`How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World'

(PG, 104 minutes,

Born in the 3-D land rush, “How to Train Your Dragon” has never quite shrugged off the bland corporate sheen attached to it from the start. But almost a decade since taking flight in 2010, these movies have made up for their lack of fire with enough sincerity and genuine sense of wonder to sustain a mild but moving trilogy.

“How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” brings the franchise to a close with an affectionate chapter that continues the adventures of the Viking boyturned-chief Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and his faithful dragon Toothless, a sleek, black kind of dragon called a Night Fury.

In “The Hidden World,” the dragon utopia that Hiccup has built on the Island of Berk, where Vikings once feared and fought dragons, comes under threat from a dastardly dragon hunter named Grimmel the Grisly (F. Murray Abraham).

With Berk under attack, Hiccup rallies the Vikings to uproot and flee to a mythical, undiscovered realm called the Hidden World, where dragons could live safely away from humankind. It feels like an overreaction.

“The Hidden World” may not overwhelm in its necessity; it's a tale that lacks the stakes of the previous installment, which dealt significantly with Hiccup's parents. But the $1 billion in box office taken in by the first two movies, combined, was enough to push the franchise forward and put “How to Train Your Dragon” back into action five years later.

There are two compelling parts of “The Hidden World” that validate it. The first is the courting scene between Toothless and another white (and presumably female) Night Fury who turns up just as Grimmel does.

The second is the film's terrific coda, which leaps years forward and adds a wider, wistful and more grown-up dimension to what has always been, at its heart, a boy-and-his-dog story, just with wings.

Without much to draw on from the surrounding characters (voices include America Ferrera, Jonah Hill and T.J. Miller), “How To Train Your Dragon” always has been predicated on that central twosome and the laudable lesson that animals, even fire-breathing ones, aren't our enemies unless we make them so. — Jake Coyle, Associated Press