Lovely trip to dragon realm
The third installment in the animated “How to Train Your Dragon” series is a lovely movie that takes real chances. It moves the story forward considerably, so that it would be hard for the filmmakers to go back on the idea of this being the last of a trilogy. And it contains two sequences that are practically avant-garde in their freedom and audacity. The title is “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World,” and the hidden world, in this case, is a utopia for dragons that exists at the end of the Earth. It’s a place of legend and is believed to be myth, but if it exists, it would solve the big problem troubling every nice person in the movie: In a hostile world, it’s very hard to keep dragons safe. The setting is a fantasy Viking land that never existed, in which people and dragons cohabit the Earth. Over two previous installments, the young Viking
Series’ final installment takes risks — and they’re worthwhile
leader, Hiccup (the voice of Jay Baruchel), transformed his community’s feeling about dragons. Everybody likes them now. People fly around on them, and everyone is happy, except for one unsettling fact: The outside world still hates dragons and wants to hunt them. Indeed, Hiccup’s establishing his land as a dragon safe haven may actually imperil them all the more. Now they’re all in one place for their enemies to attack.
In another animated movie — not just a bad one, but a mediocre one — this setup would be the pretext for a series of battles, in which good would finally triumph over evil in the five minutes before the finish. “Dragon 3” has what could be called a battle, too, but it’s more like a smallscale encounter, and the rest of the movie is devoted to showing two things: the devising and implementation of a permanent survival strategy. And the aspects of life that make survival worth the trouble.
This brings us to the movie’s defining sequences, which are unusual in their strategy and strong in their impact. The titular dragon, Hiccup’s own dragon, Toothless, is a special dragon known as a Night Fury and thought to be the only one in existence. Well — good news for everyone — there’s another Night Fury, a girl Night Fury, and ... well, you know where this is going, right? Toothless and the wild, undomesticated female Fury meet, and they start checking each other out.
What follows is more than obligatory sniffing around. It’s a long scene of two wild animals trying to communicate, without access to words. Each takes chances. Each tries to build trust. There’s backing off, and there’s moving forward. There’s interest and resistance, and this goes on for minutes. It’s a beautifully choreographed achievement in conception alone, but this is animation and can’t merely be conceived. It must be executed, with delicacy and detail in the facial expressions, so that we can track every flicker of feeling, as though we were looking at Harriet Andersson in an Ingmar Bergman movie. This is sensitive, gorgeous work.
And then it gets even better, because 15 minutes later, this sequence is surpassed by a mini-masterpiece, in which Toothless takes off into the sky looking for the female Fury. He finds her, and what follows is a kind of ecstatic expression of young existence, again wordless, as they fly just over the ocean, through a waterfall, and discover their dragon utopia. We see a bright place bursting with orange light, as the soundtrack soars with music straight out of a biblical epic scored by Miklos Rozsa.
In “The Hidden World,” the struggle for good and evil is present, but only as a plot device. The movie’s main concern are the passages of life, which can be painful enough, but also can be glorious. The movie enacts, in fantasy form, the process by which children grow up, find love and leave their parents, and watching this, it’s easy to wonder if kids, who are the target audience for this film, will remember “Dragon 3” when they become adults, 10 or 15 years from now.
By the way, if you’re wondering about the subliminal appeal of the dragons — why these animated creatures look adorable onscreen and not menacing at all — here’s why: Their movements, behaviors and expressions are based on cats. Once you know, it’s the most obvious thing in the world.