How to Train Your Dragon review

I decided last night to wait on writing this review simply because... I was hot piss angry about it. Which I shouldn't be given that it's a kids film I went into with low expectations, however it was blending in to the blob of family junk food movies that we're hit with dozens of times a year that are filled with dated pop culture comments, tasteless jokes, overly cartoonish design and worst of all monsters with no spine. But I thought it over really hard and realized I shouldn't take out my frustrations on this single picture and instead need to just focus on it's flaws and successes and nothing else. SO let's do that!

"How to Train Your Dragon" is a tailor made movie for kids in that 7 to 12 year old range that just like seeing movies with jokes and action and damn the rest; and for their parents who either never had too good of cinematic taste to begin with or who have been mentally brought down to the level of their child and think this junk works. Easily this is out of my demographic, but hell I enjoyed "Kung-Fu Panda" and "Monster House" and those were out of my demographic, so really that shouldn't matter too much. The problem here is it's pure old junk food, with nothing added to make it taste better. All the vikings have 'funny' names like Hiccup and Stoick and live in a very viking world of screaming violently and running around trying to kill things. I'm not saying vikings didn't do that, but there pretty much one big, bearded stereotype in the movie. Jay Baruchel voices our dweebish hero Hiccup with his dweebish fucking voice which works well... if he wasn't a main character and thus didn't have to hear him so often. This is something that worked for him in "Tropic Thunder".

Hiccup wants to be a viking, but instead is a loser that disappoints his father (voiced by Gerard Butler) on a regular basis and causes much chaos in the village. OK now let's get good ole' Toothless the 'dragon' with is really just a mixture of a cat and a newt with wings. They attempt to make that dragon as cute... scratch that they attempt to make every dragon as cute as possible while still trying to make things as adventurous as possible. That concept kind of works in the final act which is strangely filled with better looking and moving imagery, but nothing amazing or awe inspiring. A cute winged cat-newt and an ugly six eyed, winged version of Roland Emmerich's Godzilla going head to head in dark clouds; not quite cool, but not lame either. Sadly that's the only sequence I can get behind.

I notice that a lot of people aren't so hard on judging animated kids movies and that right there could be the problem. If creators know that now matter what they do as long as it has a mild story and moral and some action or comedy, then they're looking at mega money and at least decent reviews. And maybe I wouldn't be so feeling so bad after watching this movie if there were more animated movies or just kids movies in general with balls now-a-days. If we could have a family adventure picture come out that could give kids something fresh and interesting to look at and think about. Something that might scare them a bit or confuse them some, but damned if it won't stick with em' so they remember that and want to re-watch it when they're older to see if it still has that effect. Oh wait we did have that last year. One was called "Avatar" and was quickly trumped up into an awards film and hated on to a high level because of that and the other was called "Fantastic Mr. Fox"... show of hands, who saw that last movie? *crickets* I see...

Perhaps crap like "How to Train Your Dragon", "Monsters vs. Aliens" and upcoming crap like "Sherk Forever After" and "Despicable Me" is what parents, kids and I guess everybody else wants to see. On the one hand they get the big bucks and nobody yells out that it's ripped off from something else or it's too long or weird or has a bad message and all that. It appears that audiences don't care as long as they're content with what it is and nothing more. But on the other hand this has got me all depressed for the future of cinema and shit because then most of the impressive stuff goes unseen and mediocrity reigns. But until producers or audiences wake up, some of us will have to await in silence for animated films NOT made for kids (like the Fincher, Eastman, Cameron, Verbinski, Snyder etc collaboration of "Heavy Metal") or just any kids picture that's not dumbed down as far as possible (basically most non-U.S. made kids films that reach our country. Or things from Pixar... sometimes.)