The cover of said book featured an illustration of Smaug the Dreadful in all his magnificence. This fascination probably springs from my early exposure to The Hobbit, via the wonderful BBC Radio adaptations and later in my dad's old paperback copy of the book. Some kids like sports, some kids like dinosaurs, some like cars or trains - but for me it was always dragons.
But let us put aside such dour thoughts for now, and take some time to consider the abundance of joys offered by favourite film of year.įirst off, in the interest full disclosure, I should mention that I really like dragons. While self-awareness is invaluable to any critic, like healthy eating and exercise, the process is made no more pleasant by its necessity. Furthermore, I find that this film-analysis forces me to do a little self-analysis.
And it's explaining this "why" that is most worrisome, as it forces me to position How to Train Your Dragon as part of a troubling trend in cinema and culture at large. Towards the end of this article, I will examine the film's problematic treatment of its female characters, and try to understand not only how but why the film does this. Eventually, like Hiccup himself, I must turn away from selfish escapism and shoulder my responsibility. I will begin by unashamedly revelling in the sensory joys of flight, and try to convey some of the pleasures afforded by the film without getting bogged down in issues of representation, ideology, and meaning creation that I believe are the responsibility of every critic to examine. How then do I overcome this dilemma? Thankfully, I'm provided with a rather helpful model by the structure of the film itself. After being prodded and poked, deconstructed and dissected, what will remain of that exhilarating kinaesthetic joy that I tried to describe in my review? Even using the word kinaesthetic to describe that particular sensations seems to leave it somehow diminished, somehow dryer.
I'm afraid that the sometimes brutal nature of analysis will damage the film. Where then does this difficulty stem from? On further consideration, the obstacle to critical thought seems to lie more with the writer than text. Yes, I described the film as "near perfect" and a possible contender for my favourite film of the year, but that doesn't mean I'm blind to the film's less than perfect elements. Neither do I ask the question out of a feeling that the film is beyond criticism. Not only do I reject this claim on principal, I also believe that How to Train Your Dragon 2 has even more to say than other films of its type - setting the bar particularly high for those films following it. How to write critically about How to Train Your Dragon 2? I’m not asking this question because the film is an animated fantasy blockbuster aimed at kids a film so resolutely positioned at the entertainment end of the art/entertainment axis that it has no need of further examination.