How to Train Your Dragon Part 2: How Visual and Sound Turn a Good Story into Something Amazing (Film Analysis)

LINK TO PART 1!!!

Using the knowledge gained from his time with Toothless, Hiccup succeeds in passively defeating and/or befriending the training dragons in fighting class.  Despite such successes gaining his peers’s praise (aside from Astrid, who grows jealous over Hiccup becoming the new star student), Hiccup is more preoccupied with getting Toothless back in the air again—for a more accurate lesson Hiccup was taught is that a downed dragon is a dead dragon.  Being the inventor that he is, Hiccups begins designing a tail flap to replace Toothless's missing scale.  Hiccup discovers, however, that the artificial wing will not remain open when Toothless flies alone.  As such, Hiccup builds a saddle for him to ride and help assist Toothless in flying.  The film’s excellent pacing is shown off here with a split montage of Hiccup building the flying device while training at classes.  I love how naturally the scenes move from Hiccup just trying to build an artificial scale for Toothless to saddling up to fly with him.

Eventually, Hiccup gets the courage to go on a test flight run with Toothless.  With an instructional position manual in hand for shifting the artificial wing's position, Hiccup heads out with Toothless to oceanside near a cluster of rocky pillars to practice flying.  Forbidden Friendship is the first of How to Train Your Dragon’s memorably fantastic scenes—Test Drive is the second.   The scene is drop-dead gorgeous—an absolute treat to have seen in theaters, yet still holds up beautifully on the small screen.  There are some light notes of comedy here, as well as a brief moment of panic as Hiccup unhinges from Toothless’ harness—causing both to start falling to their doom thousands of feet in the air.  Hiccup luckily manages to grab Toothless's harness and steer them away from the ground, right into the rocky pillars.   In a split-second decision, Hiccup forgoes the instructions to fly on pure instinct, successfully guiding them through the pillars in an exhilarating high-speed flight sequence.

The soundtrack used during the sequence is called Test Drive and, along with Coming Back Around, is the most iconic soundtrack coming from the film and series as a whole.  The song alone gives me goosebumps, yet when combined and perfectly edited with the visuals of the training sequence crafts a masterful sequence of visual and sound.  The scene ends humorously with a joyful Toothless firing a victory shot forward much to Hiccup’s dismay as they soar right through the remaining soot and ash.  The pair stop to rest and eat on one of the rocky formations.  There, Toothless gets into a humorous squabble with a smaller dragon known as a Terrible Terror—firing a small bolt into the dragon's mouth, causing it to have a little cartoon implosion.  The result gives Hiccup insight that dragons are not fireproof on the inside.  Despite their horrific name, the Terrible Terrors act very playful and goofy around Hiccup, one even coming up and cuddling right beside him like a small cat—further cementing to the Viking that everything they know about dragons is off.

Hiccup’s various mysterious descents into the woods eventually catches the bitter curiosity of Astrid, who follows him and discovers what he's been hiding, much to Hiccup's hilarious reaction of deadpan dismay as she runs to tell the others; "Da, da-da! We're dead!"  Toothless, however, takes fate into his own hands by hoisting Astrid up into a tree.  Hiccup proceeds to try and convince Astrid of Toothless's loyalty and goodwill by taking her on an easy flight.  Yet Toothless has other plans, and as payback for the way Astrid treated Hiccup takes off in a zany, insane ride across the island much to Hiccup’s bickering dismay; “WHOA!! TOOTHLESS! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?! BAD DRAGON! He's not usually like this. Oh, no...Toothless, what are you doing?! We need her to like us. And now the spinning. Thank you for nothing, you useless reptile.”

The scheme actually works, however, with a terrified Astrid apologizing for her behavior.  Content with the apology, Toothless calms his flying down into the third memorably fantastic scene known as the Romantic Flight.  The lovely soundtrack here is called, you guessed it, Romantic Flight—a beautifully serene piece that plays as Toothless takes Hiccup and Astrid through one of the most lovely, romantic flying sequences since Disney's Aladdin (and was not at all surpassed by the much unneeded live-action remake Aladdin).  

First, they fly through a beautiful landscape of cotton candy clouds, Astrid gently running her hands through them in amazement.  Then they go above the clouds into a gorgeous night sky, complete with the northern lights shining above, before ending on a crystal clear view of Berk with all the evening fires alight.  There's a subtle moment of great visual comedy where Hiccup's only response to the sublime situation is a raised eyebrow towards Toothless—seemingly astonished at the dragon’s impressive wingman skills.  It hit me that while the scene only lasts around three minutes, the quick-change from daytime to nighttime suggests the flight went way longer than what is shown.  This might explain Astrid's rather quick change-of-heart to being immediately on Hiccup and Toothless' side—though after a flight sequence like that, I think even Stoick the Vast would have had a quick change-of-heart (which the television show actually does in a hilariously brilliant parody of the scene when Hiccup and Toothless take Stoick for a ride).

Toothless precedes to take the pair to see the Dragons’ Den, revealing that the dragons are not taking Berk’s food/livestock for themselves, but giving the food to a giant dragon known as the Red Death that cannibalizes the dragons when they don't do what it commands.  Astrid compares it to a giant beehive where they're the workers and it's the queen that controls them.  Astrid wants to immediately tell the other Vikings, but Hiccup asks her to wait for him to come up with a plan as they will most likely kill Toothless before listening to his pacifistic beliefs.  Astrid questions his plan, yet Hiccup doubles down on his resolve:

Astrid: Hiccup, we just discovered the Dragons' Nest. The thing we've been after since Vikings first sailed here. And you want to keep it a secret?! To protect your pet dragon?! Are you serious?!

Hiccup: (In a serious, steadfast tone) Yes.

Astrid: …Okay. Then what do we do?

It's the first time in the film where Hiccup not only stands up for himself but shows great determination like his father, something Astrid immediately notices and respects.  It's a sign not only of Hiccup growing up, but showing the qualities of a leader.

It's here, however, that I get to some less-than-stellar moments in How to Train Your Dragon.  The film starts falling into some predictable trope territory when Hiccup's plan goes horribly awry, everything gets revealed yet the older Vikings and Stoick refuse to hear Hiccup’s reasonable pleas (despite mounting evidence to the contrary), Stoick disowns his son because he's embarrassed him, yada yada yada.  It's the same old tired song and dance seen in many previous stories and it is a chore to sit through.  

Stoick decides to use the now caged Toothless as a guide to help them get to the Dragons’ Den, yet he ends up being vastly underprepared for the giant Red Death.  With the other teens as backup for Hiccup, they take the training dragons and ride off to go help against the Red Death.  Stoick ends up seeing the errors of his way and helps free Toothless so that Hiccup can fight alongside the other teenagers.  Stoick’s apology here feels very rushed and half-hearted on the writers’s department.  It would have worked a lot better for the story if they had just discarded the whole disownment/not listening parts altogether and had Hiccup's plan actually get through to Stoick in the first place.

Nonetheless, the film gets back on high-quality track as Hiccup and Toothless go up against the Red Death using speed and strategy to outwit and gradually damage the beast.  There's a really cool sequence where the pair fly up into the cloudy sky and start blasting fire bolts at the Red Death, the scene looking to the Vikings below like lightning flashes in the clouds as if Thor himself was battling above.  Hiccup then exploits all dragons’s main weakness by having Toothless fire a bolt into the Red Death’s mouth just as it’s charging up a blast—causing it to self-destruct and come crashing down into the ground as it blows up.

Unfortunately, Toothless and Hiccup get caught within the explosion, with Stoick’s reaction to his apparent son’s death here being far more impactful and dramatic than his previous apology.  The pair survive, expectedly, but not all in one piece as Hiccup loses his entire leg from the impact.  The loss gives weight to their victory, effectively emphasized when Hiccup wakes up in his room and realizes what he’s missing.  Hiccup’s non-vocal reaction says it all as he mentally comes to grips with reality and struggles to get across the room, Toothless coming to lend a leaning shoulder as they walk together outside.   I love the symbolism at play, Toothless now returning the favor of helping Hiccup travel after losing a vital piece of his mobility.  The Red Death’s, well, red death has freed the dragons from its influence, now living freely alongside the Vikings in peace and harmony (except for all those future TV episodes and film sequels, but that’s for a later date).

How to Train Your Dragon is a phantasm of visual and sound—a gorgeous display of the two coming together in union to form a masterful display of wonder, exhilaration, and beauty.  The film’s OST is a fantastic composition, with composer John Powell gifting the film with one of the best scores around.  I often listen to these soundtracks during recreational activities such as running or sitting on my computer (I’ve been listening to them as I write this review) because of how much I love them.  While the story can suffer from clichés and stale tropes at times, it vastly overcomes these faults with excellent pacing, entertaining to endearing characters, a variety of effective comedy, a touching, well-crafted bond between a Viking and his dragon, and the aforementioned masterful visual and sound.  How to Train Your Dragon is a great achievement both for animation and cinema in general.  It is, by far, one of DreamWorks Animation's best creations and one of the best films of the 2010s.