Genre: Animation/Adventure
Related Titles: How to Train Your Dragon, Bolt, Wreck-it Ralph
By Leanne Harragan
When a threat comes to their village, Hiccup and Toothless leave home and travel to a hidden world. Dragon and rider fight together to save everything they know and love.
How to Train Your Dragon finally comes to a close with this final instalment in the now trilogy. After all the effort put into rescuing dragons and creating a safe place for humans and dragons to coexist peacefully, Berk is facing problems with overcrowding and attack from those who believe dragons to be the enemy. Chief Hiccup's proposed solution is to find the Hidden World, an almost undiscovered home for dragons.
The story line is decent but as expecting in a children's film a tad basic, journey to a new world and fight off a villain or two along the way. There's nothing wrong with this, it's a well-tested formula and works just fine, How to Train Your Dragon is helped along by the love people already have for these characters and the slick animation accompanying it.
As always animation is continuing to become strong and stronger, I am continually impressed by the design of these films. How to Train your Dragon is no exception. The eventual discovery of The Hidden World leads to one of the most eye pleasing animation spectacles I've seen in a while, the colours fly off the screen and the attention to detail has seriously paid off.
The eventual parting of ways between Hiccup and Toothless kind of failed to really a hit a spot for me, it was clearly meant to be said and quite touching but I personally didn't really feel that way, I did enjoy their reunion in the future with both Hiccup and Toothless having had children and all them interacting, this was very cute and a nice note for the film to end on.
It's early days to say yet but this is a strong release for this year's animation, there will definitely be worse animations you could see, but with films like Toy Story 4 and Frozen 2 set for release later this year I'm not sure it will be the best. Regardless of this, it's a worthy film, ties everything together neatly and in many ways doesn't have the drag of two previous films on it's tail like so many sequel animations do!
Rating: 6/10
By Rebecca Mannick
Its been a minute since I saw this film and one thing that first springs into mind is how forgettable it is. If I'm being honest I wasn't thrilled about seeing this movie mainly because I hadn't seen any previous films from this franchise and while watching I was kind of bored. One thing I did notice towards the beginning was how fast paced some of the action sequences were. I was struggling to keep up let alone the majority of children in the cinema. The storyline was simple every character had a clear and decisive role. The good guys vs the bad guys and then the dragons caught in the mix.
The dragons obviously play a huge role in this third movie and this time Toothless is at the centre of attention as he is lured into a trap with the female Light Fury. Hiccup is on a quest to find the hidden world for all dragons to live as the island is becoming overpopulated. Grimmel and his army are on the way to capture Toothless and its Hiccup and the crews responsibility to stop them. There were no real twists or turns in the narrative which made it quite predictable.
Obviously there are a few highlights for How to train your Dragon in its overall design and voice acting mainly carrying it through. There are a few famous names on the credits which I did not pick up on. One thing I do enjoy is the style of animation by Dreamworks - its pretty distinctive in the way that it looks - I like that its quite soft in its edges if that makes sense. The colours are eye-catching and is enjoyable to experience. To be honest though the movie is just too average to watch again or recommend.
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