After four weeks of focusing on game design, I’m a little video game fatigued (don’t worry, we’ll be getting back to it soon enough), so I figured this weekend I would take a little break from games and talk about a movie which finally released yesterday – also, its February and I still haven’t reviewed anything this year, so here goes!

Sidenote: there are no spoilers in this review.

 

Right from the outset, How to Train Your Dragon 3 is different to its two predecessors, for one it has a subtitle, The Hidden World, but a few other things are markedly different.

The first two films in the franchise feature Toothless, in some way or another, during the DreamWorks logo animation right at the start of the film; be it flying around the back, as with the first film; or flying past over the water on which the logo is reflecting, only for the shot to then fade to daylight and pan upwards for a view of Berk.

A third noticeable difference is the lack of an intro from Hiccup. At the start of each of the first two films, Hiccup gives us narration that sounds almost like he is trying to convince the audience to move to Berk. The third film doesn’t start this way.
The third film starts with a raid.

Hiccup and the gang are rescuing a few dragons from some dragon trappers, it seems like they have a whole routine planned out, almost as if for theatric effect, to get the point across to the trappers that the dragons on and around Berk are protected. Of course, when you have teammates like Snotlout, Ruffnut and Tuffnut, things don’t always go according to plan.
Then, while taking these newly rescued dragons back to Berk, and only then, do we get Hiccup’s opening sales pitch.

The four above paragraphs should tell you everything – this film is nothing like its predecessors.

 

Something I mentioned in my first impressions video on my Instagram story (here is me plugging my Instagram) is the pace of this film, which I’m honestly still not sure of. The film picks up rather quickly with an exhilarating fight scene and then slows down, even if only briefly, for a few character moments, picking up the pace afterwards and not really slowing down at all for quite some time, then we have a slow scene followed up by a few faster and more intense scenes, and from there the film doesn’t slow down at all, but it doesn’t really pick up the pace either – leaving it at what felt like a somewhat odd pacing for the majority of the movie.

Oh, and I have two more major differences between this film and its predecessors; the lead role and the overall theme.

In the first film, there are only two deaths; the one being the Red Death (the giant dragon at the end of the film) and the other being a baby Gronckle that got eaten by the Red Death earlier on in the film. In the second film there are, yet again, two deaths, one of which is onscreen, being the death of Stoic the Vast, the second death is that of Drago, the film’s villain, but his death is far more implied than actually seen.
Now, I won’t say whether or not there are any deaths in The Hidden World, but I will say that as this franchise has progressed, the overall theme has become rather mature – the franchise grew up with its audience (much like Harry Potter).
The only problem with this is the humour, which remains rather childlike – an understandable move, the characters may be in their early to mid-twenties but this is still an all-ages film – the issue here is that the inclusion of childlike humour in a film with a rather adult tone makes the humour feel almost forced.
To add to that, one of the best jokes in the movie was spoiled in the trailers and didn’t really hold much comedic weight after seeing it for the howmanyth time, even though I was seeing it on the big screen for the first time.

 

As for the lead role, well, don’t expect this film to have more dialogue than either of the previous two in the franchise. Remember I mentioned a slow scene earlier?
Said scene is on the order of five to ten minutes long and features no dialogue whatsoever.
But it does feature Toothless interacting with the Light Fury (who has yet to be given an actual name of any sort, from either the directors or the Internet).

In storytelling, the protagonist is the one who moves the story along (different from a plot device but similar) and more often than not they also happen to be the lead character (a character who is the protagonist and lead is labelled the hero of the story), but protagonists and lead roles are not mutually exclusive.
In How to Train Your Dragon 3, Hiccup and Astrid are the protagonists, but the actual lead is Toothless.
This is his story.

 

Speaking of stories… subplots.
This movie has a few of them; one is a running joke featuring Snotlout, the other is actually a rather serious subplot but it gets the same treatment as the aforementioned running joke (aside from the fact that it actually has a resolution, one most of us saw coming a mile away, especially when we got a glimpse of an older Hiccup with a full beard in the trailers).

Then we have the villain; Grimmel.
Who’s name I honestly thought was ‘Grimlow’ until about halfway through the movie.
If Drago was the ‘I want to take over the world’ villain, Grimmel is the ‘I kill simply because I find it fun’ villain.
Granted, there were attempts to get us to sympathise with Drago, revealing to us that he lost an arm to a dragon long ago; but there is no such element with Grimmel, whatever his reason for hating dragons, it is never really openly hinted at, much less brought up and discussed. There are, however, a few lines of dialogue that prove one thing: Grimmel believes that humans and dragons cannot coexist peacefully, his belief is that dragons need to either be caged up or killed.

Sidenote: thinking about it after writing the above paragraph, his belief that humans and dragons cannot coexist peacefully might just be a hint at his past. Maybe he tried what Hiccup and the Berkians are doing with their dragons? Maybe it didn’t work out? If that’s the case, did he lose someone he loved to a dragon?
It would be the perfect motivation.

 

But when you get past the plot, the subplots, the villain, the protagonists and the lead… you’re left with two things.
An amazing soundtrack and some absolutely fantastic animation.

We still hear some familiar musical pieces from the first film and even a few from the second, seemingly (could be wrong though, might just be me hearing things; although I’m not the only person to notice music from the first film in The Hidden World, so I know I’m at least half right).
The soundtrack is stellar – I didn’t really think it could get any better, but it just keeps getting better.
‘Fly On Your Own’? The name of the song appeared in the trailer as a sort of que for what the story would entail – and it really is just that, a hint at the story to come; I can’t really say more than that.

Then there are the stunning visuals. The overall art style has had a few tweaks here and there, but the actual animation; how characters and dragons move around their environment, the look of the environment, everything from the scales of a dragon, to the grass on the ground, to the water, all the way over to the hair on the human character’s heads and faces; the animation somehow finds a way to continually look better, to look more crisp,, more detailed, more realistic.

 

This film is nothing like its predecessors. It starts differently. It’s paced differently. The lead role has changed. And it isn’t starting or continuing a story, it’s ending one.

While writing this review, on which I have now spent a little over an hour, I have been listening to the soundtrack of the first How to Train Your Dragon, and I have reached a track by the name of ‘Coming Back Around’, the piece used to end the first movie, with one of the most beautiful musical ques in the entire soundtrack. This one piece, to me, encapsulates the entirety of the series perfectly – along with the part of my childhood that it occupies.
This franchise saw me through some dark and painful times, often reminding me of my love of dragons and why I’ve always loved them to begin with (which won’t be going away any time soon, might I add), for quite a time this franchise was the brightest light I had, and now that it has ended, I realise that the main theme of the third film is letting go of whatever you have been using as a crutch, I think I’ve learned to ‘fly on my own’ but I guess we’ll see in time.

A fitting way to end the franchise. Three feature films, two companion television shows with 118 episodes between them, four short films, two graphic novels, one theatrical play, a slew of video games and one very emotional payoff.