How To Train Your Dragon: Like a special edition of an old favourite

Like Disney’s 2025 versions of Snow White and Lilo and Stitch, How To Train Your Dragon is a live-action remake of an animation. But the 2010 original was no average cartoon. 

Animated in CG, it wasn’t a musical. Nor were its physics and logic far removed from live-action. True, its depiction of a remote island full of hardy Vikings fighting swarms of dragons echoed the Asterix comics. But its story was fundamentally straight, with debts to the 1979 classic The Black Stallion.  

A skinny misfit boy, Hiccup, brings down a dragon with his hand-made projectile. He can’t bear to kill the creature, realising it isn’t naturally aggressive. Instead, he bonds with the dragon, naming it “Toothless.” It has canine and feline qualities and in a break with other animated animals, Toothless can’t talk. Naturally, Hiccup ends up challenging the dragon-hating attitudes of his people, including his giant-sized Viking father Stoick, voiced in the original by Gerard Butler. 

Butler plays Stoick in the live-action film too. Helmed by one of the original co-directors, Dean DeBlois, this remake is enormously faithful, with no big story changes and many memorable moments and images recreated. Many reviewers will likely write it off as redundant as a result.  

But the new How to Train Your Dragon works. The characters and adventures have a vitality beyond most animated remakes, which often feel like half-hearted copies of the originals. The remake’s main live-action performers appear comfortable inhabiting simple characters who successfully carry the story’s broad emotions. Hiccup’s and Toothless’ slow-growing trust and friendship remain as touching as they were in the first film. 

Compared to this interspecies bond, the father-son conflict between Hiccup and Stoick was less vivid in the cartoon, and it remains so in the remake. Still, it’s fortified by some additional dialogue and moments which sell the fairly hackneyed idea of a patriarch slowly seeing his son for who he is. Few other characters are layered beyond the original, but there are glimpses of the hidden softness of the Viking teacher Gobber (Nick Frost) – a character who came out as gay in How to Train Your Dragon 2.  

There are some missteps. An opening dragon attack is messily edited, with action sequences that are too confusingly haphazard to be exciting. Later, there are moments where Hiccup’s dragon-flights look phoney. However, the film remains a rousing, exciting spectacle in splendid locations (filming mainly took place in Northern Ireland). Exhilarating and wholehearted, it’s less a standalone achievement than a special edition of an old favourite. 

► How To Train Your Dragon is in UK cinemas now.