![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
How to Train Your Dragon is, if not the most adorable movie ever, at least the most adorable one I've seen in the past six months, and only partially because the dragon character looked exactly like my cat (seriously, exactly like the Fluffle, big round golden eyes and snub-nosed little face and all. It even had the same facial expressions the Fluffle does half the time).
The teenage characters acted like teenagers, the main character was likable and cute, and had a realistic relationship with his Dad that I really liked, and the female lead was kickass (and you see her working hard at being so), and the flying sequences were wonderful. The dragon flies like an airplane -- as in, there are actual aeronautics involved, both on the part of the animators and on the main character's part as he figures out how to help it fly again. I really need to rec this film to my Dad and my sister, who would both love those bits.
This movie is like the anti-Avatar. Better flying sequences, resolution that involves teamwork and learning to understand your enemy and stop being enemies, and both the dragon, one of the adult characters and by the end, the hero, who loses a foot in the final battle, making him symbolically suffer the same injury he gave the dragon early on have prosthetic limbs without it being a tragic condition to bravely overcome via creepy bodyswapping (The clone body they put Jake what's-his-name in in Avatar was moving in that glass tank at the beginning, which to me says that it would have had a mind/soul of its own had they not stuck Jake in there).
The teenage characters acted like teenagers, the main character was likable and cute, and had a realistic relationship with his Dad that I really liked, and the female lead was kickass (and you see her working hard at being so), and the flying sequences were wonderful. The dragon flies like an airplane -- as in, there are actual aeronautics involved, both on the part of the animators and on the main character's part as he figures out how to help it fly again. I really need to rec this film to my Dad and my sister, who would both love those bits.
This movie is like the anti-Avatar. Better flying sequences, resolution that involves teamwork and learning to understand your enemy and stop being enemies, and both the dragon, one of the adult characters and by the end, the hero, who loses a foot in the final battle, making him symbolically suffer the same injury he gave the dragon early on have prosthetic limbs without it being a tragic condition to bravely overcome via creepy bodyswapping (The clone body they put Jake what's-his-name in in Avatar was moving in that glass tank at the beginning, which to me says that it would have had a mind/soul of its own had they not stuck Jake in there).