TALL TAILS

THERE ARE LIFE LESSONS IN THIS DRAGONS’ TALE. CHRIS KNIGHT MOVIE REVIEW.

At this point in the How to Train Your Dragon franchise — now nine years, three movies and 118 animated television episodes — you can be assured that the dragons have all been thoroughly trained by the residents of Berk, a Viking outpost home to a motley collection of villagers of varying accents but ruled by a young Canadian named Hiccup, with the voice of Jay Baruchel.

They’ve moved from education to emancipation, and the opening scene finds Hiccup leading a raid against a rival tribe of dragon slavers. The one beastie they fail to rescue, however, is a rare dragon dubbed a Light Fury. Hiccup’s best-friend/dragon is a Night Fury, a jet-black creature he’s named Toothless.

Regardless, Toothless spends the rest of the movie in pursuit of the Light Fury, sometimes for annoyingly long stretches of time. (Honestly, that mating dance goes on forever.) Meanwhile, Hiccup has to figure out whether the time is right to marry his girlfriend Astrid (America Ferrera), while Tuffnut (T.J. Miller) gives him backhanded relationship advice, and Snotlout (Jonah Hill) tries to get with Hiccup’s mom (Cate Blanchett).

The second Dragon movie, which came out in 2014, cemented the bond between Hiccup and Toothless as they battled a mad dragonmaster. Here it’s all about the characters pulling apart, which may be emotionally satisfying but is narratively less thrilling; key scenes feature Toothless trying to balance his friendship with Hiccup and his desire for the Light Fury, a conundrum exploited by Grimmel (F. Murray Abraham), the movie’s chief villain.

The animation continues to be first-rate; writer/director Dean Deblois, who’s been with the series since its inception, gives us forest backgrounds, ocean waterfalls and cloudscapes that you could freeze and hang on your wall, they’re so lovely. But on this final go-round much of the novelty is gone.

But there are still pleasures aplenty to be found in closure. The hidden world of the film’s subtitle is a realm, possibly mythical, where Hiccup imagines the dragons, and perhaps his own tribe, might take up residence to escape all the anti-dragon sentiments of this world.

But the young chief quickly learns that people don’t easily pull up stakes for an ill-defined promised land. So this is also a story of a leader coming into his own as a decision-maker and compromise-broker. The animals may by fantastical, the society a pastiche of an imagined Viking-celtic Golden Age. But the life lessons are real. ≤≤≤

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World opens across Canada on Feb. 22.