Skip to main content

How to Train Your Dragon is an Incomparably Thin Regurgitation

It is both a baffling and a depressing thing that competing against one another right now in theatres are two dreary live-action remakes of animated movies directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois. If Disney’s latest unearthing of Lilo & Stitch for a pale cash-grab wasn’t enough, DreamWorks has now stepped into the same creative ditch to fittingly muted reception with a retread of one of their major hits How to Train Your Dragon. On both films, Sanders has taken a backseat on the creative side of things (apart from coming back to voice Stitch), but when it came to this movie, DeBlois -who has been the chief creative force behind the Dragon franchise since Sanders departed after the first movie, actually opted to come back himself; making his live-action filmmaking debut an exercise in nostalgia, re-living the glory of his earlier movie by translating it directly.
And it is extremely direct. I don’t know that even any Disney remake has maintained this level of fidelity, this level of intense closeness to the work being adapted. There is no scene from the original How to Train Your Dragon that is untouched, much of the dialogue is word-for-word and most of the compositions shot-for-shot. It is an uninspired approach on its face, but more-so it just sets a stark contrast between evocative animation and cheap live-action mimicry.
Mason Thames steps into the shoes of Jay Baruchel  as Hiccup, the scrawny awkward teenage son of Viking chief Stoick, played by Gerard Butler reprising his voice role from the original movie. Desperate to prove himself to his hardened father, Hiccup is overjoyed when he apparently shoots down a rare dragon over the village, but finds he doesn’t have it in him to kill the animal -and in empathizing with the creature he names Toothless begins to train and ride it while feeling the pressure of his clan’s intense aggression and prejudice towards dragons.
Of all the things that do not change in this translation from animation, Toothless is one of the starkest -looking more or less exactly the same as his original animation counterpart to the point his cartoon features drastically stand out from the live-action setting. He might as well be Roger Rabbit, and as such his every interaction with a real human Hiccup feels immaterial. There is an iconic shot from the original film recreated exactly here of the first time Toothless touches Hiccup’s outstretched hand -a powerful evocative moment, not in the least believable in this context. The emotional spark is lacking in all tangibility. It is a boy and his special effect.
This is of course true of every other dragon in the movie as well, even those with slight changes made to their design -those designs are still highly exaggerated and expressive in a way meant to fit perfectly the contours of a cartoon. And while it distracts, it also makes vividly clear the format these creatures belong in, made all the more intense by every shot intentionally reminding audiences of the superior version of this story.
DeBlois makes very few concessions -he is fully proud of the work he and his collaborators did on that original movie and sees no room for improvement. At least two-thirds of the film is shot-for-shot a reenactment of the animation; elsewhere he may try a new camera angle or the reverse image of what had been there originally, a slight alteration in panning, but every element around these remains the same, down to the dialogue itself. It doesn’t just apply to the handful of lines a fan may remember, and the pacing is the same, as well as the editing. On a few occasions a line will be cut across two scenes as a comedic device -and though it has been used in live-action many a time, the swiftness of the edit makes it awkward here in the attempt to replicate the energy of animation.
Worse is the effect this has on the performances. Nick Frost as Gobber has enough experience to adapt the role modestly to his own strengths, and Butler, in spite of regurgitating everything he had recorded fifteen years ago, derives some thrill from getting to embody Stoick fully (the film keeps up the weird choice of giving the adults Scottish or English accents while the kids are all American); but the teenagers really struggle. Gabriel Howell is nakedly out of his depth trying to render convincingly the cartoon oafish sensibilities-of the bully Snotlout, while Julian Dennison really has a rough go of hiding his New Zealand accent as the enthusiastically nerdy Fishlegs. Nico Parker’s Astrid could have worked if the part had been adjusted towards her comforts -instead she acts out an impression of America Ferrera’s performance without conviction, and without animators to buff up the expressive magic of her critical moment of epiphany. Thames actually gives a pretty solid performance, all things considered, but he is notably hurt every time he has to recite a bit of dialogue that had clearly originally been either ad-libbed or workshopped by Baruchel in the recording booth -lines geared towards Baruchel’s very specific comedic voice and no one else’s.
To reach an arbitrarily longer runtime, there are a few slight additions in the form of marginally extended scenes, though none of them are substantive, none fleshes out characters like Astrid and Stoick, and none exploit any different perspective on the dragons or their world. All that matters is elongating the trite imitation and not attempting anything that would in the least deviate from the sacred text of the original rubric. You can almost feel the creative cowardice. It is as safe and deliberately uncontroversial as possible. Dramatically and stylistically boring for anybody who has seen the original movie.
Perhaps it is less-so for those who haven’t. Indeed, its fidelity is such that the strengths of the original story and the script are still there, and occasionally carried out with decent enough acting. The great music by John Powell hits at all the same right moments, the cinematography by Bill Pope -some of his most restrictive work- matches the original in as many of the right ways (though in one notable example of the opposite, he shifts focus to Astrid in a critical third act beat that is meant to belong to Hiccup). The movie often feels pretty solid. But this is a case where barely any of the good to come off this movie is attributable to the movie itself. Its credit goes directly to those who made the original film -which does include DeBlois- whose work is not improved upon in any way here. Just the novelty of the reenactment wears thin incredibly fast once it becomes clear there is nothing in the script or visuals that will match it.
What this How to Train Your Dragon remake does is inadvertently make the case for animation while trying actively to diminish its merit. That’s been the underlying idea behind all of these remakes -that animation is not serious, and that a live-action translation automatically has greater potential. In many cases the opposite is true. And How to Train Your Dragon very much is one of them. Without the schematic of the original movie, the approach of this one would be very different -in a way that could better suit its format. But DreamWorks isn’t interested in that. And so you have a film that is still very much a cartoon but without the life or expression or style or even artistic passion that fueled the earlier incarnation. It is an empty vessel of the story you liked before. Why not just choose the version with a soul?

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

A Stylish and Charmingly Reinvented David Copperfield

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)  is the most important book Charles Dickens ever wrote. It is not the most famous or influential by any means (that would of course be A Christmas Carol ), but it is the book that is the purest expression of the authors’ style, identity, and worldview. It is his most personal work, semi-autobiographical in its story of the chronology from infancy to adulthood of a character who overcomes great loss and hardships to find a fulfilling life as a writer. To read David Copperfield  is to understand Dickens himself. Armando Iannucci knew this when he decided to make a new adaptation of the novel for a twenty-first century audience. He also knew that Dickens adaptations are ubiquitous at this point. Films are a bit rarer, but every few years a new television adaptation rears its head to keep the authors’ unique world an...
Post a Comment
Read more