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How to Train Your Dragon
As the son of a Viking leader on the cusp of manhood, shy Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III faces a rite of passage: he must kill a dragon to prove his warrior mettle. But after downing a feared dragon, he realizes that he no longer wants to destroy it, and instead befriends the beast – which he names Toothless – much to the chagrin of his warrior father.
2010 · Directed by Dean DeBlois · 98 min · Fantasy · Adventure · Animation · Family · Screenplay in the scene database · 52 frames
Tagline
What started as fire and fury will become friendship.
Plot
The Viking village of Berk is frequently attacked by dragons that steal livestock and endanger the villagers. Hiccup, the 15-year-old son of the village chieftain, Stoick the Vast, is deemed too weak to fight, so he creates mechanical devices under apprenticeship with Gobber, the village blacksmith who is also Stoick's best friend and advisor. Hiccup uses a bolas launcher to shoot down a Night Fury, a rare dragon, during a dragon raid, but nobody believes him. He enters the forest and finds the Night Fury but cannot bring himself to kill the dragon. Instead, he sets the creature free. The Night Fury then suddenly pins Hiccup down, but to Hiccup's surprise, the dragon spares him.
Before leaving with his fleet to find and destroy the dragons' nest, Stoick enrolls Hiccup in a dragon-fighting class with fellow teenagers Fishlegs, Snotlout, twins Ruffnut and Tuffnut, and Astrid, on whom Hiccup has a crush. Facing little success in the class, Hiccup returns to the forest and finds the Night Fury in a cove, unable to fly because Hiccup's bolas tore off half of his tail fin. Hiccup gradually befriends the dragon, naming him "Toothless" after his retractable teeth, and designs a harness and prosthetic fin that allows Toothless to fly with Hiccup riding atop his back.
Learning dragon behavior from Toothless, Hiccup manages to pass the training by subduing the dragons, earning admiration from his peers but sparking suspicion and jealousy from Astrid. Stoick's fleet returns home unsuccessful. When Hiccup learns that he must kill a dragon for his final exam, he tries to run away with Toothless, but Astrid discovers them, and Hiccup takes her on a flight to demonstrate that Toothless is friendly. During the flight, Toothless is hypnotically drawn to the dragons' nest, where an evil gigantic dragon named the Red Death summons relatively smaller dragons to feed it copious amounts of live food to avoid being eaten themselves. Realizing the dragons have been forced to attack Berk to survive, Astrid wishes to tell the village, but Hiccup advises against it to protect Toothless.
Plot summary from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.
Crew
- Screenplay: Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders, William Davies
- Cinematography: Gil Zimmerman
- Edited by: Maryann Brandon, Darren T. Holmes
- Music: John Powell
- Production design: Kathy Altieri
- Produced by: Bonnie Arnold
Cast
- Jay Baruchel as Hiccup (voice)
- Gerard Butler as Stoick (voice)
- Craig Ferguson as Gobber (voice)
- America Ferrera as Astrid (voice)
- Jonah Hill as Snotlout (voice)
- Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Fishlegs (voice)
- T.J. Miller as Tuffnut (voice)
- Kristen Wiig as Ruffnut (voice)
- Robin Atkin Downes as Ack (voice)
- Philip McGrade as Starkard (voice)
Production
- Country: United States of America
- Language: English
- Studios: DreamWorks Animation
- Budget: $165,000,000
- Box office: $495,141,736
- Themes: friendship, ship, blacksmith, island, based on novel or book, flying, arena, village, villain, training
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