Dragon Whisperer

I loved How to Train Your Dragon.

No: I. Hearted. It! I thought it was an exhilaratingly fun adventure, a moving coming-of-age story that was never schmaltzy and always utterly relatable.

Jay Baruchel (currently seen in the comedy She’s Out of My League) voices a Viking teenager named Hiccup who lives and fumbles on the gloriously mountainous island of Berk, where fighting dragons is the way of life.

Unfortch, Hiccup is a bit of the village’s outcast – his smarts and offbeat sense of humor don’t sit well with his tribe or its chief, Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler, letting his Scottish accent free for a change, to great effect, too), who just happens to be Hiccup’s disapproving father.

Everything changes for Hiccup, though, on the eve of dragon training, a tradition young Vikings participate in as they get older.

During a dark-before-dawn attack by the winged fire-breathers, the boy, using a homemade cannon-like som’in’ or another, captures his first dragon – the elusive and much-feared Night Fury, no less – but no one believes him. The next day, he ventures into the forest to claim his catch, but instead finds a fallen mighty, a young’un just like him. He recognizes a certain vulnerability in it, and he soon befriends the majestically black creature. That’s How to Train Your Dragon! With kindness.

Hiccup names him Toothless, and as he gets to know it, he discovers that dragons can be A-OK…that everything his tribe knows about them is wrong. Toothless becomes his BFF, and through their friendship, the Viking whipper snapper becomes a more confident young man. He begins to use what he’s learning in training, and soon becomes well liked and respected by all, even his dad.

Alas, eventually the cat, or better yet, the dragon gets out of the bag, and Hiccup must fight his people’s ways to help them understand that dragons aren’t all that bad, and that maybe, just maybe, they don’t have a choice in the matter when it comes to attacking their village.

Maybe they’re pawns in...something bigger’s plot.

His world now upside down, Hiccup will have only one shot to prove not only himself, but his new friend’s kind, who may turn out to be the tribe’s best ally.

At its best, How to Train Your Dragon soars through the sky in ways that make you never want to get off the ride, while at its worst.... Oh, who am I kidding: this does not have such a thing. It’s that enjoyable and well told and well made (oh yeah, it’s in 3-D...and this is how do employ the effect the right way, Clash of the Titans).

That it also works as a love story (between Hiccup and Toothless, whose bond is as strong as any, and between the boy and his America Ferrera-voiced crush, Astrid), well...that’s just gravy.

My Rating ****

Photo: DreamWorks Animation.