Movie review: How To Train Your Dragon 1 and 2
I’d been wanting to see this series for a while. They seemed like genuinely good movies. On the cruise, HTTYD2 came on late the first day I was there and I opted against it, to the surprising and persistent complaints of my daughter. I felt really bad about that and resolved that we’d see it together … eventually. So for Christmas, I bought the two movies and gave them to my boyfriend to give to the kids to wrap for me (that’s how you make sure you get what you want for Christmas!) The afternoon of Christmas Day, she and I settled in and watched it.
The basic plot matches the usual horse movie for little girls - misunderstood child finds and tames powerful wild animal, wild animal *only* loves and trusts the child, child uses wild animal to rise to fame and prominence, child is no longer misunderstood. It’s typical that the child involved is a boy and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a case where the animal involved was not male. Frequently, they seem to market these things to boys, but their real audience seems to be little girls (or in my case, big girls). I don’t know where the marketing people’s heads are. The whole ‘taming a wild animal’ thing is a girl theme. Boys want to KILL the wild animal. But whatever.
I’ve already given you the basic plot for the first movie. The boy is the son of the chief, but a disappointment to his father because he’s small and nerdy instead of being hulking and martial. Dragons terrorize the village until the boy wounds and then tames Toothless, a special, rare kind of dragon with unknown powers (mainly, it’s fast, deadly, and smart). After that, the boy expands the tricks he learned about how to tame dragons and shows them to the rest of the villagers. Soon the village is full of dragons and dragons become their new industry. There is a sort of uber-dragon they have to defeat first, a queen dragon who has a nest and is fed by the other dragons, but she’s sort of tossed in at the end so there’s a final battle.
The second movie revisits the theme of having one big dragon being served by a bunch of little ones (‘little’ still being several times the size of a human, so the big one is truly vast, exceeding the size of any Earth animal by a couple orders of magnitude, and I’m including whales and dinosaurs). This time the big dragon is a male and instead of being fed by the other dragons, it feeds them with magical fish-catching powers. (I catch a whiff of misogyny here, which is particularly repugnant because female animals are usually the food producers and the males the useless ones.) There’s also a bad guy who is rounding up all the dragons to use them as weapons of war and he has his own titanic, alpha male dragon who defeats the fish-catching one, thus stealing/mind-controlling all the dragons. Toothless eventually breaks free (with the boy’s help and urging, of course), and somehow manages to cow the enormous alpha, thus becoming the new alpha while the other slinks off.
It’s a fun pair of movies. Everyone is white, by the way, and nearly everyone is male. I can think of only four notable female characters in the movie, one of which never actually has any lines, and one of which only appears in one of the two movies. But males? There’s probably 20-30 who get enough screen time to be recognizable. Most of the dragons do not have their gender explored. Toothless is specifically mentioned as male, but then they turn around and imply that all the dragons are female, like bees, feeding their queen. Then in the next movie we find that there are big males to match the big females, and one dragon is introduced as specifically female. So the dragons seem to have genders. I liked that the female dragons are not necessarily small, dainty, or retiring. Also, that sexual aggression among humans was not gendered either, with males trying to woo females about as often as females made overtures towards males.