As his name suggests, Stoick is commanding and distant. (Even though, spoiler warning, Stoick dies midway through How to Train Your Dragon 2). The relationship between the teenaged Viking Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) and his chieftain father Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler) gives How to Train Your Dragon, and its sequels, their heart. That left DeBlois and his partner Chris Sanders, with whom he’d co-written and co-directed Lilo & Stitch, to find it. “ was buried under mysticism and prophecies and Nordic legends,” Dean DeBlois says in the documentary The Making of How to Train Your Dragon: Finding the Story. Dreamworks retooled the adaptation of Cressida Cowell’s book series mid-production after fearing that story skewed too young and had lost a handle on the father-and-son tale that was supposed to be at its core. How to Train Your Dragon changed that, even if transcendence wasn’t always the plan. DreamWorks brought animated bees with arched eyebrows and a never-ending supply of wisecracks. This was DreamWorks Animation, after all, and the studio hadn’t yet shown much inclination to veer out of its lane with its in-house productions. But maybe not that much of a departure the trailer had a statelier tone, but there was always the chance that the dragons could end up dancing to a Smash Mouth song. From the start, the film looked like a departure from DreamWorks Animation’s usual creatures-with-attitude vehicles like the Shrek series and Shark Tale (an approach that found a little more emotional depth with 2008’s Kung Fu Panda). When the first trailer for How to Train Your Dragon appeared in late 2009, nothing suggested that, nearly 10 years later, an elegiac, third entry would close the loop on a story of idealism, loss, and getting older in the midst of tumultuous times.
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