How to Train Your Dragon Review

DreamWorks spent a decade making animated features that talked too much, then made this one, which understands that its best scene has no dialogue at all. The long sequence in which Hiccup approaches a wounded Night Fury with a fish, retreats, sketches in the dirt and finally gets a hand on its snout is animated with the patience of a nature documentary, and it establishes the entire relationship without a line. Roger Deakins consulted on the lighting and it shows, in the way dusk settles over Berk and in the first flight, where John Powell's score handles the emotional bookkeeping while the camera simply keeps up.

The film also refuses an easy ending: Hiccup wins and loses a leg for it, a permanent cost most family pictures would have written out in the last reel. Jay Baruchel's reedy delivery makes an unlikely Viking and Gerard Butler's Stoick is stubborn rather than stupid. The village comedy is broad and the supporting teenagers are thin. But the flight sequences remain a benchmark for animated action, and the friendship at the center is drawn with more care than this genre usually allows.