong, dragging the movie down?  How much had the magic of those sequences bled over into the other scenes?

Turns out I didn't need to worry at all, because what really defines the movie for me worked just as well at home as it did in the theater: the relationship between Hiccup (the boy) and Toothless (the dragon).  I'm a sucker for stories that explore the connection between animals and people, and so movies like this kind of have a shortcut to my heart.  HTTYD earns extra points for building the relationship between the two slowly over the course of the movie, and for keeping Toothless convincingly non-human throughout.  Sometimes I feel like movies try to make animals appear more human in order to make them more relate-able - often by having them speak - but I found this approach much more compelling. 

I feel like we all respond more powerfully to some themes than others than others; I find stories about the human need to make and maintain connections particularly meaningful, for example.  I had a professor in college who liked to talk about how the human experience is defined by our awareness of our isolation, how we're all prisoners in cells tapping on walls trying to communicate with each other, always trying to understand and be understood.  It probably sounds strange that How to Train Your Dragon made me think about this, all these years after sitting in Professor Whoeveritwas's classroom, but I really do feel like this well-told story gets to the heart of that desire in all of us - to forge meaningful connections, to be seen and understood.  The fact that Hiccup and Toothless can't speak to each other underscores how difficult it can be to make any kind of connection, how often it depends on a leap of faith, and how meaningful and important those bonds can be once achieved.      

And on a lighter note, I kind of dug that the dragon acted more like a cat than a dog, since dogs are often the Default Meaningful Pet in movies like this.