#httyd 2010

“Our parents’ war is about to become ours,” Astrid continued and pointing her axe near his face.

“Figure out which side you’re on!” Then Lykke’s amber eyes bulged once at her order.

“Our parents’ war is about to become ours…” still rang fresh in her own mind as she stepped back into Tante Havdis’ house.  

Slowly walking towards the wall, clutching her skirt with one hand she stopped at a wooden rack with multiple spears stacked tall.  

She slowly picked up one spear with a curved blade, the metal reflected her honey and slightly narrowed eyes. 

“Not if I could help it!”

What made you go to the theatre to watch the original httyd back in 2010?:

For me, my cat who looked so much like Toothless (minus the eyes, her’s were yellow) suddenly passed away months earlier from a genetic heart condition and she was my first experience of death of a loved one (I was only 7 years old). When I first saw a trailer of it on YTV, I immediately fell in love with Toothless since he looked and behaved so much like her and she was a curious stray we befriended which reminded me so much of Forbidden Friendship! It was a very unique character concept considering most animal characters usually had a lot of puppy-like personality/characteristics; but no not Toothless—at least not much of it in the first film anyway. My family being poor at the time, my mom was still very kind and actually took me to see the movie on a later-than normal time and on top of that: on a SCHOOL NIGHT because she wasn’t only off work but also she knew how much I missed and loved my cat. I was lucky to get a chance to watch it and I will never forget my first time watching Test Drive on the big screen. I ofc didn’t understand Toothless’ prosthesis and none of the other characters besides Hiccup and maybe Astrid were that interesting to me, not even the dragons cause I didn’t like how cartoony and vastly different they looked compared to Toothless until I grew up to finally fully appreciate them.

Years later it has became one of my biggest hyper fixations and I wasn’t a huge fan until unfortunately when THW was released so I missed a lot and had a lot to catch up on the lore (excluding to httyd 2 but much to our surprise, I didn’t like it as much as the og and didn’t get into it early on).

Which okay yes I know how everyone feels about live action remakes. Believe me, I feel the same way. But my sister is a huge HTTYD fan and wanted to see it so we went together. Here is my review:

Overall, this is literally the same movie. Practically shot for shot. I mean the dialogue was the same, the camera angles were the same, the music was the same. It was like 90% How to Train Your Dragon (2010). Didn’t add much, didn’t subtract much, but there were a few differences.

The biggest one, I would say, is that the chief of the tribe is apparently not a dynastic position. There are a couple characters who mention something about wanting to be chief someday, which I think was just inherited originally. Astrid especially is vying to be chief, which is even brought up by Hiccup when he mentions how Stoick would probably be proud to have Astrid as his successor since she’s everything that Hiccup isn’t. Also, in the original, the Viking teens dislike Hiccup because he’s puny and awkward and just Not Like Them, and in this version that’s part of it, but the main reason they don’t like him is essentially because he’s a nepo baby. They point out Hiccup’s privilege as the chief’s son, mentioning how he doesn’t have to work as hard as them, or how if he was anyone else’s son, he would’ve been exiled from Berk by then, but because he’s the chief’s son he gets to stay no matter how many messes he causes, and that he wouldn’t have made it to dragon training without Stoick “pulling some strings”. When Hiccup starts to be the star pupil because of the stuff he’s learning from Toothless, they do level off on this and start clamoring to be his friend just like in the original.

Another pretty key difference is that they cut the scene after Test Drive where Hiccup and Toothless are chilling eating fish and the group of Terrible Terrors flies in and Hiccup feeds them. I don’t know why they cut this scene because it’s pretty important. It’s the scene that establishes the Chekhov’s gun of how dragons aren’t fireproof on the inside. This is a really important detail for Hiccup to learn because it’s how he defeats the Green Death. It also includes the important line “everything we know about you guys is wrong”, which isn’t said here, but Hiccup does remark to Astrid during the scene where they’re reading the dragon training manual something like “maybe we’re wrong about them”, which I suppose is pretty similar. But the not fireproof on the inside thing is pretty important. Hiccup does defeat the Green Death in the exact same way, by having Toothless ignite its fire breath first, but there wasn’t a scene where Hiccup learned that dragons can be defeated that way, so that knowledge just kinda seems to come out of nowhere.

Also, when Hiccup discovers Toothless shot down in the woods and can’t bring himself to kill him, he doesn’t say “I did this” with regret. This means that Stoick also doesn’t say “I did this” when he thinks Hiccup is dead, so we don’t get that bookend of the father and son being the same in that instance. Also, when Stoick apologizes to Toothless, there is like a whole minute of dramatic tension before Toothless opens his wings to reveal that Hiccup is alive, when in the original he opened his wings right after Stoick apologized. But I’m glad to say that they did keep the really important shot at the end where Toothless and Hiccup have matching injuries requiring prosthetics. That was a good detail.

This is the only detail of the movie that I actually do think is weird and kind of unnecessary, and that’s the character of Snotlout. Idk why, but in this version, he’s basically the MCU’s version of Flash Thompson. Like instead of being a physically imposing bully, he’s just kind of a show off. He is bigger than Hiccup, but he doesn’t seem “tough”. And much like the MCU Flash, he has this weird relationship with his dad?? Like there are a surprising number of scenes where he tries to impress his dad and his dad completely brushes him off and barely acknowledges his existence, and he even tells Snotlout not to speak to him in public. It was giving Flash at the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home when he gets back to New York to find that his butler/chauffeur came to pick him up but not his parents. Like that exact same vibe. It really didn’t add anything to the movie except to make you feel sympathy towards Snotlout I guess but it honestly wasn’t needed and I thought it was weird. (Full disclosure though, I haven’t seen any of the httyd tv shows so I have no idea how Snotlout’s character is expanded in the franchise, so it’s possible that I just don’t understand the full extent of his character)

Pretty much everything else about the movie is the same as the animated one, and I do mean pretty much everything. Hiccup is his normal awkward self, Astrid is a Cool Girl, Gobber suggests putting Hiccup in dragon training, Fishlegs is a dragon nerd, the twins pick on each other, Stoick and Hiccup’s Viking helmets are halves of Valka’s breastplate, all the same dragon species are mentioned, Hiccup is left-handed, and he even eats the bit of fish that Toothless coughs up.

So since the movie is like 90% the original movie, that means that it’s good, or at least mostly good. There’s nothing offensive about it, very little added, very little subtracted. Being live action it obviously doesn’t have the same visuals or ability to do things that you can only do in animation, but they really do try their best to copy like, all of the important shots. If you love How to Train Your Dragon you’ll probably be okay with it since it’s like basically the same movie, but of course it’s hard to beat the magic of the original. But as far as live action remakes go, since it kept pretty much everything, that means that it’s generally very faithful.