When a successful animated feature is remade into a live-action feature, you have to ask: It is really necessary? If you want to see well-crafted CGI dragons, “How to Train Your Dragon” does well, but there are some tweaks to the plot and characters, including misguided attempts at diversity.
Shot in Iceland, the reality of live-action “How to Train Your Dragon” is beautiful, with intricate wood carvings, but if you’ve done any woodwork at all, this will make you question the very first few moments. As with the animated feature, we learn that the seven-generations old village of Berk is plagued by dragons who attack too often. The Vikings and the dragons have been enemies for generations and part of adulthood in this Viking world means learning to fight dragons. All the buildings are new because of these frequent dragon raids which includes the burning of buildings yet we see how large these buildings are and how intricate designs are carved into the wood.
While our narrator, the 15-year-old Hiccup (Mason Thames), has a large muscular father—Stoick (Gerard Butler), Hiccup is skinny and small, even when compared to his peers. Because of his clumsiness, Hiccup also tends to cause disasters, both small and large which he demonstrates as the village attempts to recover from the dragon attack. Hiccup has been apprenticing under Gobber (Nick Frost) as a blacksmith who specializes in weapon-making. Gobber is also missing a hand and a leg due to dragon battles, but Gobber has managed to find ingenious ways of making that an advantage.
The latest accident comes after Hiccup has tried his new invention (a type of bolas). No one believe him when he claims he has downed the legendary and dreaded Night Fury. As in the animated feature, during the battle, we do meet the group of cool kids, including Astrid (Nico Parker) and the overly confident Snotlout (Gabriel Howell). Unlike his interactions in the animated feature where Astrid is reticent, the live-action has Astrid actively showing her disgust for Hiccup. I think this makes her eventual conversion less believable.
After this last attack, Hiccup’s father decides to lead his men in search of the dragons’ nest. While this expedition is gone, Hiccup unexpectedly is forced to join the cool kids training to battle dragons.
Of course, we know that Hiccup did indeed down a dragon and because that dragon is injured it cannot escape. Hiccup feeds the dragon he names Toothless (because of its retractable teeth) and, using his ingenuity at engineering, he makes a contraption that enables Toothless to fly again. Yet they can only fly together. Thus they form a symbiotic partnership. Through his intimate knowledge of the Night Fury, he is able to do well in the dragon training, eventually beating out the others. By this time, his father has returned. After Gobber informs him of his son’s phenomenal skills at dragon taming, he becomes proud of his son. Yet the honor of being the best is to kill a dragon in front of his whole village. Hiccup refuses to do it, but when his father becomes upset, Hiccup’s life becomes endangered and Toothless comes to his rescue.
Stoick won’t listen to his son and will attempt to use Toothless to find the dragons’ nest. Hiccup must save Toothless and his father by quickly teaching his classmates how to train their dragons.
The story is essentially the same. The live-action film is 125 minutes. The 2010 animated feature was 98 minutes. The extra 27 minutes do not add much. Perhaps if the action was tightened up a bit the humor would work better. Of course, there’s also the problem that I’ve heard many of these lines before from the animated feature so they aren’t as fresh.
Director Dean DeBlois co-directed the animated feature with Chris Sanders. Sanders and DeBlois with Will Davies wrote the screenplay for the animated feature (loosely based on the 2003 novel by Cressida Cowell), but DeBlois writes and directs the live-action feature. So knows the characters and animation and can move with confidence, but I don’t feel that the live-action actors, the actual people, are as nuanced as they could be. Perhaps DeBlois isn’t as confident with non-animated actors. I don’t feel that the relationship between Frost’s Gobber and Thames’ Hiccup was built as well as it could be in a live-action film and I wasn’t particularly convinced of the chemistry between Thames’ Hiccup and Parker’s Astrid.
Diversity
You can’t miss the racial diversity in the crowds. There are visible African/Black actors at respectable intervals (e.g. Marcus Onilude as Snorti). You might even catch someone who looks East Asian (Anna Leong Brophy as Retcha). From the main cast, you might not notice the diversity that is there.
- Mason Thames (as Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III) seems to be a standard mix of English and Scots-Irish heritage.
- Nico Parker (Astrid Hofferson) is part Zimbabwean through her mother, Thandiwe Newton.
- Gerard Butler (Stoick the Vast) is Scottish.
- Nick Frost (Gobber the Belch) is English.
- Gabriel Howell (Snotlout Jorgensen) is British, but I can’t find more information than that.
- Julian Dennison (Fishlegs Ingerman) is of Māori descent and a member of the Ngāti Hauā iwi tribe.
- Bronwyn James (Ruffnut Thorston) is English.
- Harry Trevaldwyn (Tuffnut Thorston) is English.
Butler voiced Stoick in the original animated feature film.
So there is someone who might be consider Black and another who is a Pacific Islander. What’s wrong is that according to DNA evidence, Vikings weren’t black in the sense of sub-Saharan African, but perhaps black in the sense of Mongolian or Arab. They might be of Spanish heritage (Iberian Peninsula) and the original voice actor for Astrid was America Ferrera whose parents were from Honduras and Ferrera has stated she has Lenca ancestry (indigenous people from southwest Honduras and eastern El Salvador in Central America). It would make sense to include people from indigenous cultures since we know for a long time that they had contact with the Vikings and because of the Sámi, people who might look Mongolian or East Asian. “The Sámi, as well of the Finns, are a very heterogeneous group of people who display a wide range of physical features. While there are some that feature darker Mongoloid-like characteristics, there are others who display very light colored pigments in their skin and hair. ”
Having watched, the anthology series “The Terror” which featured Greenlander Nive Nielsen with Canadian Johnny Issaluk, both of whom are Inuk, I wondered why an effort wasn’t made to cast actors from who were from Greenland, Iceland or Canada with heritage from First Nations or indigenous peoples. I’m also following “Resident Alien” which features actors such as Sarah Podemski (who is part Saulteaux), Justin Rain (Plains Cree), Jewel Staite (part Iroquois). A Canadian series that feature Inuk First Nations actors is “North of North.” The actors are out there and if one is going to substitute people who could pass as Inuk, they could have also included more actors of East Asian descent because of the lovely lady who wore the swan dress to the 2002 Academy Awards: Björk. Björk, now 59, was born in Iceland where the live-action “How to Train Your Dragon” was shot and there have been questions about why she looks East Asian.
Iceland was, along with Northern Ireland (a Belfast studio and Tollymore Forest Park), Faroe Islands and Los Angeles, the filming locations for this movie. DeBlois also directed a documentary about an Icelandic musical group (“Sigur Rós: Heima,” 2007).
From the standpoint of geography and what we currently know about the Vikings, including people who look to be of subSaharan Black descent doesn’t make sense and seems more like pandering or performative diversity casting. There was diversity within the Vikings, but the diversity isn’t always subSaharan African Black.
Of course, the other side of diversity is having two prominent characters who are physically disabled. That’s still in the film and a win.
Overall, I prefer the animated feature despite the lack of diversity in terms of race, but I think the animation of the dragons in the live-action is exceptional. In retrospect, I do see how damaging the perpetuation of the concept of an alpha is, particularly in a cross-species context and how that could potentially have real life consequences.
“How to Train Your Dragon” premiered at CinemaCon on 2 April 2025. It was released in the US on 13 June 2025.
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