surprisingly cool: how to train your dragon (with 3D)

Yeah this was good - go see it

73 metacritic score 92 user score
93% rotten tomatoes (top critics)

actually - go in thinking it will be just another kids movie.
it had really crappy commercials, IT IS JUST ANOTHER KIDS MOVIE

don't read reviews. the less you know the better

We went last night and had a blast. Definitely among the better movies I've seen recently.

The trailers for Shrek Forever After and Toy Story 3 and whatever that owl one was made me want to dash out my brains though.

I can't remember an owl one but 'The Karate Kid 'preview was a big disappointment (I re-watched 'The Karate Kid' a couple weeks ago - I had forgot the whole movie but the Jersey kid was wonderful and can't be replaced. Not to mention the new Karate Kid takes place in China or something and Jada Smith is way too young).

Maybe owl preview you meant 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' by M. Night Shyamalan? Again, the main character looks like a 10 year old.

Shrek looks dumb as usual and Toy Story 3 really left me hanging. The beginning of the preview made me think of 'The Brave Little Toaster' but then it showed a bunch of kid jokes and a dumb plot-line. Not to say the original Toy Story didn't have a lot of dumb kid jokes.

Naw, we love Avatar the Last Airbender and the live action movie looks dope as hell. And Karate Kid looks good, but I'm a bit pissed that they didn't call it the Kung Fu Kid.

The owl movie is apparently called LEGENDS OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE. It looks corny as hell.

I've been thinking about starting a rolling children's movie thread for movies that aren't going to get 1,000 posts like Wall-E or Alice in Wonderland or whatever. Are there any threads like that which I missed by searching kid's movies and children's movies?

I pretty much only watch children's movies these days, is why.

We went back to watch this again today (my kid is really lucky his dad is having a nervous breakdown right now, basically) except we saw it in 2D, for $$$ reasons. Anyway, I'd totally recommend checking it in 3D if you get the chance - the landscapes and stuff are great.

Finally got round to seeing this on noticing the 3d run ends tomorrow, and wow, that's the best use of 3d I've seen so far - nice deep 3d in every shot without going in for obvious throwing-stuff-out-of-the-screen gimmicks

(enjoyed the rest of the film too - wasn't sure during the village scenes at the start, but it really took off when he left the village)

Agree that the Toy Story 3 trailer looks a bit disappointing too, though I'm sure I'll still go and see it.

Good movie! I'd like to watch it again in 3D some time, it looked really well designed for it.

(I was vaguely tempted to read an Israel/Palastine subtext, but that's going too far isn't it)

Just saw this over T-giving. Honestly it was way better than Toy Story 3 (which was good but eh) and more fun than the Social Network. My Hollywood movie of the year.

Also - more mindblowing visually than Inception.

I am afraid to see this because just the fucking trailer made me cry!

It's really good. I want to see it again.

one of my favorite movies of the year! and it is not too bad in the making you want to cry department, abbott. no worse than toy story 3, that's for sure.

i felt the same way, adam!

I really enjoyed this. Restored my faith in there being actually good, cute, funny animated movies that don't pander to kids or play up to parents or get completely lost in their celebrity-voiceness. I just saw Megamind (under duress, not by choice)...so much fail in that stupid thing.

Definitely Dreamworks' best movie. Looked lovely and a decent story too.

i still can't believe anyone would think anything was better than toy story 3 but maybe if you haven't seen the first two 10,357 times, you don't have the same reaction. (okay I haven't actually seen this yet. my knee-jerk anti-dreamworks feelings are pretty much gone these days though. megamind was really good)

This was definitely better than TS3.

I've heard nothing but good things about this. I also hear 'Tangled' is surprisingly good. Is there a rolling animation thread?

Loved TS3 by the way. You will get no hate from me

same here. didn't expect to like TS3, having long ago burnt out on the 1st two, but thought it was great.

in dreamworks defense: the stop-motion aardman movies (chicken run and wallace & gromit: the curse of the were-rabbit), over the hedge, flushed away, kung fu panda, monsters vs. aliens. none great, imo, but all quite good.

and though it isn't dreamworks, cloudy with a chance of meatballs deserves the kind of love H2TYD is getting itt.

Cloudy and Surf's Up were both better than their year's respective Pixar films.

Loved Cloudy as well. Saw Tangled the other week and it looked pretty damn nice - in a completely different way from How To Train Your Dragon - although no mistaking it's a Disney movie, princess and magic and all. Aside from the over-girliness, the songs were enjoyable and the jokes and crazy animal characters were funny. Maybe I'm getting easy to please in my old age...

Love Kung Fu Panda - story gets a little patchy in the middle but god I could look at the art in that all day. Glorious. And I was surprised by how much fun Cloudy was, I wasn't familiar with the book or anything...that was a hoot.

Am interested in Tangled, def. The more I see of it the more I think I'd like to check it out.

Also - more mindblowing visually than Inception.

have seen this 3x now, it was ok. the "witty modern kid in medieval times" angle sours it for me. don't think it's gonna age well.

liked toy story 3 a lot more, and this from a guy who didn't really like toy story 1 or 2.

I loved Toy Story 3, but now that I have a 3 yr old that wants to watch it every day my opinion is changing. No movie holds up to that many repeated viewings.

have seen this 3x now, it was ok. the "witty modern kid in medieval times" angle sours it for me. don't think it's gonna age well.

This was a minor problem for me as well, if I'm being churlish. Also the older vikings all being Scottish for some reason - what, they couldn't find any jobbing voice actors who could do comedy Norwegian accents? Still great overall though.

I loved Cloudy too, but it's a very different film to this. How to Train is more traditionally crafted, Cloudy was pretty off the hook at times, it had a pretty crazy and unique energy to it.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was really really weird. Like one of the weirder big-studio pics I've seen in a while. I enjoyed it but it was way more bizarre than I expected.

That was a real plus point for me.

Like the giant food planet thing was some darkside, Gieger-like shit for a kid's movie.

nicole, i was warned that Toy Story 3 would be too scary for a 3 yr old, not the case?

i find that Finding Nemo is the only kid movie (that we have) i can honestly tolerate on repeat. we're currently on our second viewing of Milo and Otis today (because she has a thing for Dudley Moore?) and omg is that movie messed up.

Like the giant food planet thing was some darkside, Gieger-like shit for a kid's movie.

― A brownish area with points (chap), Tuesday, November 30, 2010 8:23 AM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, the dark weirdness was a big part of the appeal for me (like the psychedelic creepiness of the fat mayor's final transformation). suppose that makes it less a legit kids movie, more eye candy for chemically enhanced adults.

Kim, Toy Story 3 did not bother my kid but she is only frightened by weird random things like birds.

just read up on milo & otis. doesn't sound like the kind of thing i could deal with. felt bad enough for the tigers in two brothers.

toy story 3 has some creepy moments, it gave my 6yo nightmares and usually she's pretty good about that stuff

That monkey was quite scary.

The monkeys scared me, but I have always been v. frightened of them.

i like ts3 a lot, and it didn't scare my 4 y/o or 6 y/o. 6 y/o agitating for httyd, so that will be viewed soon.

now coraline, thats pretty scary for a kiddo and has some o_O shit in it. better for 8 y/o plus.

Love Coraline. Miles better than the ludicrously overrated Nightmare Before Xmas.

This is just turning into a general children's animation thread isn't it?

coraline is not really for kids, is it? some pretty horrible shit in that, as well as being basically incomprehensible in places

I would've lapped it up as a kid I think. And what parts are incomprehensible? It certainly makes more sense than Transformers or something.

coraline seems aimed at older kids and adolescents. like the harry potter years. good movie, though. don't see why we have to trash the night before christmas to praise it, though. love both.

too many thoughs though

Also the older vikings all being Scottish for some reason - what, they couldn't find any jobbing voice actors who could do comedy Norwegian accents? S

yeah, this grated, initially.

also, went into it totally blind, per this thread, and was a little surprised that the pet dragon was like a pokemon?? like clearly they took a lot of cues from anime

anyway, really, really enjoyed it.

this is more a complaint of modern animated movies in general but the voices don't feel like they are coming out of the animated characters' mouths, and the discontinuity in accents only draws more attention to that, though this is the first time i've seen a movie point that out as a throwaway joke.

I just saw this the other day and really enjoyed it. Loved the style of the dragons/dragon book - made me want to draw. Abbott, you're pretty much def gonna cry.

the "witty modern kid in medieval times" angle sours it for me.

also, viking helmets didn't have horns, coil springs weren't invented until hundreds of years later, and dragons don't act like that.

was a little surprised that the pet dragon was like a pokemon?? like clearly they took a lot of cues from anime

HTTYD was directed by Chris Sanders & Dean DeBlois, the directors of Lilo & Stitch. The black dragon looks just like Stitch.

love lilo & stitch, haven't seen it in ages

Yo, just re: coraline, my kid loved it at age 5.

i get scared easy though

pet dragon was like a pokemon?? like clearly they took a lot of cues from anime

I think they took more cues from housecats.

xp: he's a spooky kid.

Def agree upthread about how the voices overtake the animated characters in some movies. To refer back to Megamind, that was 100% that movie's failing. It played like a live action Will Ferrell/Tina Fey/Jonah Hill movie, instead of an animated movie about superheroes. I mean there's a section in the middle that's basically just straight romantic drama, and it just doesn't work.
If you're going to do that, then it has to be sincere, and you need good writing/characters to pull it off. But padding a 'wacky comedy' with emo relationship crap was just ugh.

thus endeth my rant.

the "witty modern kid in medieval times" angle sours it for me.

also, viking helmets didn't have horns, coil springs weren't invented until hundreds of years later, and dragons don't act like that.

just because it's a fantasy doesn't mean it shouldn't have internal consistency. the vikings all talked like scots and the main character sounded like he was beamed in from a sacramento food court. the ironic ribbing seemed shoehorned, like the screenwriters couldn't restrain themselves from winking at the audience every 5 minutes. that type of funny is so common and unearned in kids movies today, and it didn't seem to serve any purpose in this film (other than to distance me from the characters). I dunno, the serious parts of this seemed effective enough that I wish they'd played it straighter throughout.

and to continue the unnecessary comparisons to toy story 3, I was actually concerned about a bunch of toys getting melted at the end, whereas the big final battle in how to train your dragon didn't do much for me. it was visually stunning but I wasn't very emotionally invested by that point.

yeah, i dunno. the threat of the toys being melted was very convincing, edge of the seat stuff. H2TYD wasn't anywhere near as compelling, but i was emotionally invested, both in the battle's climax and in the boy's relationship with his father. not deeply, but enough to make me care about the film and its characters.

B-but all the kids were modern and American-accented, not just the protagonist. Seemed inconsistent at first but I guess it was a joke on feeling like teenagers on the bus are talking a different language, which I do every morning?

Dragon was totally kittenish, which was poss why I loved it. Did not cry but felt a bit teary at one point, and this from someone wo wept like a fool through 70% of Up while small children asked mummy why the movie was weird and didn't have enough dogs in and can they go home yet. Scottish accents a bit offputting - I dragged the bf to this and the accents were making me afraid he'd hate it, but once the main story kicked off both of us liked it.

the "witty modern kid in medieval times" angle sours it for me.

Does this more or less have something to do with you indentifying with the kid :p

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Also, Milo and Otis is classic beyond classic. If it had somehow warped my mind as a kid then I am thankful for the ways in which it warped it

what i meant about Milo and Otis was mostly about the really, really questionable treatment of the animals they used to film it - like, they throw an actual cat off a cliff into the ocean and send one over a not so small waterfall in a wooden box!

state-of-the-art as expected, but really can't stand combo of attempted mythic heart-tugging and Craig Ferguson going "What's up with that?" Choose one.

also, moral: All dragons deserve to eat, except the really big one.

admrl -- myself, missus chuck, and a friend of ours who doesn't like being mentioned on the internet -- will be watching this after x-factor on yr recommendation...

this was just ok. the animation was good, toothless was cool. i think the climax and ending were way too pat. doesn't come within 100 miles of the classic of the odd boy/outlaw pet genre, which is iron giant.

Nothing is better than the Iron Giant.

finally saw this, disagree that it is better than TS3, but it's good; but yeah I wasn't very emotionally invested in the characters. also agree with Dr. Morbious that the moral is a little confusing. I see, like every other Dreamworks feature, that this is greenlighted for at least one sequel, when it doesn't seem necessary (but then neither did the toy story sequels at first and each one was better than the previous so who knows).

I also usually back off from non-pixar animation but I think that was just drilled into me by hating the Shrek movies so much. In reality a lot of the dreamworks films are pretty enjoyable, even kind of substandard things like Monsters Vs. Aliens are cool. Tangled was really good; better than Disney's big return-to-traditional animation Princess movie last year (Princess and the Frog). And I'll stand up for Megamind again, it was way more fun than I expected. It's not art, but it was a diverting 90 minutes.

Yes the ending was pat, was never going to be anything but - BUT, interesting what happened to the main kid (trying to avoid spoilers) - similar movies would have perhaps not even gone 'that far'?

my kid started talking during the big fight so I kind of missed that bit (though I noticed the difference at the very end). so it must have happened very fast? or my son talks more than I like to think (probably the case)

I mean how he doesn't completely escape unscathed ...

also, moral: All dragons deserve to eat, except the really big one.

I was expecting him to tame the really big one instead of kill it, which would've been cooler in a lot of ways.

Yeah, having him train the big guy would've pushed this movie from just really really good into the realm of awesome.

<3 the breeding of the dragons

by that, I mean the taxonomy, not the scenes of dragons having fire-breathing sex

Also, I'd def rank this a hair above TS3, but it def owes most of its success to snatching Pixar's "make 'em cry/ditch the snarky references" steeze.

we got this for xmas and i think it's quite good, but i also agree with most of the criticisms here. even after two viewings, i still haven't quite gotten why the big dragon was still considered a baddie once they were all good with the littler ones. it's got one of the best scores i've heard in a while (might be helping that we just got new home theatre system here tho) and was really impressed with the designs and special effects so i kinda wish now that i'd seen it in 3D.

the way i interpreted what happened to Hiccup at the end was to parallel the damage done to Toothless' tail and make things more "even" - end of a war and all.

i saw Tangled... the experience was really enhanced by the presence of this large, middle-aged woman wearing a bear shirt (like a wolf shirt, but with bears) who cried through most of the movie

whoah

whenever there was a big princess moment she would make all these crazy noises that i didnt even know how to interpret... im pretty sure she was sobbing when Rapunzel got her hair braided

cool movie tho *bleary eyed thumbs up*

wow @ that woman. I hear meds are good? Yipes.

i saw tangled 3d, it was better than expected. visually cool. i liked it better than httyd but maybe thats the 3d talking.

not httyd related, but i watched despicable me recently and was super disappointed. nice-looking and funny in places, but so horribly smarmy and nowhere near funny enough to cut the treacle. real bummer after hearing so many good things about it...

aw man, I really dug Despicable Me. First 20 minutes I wasn't so sure, but I thought it was really warm and didn't weigh itself down with just lol making joeks...everythign sorta fell together pretty nicely, I thought. I didn't find it over sappy, I just found it sentimental which isn't a bad thing imo.

And: IT'S SO FLUFFY!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82utG7Q3G_k

did like that one line an awful lot, esp "it's so fluffy i'm gonna die!" or whatev. liked the kids in general, best part of the movie imo, but overall i wasn't ever more than half into it. wonder if it's cuz i don't have kids. was so clearly about having kids. perhaps it's too close to home wr2 my life regrets...

I have zero kids, no desire for kids, but I really love kid's humor and just a general kid sensibility (Peter Pan complex, who knows lol). I thought this movie did the kid humor pretty well, not playing to an adult audience over much and just being okay with its own style, not trying to be all things to all ppl.

And the big thing I liked was that even with the big names like Jason Segel and Russell Brand and Julie Andrews you weren't the whole time thinking that they were the characters...I sorta got lost in the movie which is a nice change.

yeah, maybe i was just feeling glum, i dunno. otm about the famous voices disappearing into their characters, with the exception of carell. he always just seemed like himself to me.

Yeah I agree on Carrell.

I laughed harder than I have laughed in ages at the minions dressed up as the Mum and Dad. Dunno if I was on a crazy sugar high but I coiuldnt breathe.

saw "how to train your dragon" and don't really get the lavish praise. it was "good" but has possibly the least original plot line for a kid's movie and didn't have enough jokes. "cloudy with a chance of meatballs" was a lot funnier and weirder (in a good way).

i wasn't bothered by the kid's voice except that i instantly recognized him as dude from "undeclared."

not as good as "kung fu panda" either

What, it had loads of jokes! This and Cloudy are very different but probably about equal in quality. Kung Fu Panda is worse than both, though I still liked it.

Saw despicable me on the plane, had me laughing almost as much as the ordinary guys, possibly more so whenever a marine life projectile was involved.

yeah the kids were def the funniest part of despicable me.

LOVED DESPIC ME!! And uh that Sleepy Kittens book that gets mocked savagely at bedtime? It uh really exists. And it really includes felt finger puppets. I was dying.

I should watch Despicable Me I suppose. Word of mouth has been quite poor for me.

I do like Steve Carell though.

<3 Sleepy Kittens

Ha my husband fell asleep when the guy was reading that bedtime story to the kids :)

awww

The Dr. Seuss children's book "The Lorax" is gradually making it's way onto the big screen, but not without a voice behind the stumpy little guy first. That's where Danny DeVito comes in, filling up the role for the upcoming Illumination Entertainment film. He joins the voice cast that includes Zac Efron, Betty White, Ed Helms and Rob Riggle. Zac Efron's character is a boy named Ted (after Dr. Seuss' real name, Theodore "Ted" Geisel) who goes in search of the Once-ler to find out how the world became so ugly. Helms will be The Once-ler, Riggle as an industrialist who wants to sell cans of fresh air to others and White will be the voice of Ted's grandmother who explains to him how the world once was. Although all of these casting decisions have been made, Illumination is the most happy about having DeVito lend his voice to the small character."Danny has this wonderful ability to be acerbic and grouchy but at the same time absolutely lovable," Meledandri says. "It's almost like Walter Matthau had. His comedic edge was very sharp, but he always maintained that warmth."The 3-D animated film is scheduled to be released sometime in 2012.Source: USA Today

talk about typecasting.

So apparently, dragons = Hitler. http://io9.com/5903155/how-to-train-your-dragon-reviewer-explains-why-dragons-are-like-hitler

was there a thread for the sequel? it was really good, fuiud