DIRECTOR SOARS ON WINGS OF ‘DRAGON’
Deblois broke from Dreamworks’ sequel strategy, expanding fantasy hit into trilogy
As with practically every North American kid of his generation, Dean Deblois had his mind blown by the original “Star Wars” trilogy. Deblois — who was born in the tiny town of Aylmer, Quebec, where “Hollywood seemed so, so far away” — had just turned 7 when the first “Star Wars” movie opened in summer 1977, and three years later, soon after experiencing “The Empire Strikes Back,” he felt compelled to write his own fanfiction stories about the characters.
A case could be made that no film event has had a greater impact on the school of animation storytellers working today than George Lucas’ space opera, mostly in the form of inside jokes and hidden homages designed to amuse other “Star Wars” fans. Such hat tips are woven throughout nearly every show on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, and regularly find their way into animated features as well. When it came time for Pixar — a company once owned by Lucas — to make its first “Toy Story” sequel, the writers included a joke in which Buzz Lightyear accuses his nemesis Zurg of killing his father, prompting the Darth Vader-like villain to quip, “No, Buzz. I am your father.”
In Deblois’ case, “Star Wars” not only sparked his storytelling impulses as a child, but also inspired the solution that would elevate the fantasy-film franchise for which Deblois himself was responsible — DreamWorks Animation’s “How to Train Your Dragon” — from cash-grab sequel to something unprecedented in the computer-animated arena: a self- contained three-act trilogy, in which the second installment expanded what the original film had established, revealed fresh family connections and set up a finale that sees the characters through to their emotional maturity.
Already on the first film in 2010, Deblois and co- director Chris Sanders had achieved something special. “Now, when I tell people about it, it seems so simple: a boy and his dragon,” says producer Bonnie Arnold, who was an early believer in the franchise. “Historically speaking, dragon movies have not done all that well, and according to the consumer products people, Vikings were not that popular. Believe me, everybody brought up every reason under the sun that it wouldn’t work.”
The story of a teenage dragon-trainer named Hiccup and his forbidden connection with the last known Night Fury, named Toothless, “How to Train Your Dragon” feels more thought- out than other Dreamworks toons. In truth, “Dragon” had already gone through two sets of directors and was in deep trouble when DWA chief Jeffrey Katzenberg pulled Sanders off another project, “The Croods,” to salvage the film — a challenge Sanders accepted on the condition that the studio bring in Deblois, the longtime col- How to Train Your Dragon How to Train Your Dragon 2 Source: Box Office Mojo laborator with whom he’d made “Lilo & Stitch” at Disney, for a “page one re- conceive,” as Deblois refers to it.
With the release date set and most of the character designs already locked, the rushed schedule turned out to be a blessing, says Deblois, since it eliminated much of the second-guessing that goes into a longer production schedule. As Katzenberg had told him going in, “Normally, we have time to make these movies two or three times in iteration. With this one, you’ve gotta nail it on the first time.”
Even so, Katzenberg encouraged Sanders and Deblois to take risks — perhaps most famously, the way Hiccup loses a limb at the end of the film. In their first few drafts at the script, everything tied up a little too neatly, Deblois recalls. “It was Jeffrey Katzenberg who said that we had surprised him with so many of our choices that it felt a little disappointing that it ended in such a conventional way. He pitched, ‘What if Toothless were to die?’ But we thought that was a little too extreme. At the time, we were seeing so many stories of people coming back from wars in the Middle East, who had lost limbs as a consequence of their heroism.”
Against the odds, Deblois and Sanders finished “How to Train Your Dragon” in time, and the film went on to earn just shy of half a billion dollars at the worldwide box office, after which Katzenberg asked Deblois to consider ideas for a sequel. “My first response was, ‘I’d rather work on something new,’” Deblois recalls. “I’m not a fan of sequels in general because they so often lack real purpose.”
But Dreamworks pressed, and Deblois thought about it. “The studio was asking for one movie, the next adventure,” he says. Since he first came aboard, Deblois had been touched by the prologue of Cressida Cowell’s novel, from which the first movie was very loosely adapted. The book opens with the line, “There were dragons when I was a boy.” Cowell visited DWA as the team was finishing the film, and she had mentioned to Deblois that she was work-