How to Train Your Dragon (2025)

Here we go again: barely three weeks after Lilo & Stitch, we have another live-action remake of an animated film. And the gap to remake films is getting shorter every time: only 23 years passed between the original and the new Stitch, and this is even shorter: only fifteen years since the first How to Train Your Dragon film released in 2010, and six since the original trilogy ended in 2019. In the case of Lilo, turning a 90-minute 2D film into a 108-minute live-action meant that many things had to be changed: some people liked the changes more than others, but it is at the very least a different interpretation of the same story, even altering the ending completely.

In the case of How to Train Your Dragon, nothing really changes: It's the same story, almost line-by-line, with the same character development, plot points, crazy good soundtrack, it even has the same director, Dean DeBlois (who, incidentally, co-directed the original Lilo & Stitch before moving to DreamWorks).

It would be tempting to dismiss this movie as a cash grab and label it as unnecessary, or slam Universal for retreating to the same old franchises instead of trying something new. Yet that would be undervaluing how important How to Train You Dragon is to many people. It is not an understatement to say that, for many kids in the 2010s, How to Train You Dragon is a generational classic, a series that accompanied them as they grew older. From meeting that awkward teenager with a crush in the first movie all the way to the epilogue in How to Train Your Dragon 3 (which I won't spoil if you haven't watched it, as I bet it will be remade too), the trilogy really marked the lives of a generation (including Mason Thames, the 17-year-old actor playing Hiccup today, who used to dress up as him as a kid).

Personally, I am not one of those kids. I was 14 when the first movie came out, so by then I was not particularly interested in investing my time in "another kids movie". Instead, I was looking forward to my cathartic "end of childhood" moment with Toy Story 3, released the same year, whose ending struck my heart like a freight train. When I watched the original How to Train Your Dragon, with the forced condescending look of a teenager pretending to be a film buff, I found it to be nice enough, well made but with a painfully predictable script and an incredibly beautiful but super manipulative soundtrack by John Powell. My younger cousin, however, was obsessed with it.

Today... I think pretty much the same about the movie: it's good, very satisfying, but also very unoriginal. But I understand better now that, if I had been born a few years later, I would likely have a very different view of the characters and world. I can imagine that, for many younger adults out there, seeing the characters they grew up with in flesh and bone can really feel like a full-circle moment not too different from what I felt when I reunited with Woody and Buzz and then waved goodbye eleven years after Toy Story 2 (albeit not quite as powerful, because Pixar was at another level back then, but it surely has a greater meaning).

With that in mind, I find it hard to be too critical about this newer version of the film, even if it doesn't ignore the fact that it is basically the same film. I don't think it would have been appropriate to change the story much, however, although I do feel that it's a shame they didn't use this opportunity to improve the character of Astrid (played by Nico Parker now), whose development is so incredibly rushed it's almost disrespectful to her personality (the "that's for... everything else" moment is cute and all, but c'mon).

But beyond all of those emotional aspects (I bet 14-year-old me would think I'm being too soft), the reason this new movie works comes down to more technical aspects: How to Train You Dragon is one of the few animation-to-reality cases that actually makes sense because it looks as good in real life (if not better) as it did in animation. There are no photorealistic talking animals here like in The Lion King or The Jungle Book, no uncanny blends of actors with digital enhancements like the Genie in Aladdin or Ursula in The Little Mermaid, and no hideous recreations of cartoony characters like Lumière or Beast in The Beauty and The Beast or the dwarves in Snow White.

Most of the early DreamWorks movies are so whimsical that they simply would look completely out of place in live-action (could you imagine Madagascar or Kung Fu Panda with photorealistic animals like in The Lion King? Or a real-life version of Shrek?). And the more recent ones, like The Wild Robot, The Bad Guys, or Puss in Boots: The Last Wish really play to the strengths of the animation, staying away from photorealism, which is the trend nowadays: why try to imitate real life when you can be much more expressive with animation?

We didn't think like that in the early 2000s, or at least the big studios didn't. How to Train Your Dragon in particular took a much more grounded approach to filmmaking, even to the point of calling expert cinematographer Roger Deakins (Fargo, Skyfall, Blade Runner 2049, 1917) on as a visual consultant. This trilogy was filmed as if real cameras were there in those 3D spaces, with the lighting and framing limitations that a film crew would experience to make a Viking village look believable. There are also dozens of dragons, sure, but they can be convincingly created with special effects and while some designs were more cartoony than others, and Toothless looks impossibly cute, this has always been one of the most realistic animation series, so the jump to live-action not only feels more natural, it feels truer to the nature of the trilogy.

And the remake really does look good, with a big effort put in using real locations, breath-taking landscapes, believable props and costumes, and real fire and explosions as much as possible. It is a paradox: one of the most "unnecessary" remakes, one that doesn't try to improve or revisit the original script in any way; a film that was surely greenlit for it to be an easy money-making machine with little creative effort, yet still comes out as one of the few remakes that doesn't feel like it was made on a whim.

Instead, it feels inviting to watch, as long as you understand that you have seen the story before. And because of that, it has the same, plentiful highs of the original, while retaining the very few lows that, in reality, don't take much away from the experience (the story is simple, so what? It's satisfying!). You know that a movie really works when you can rewatch it over and over again and still get a kick out of it (John Powell's score may be manipulative, so what? It's a masterpiece!). You will welcome the excuse to watch it once again.