The Greatest Animated Film of Our Time - How to Train Your Dragon

Hey everyone! If you like seeing me from 3 years ago dissecting film, come see how I execute my knowledge with my newest short film found here: https://youtu.be/E97N0ktR0AQ

Fun fact! The scene where Toothless hesitates for a second before putting his nose against Hiccup's hand was actually an animation glitch! But it fit so well for the moment that they left it in! :D

"Hiccup doesn't look like Cpt America or Thor" well he looks like Cpt America before the super soldier serum.

One thing that really stands out to me about this movie is that the weather isn't perfect. It doesn't have perfect sunlight for most of it and then rain on sad moments like other movies. Most the time it is foggy, damp, grey or dark, and it doesn't change specifically for certain points of the plot.

One of my favorite underrated moments of animation is after Stoic yells at Hiccup and tells him that he has no son, and when he leaves that room there is a look of shock and sadness on his face as he contemplates what he just said to his own son. It’s so brief and so beautiful. And, of course, the animation is perfection, and the music is grand and great. The flight scenes are so well shot, so fantastically lit, so lovingly scored, that they lift my spirits and give me goosebumps. Seriously, Social Network got the Oscar for best original score and not this?

I love this trilogy but I also love the series especially Dragons:Race to the Edge

My favorite in HTTYD is the CHARACTER DESIGN and the MOVEMENTS. Toothless's movements are absolutely incredible, it reminds me of a cat. His proportions are beautiful and so fluid. The way the dragons move is one of my favorites.

Underrated scene that goes overlooked constantly is Gobber and Stoic’s conversation in the big dining hall. Gobber’s character is at it’s absolute purest with both his goofy and grounded nature coexisting beautifully, and Stoic is showing is inner conflict with his disappointment in Hiccup as well as his concern for him. If you ask me, it is one of the best scenes in the movie because it encapsulates everything about the perspective those two have on Hiccup.

Forbidden Friendship has always been the most iconic piece in the score for me... It just blows me away every time. And when you get to the end when Hiccup discovers his leg is gone and wakes up, and that same theme reprises... I swear it almost makes me cry every time. That's some powerful music. This film's score has been a favorite every since I first saw this in the theaters.

I knew the score was going to be the last point... and it still hit like a freight train. John Powell created a masterpiece that will forever remain as one of the best to ever exist

I love HTTYD and it's my favorite animated movie as well. My friends however, just see it as a kids movie and nobody wanted to go with me to the 3rd movie. But those same friends all went to see Toy Story 4 with me. Talk about some double standards.

It's an adaptation that doesn't follow the original story but is full of love and passion for the source material. Too many directors adapt something without capturing what made the original source so special and so popular. It's amazing what DreamWorks accomplished!

During test drive, there are 2 main themes for the majority of the scene. Hiccups theme with strings and more of an orchestra, and toothless's theme with more horns and brass. They alternate when one character is in more control then the other but at the end when they are perfectly in sync, the themes combine beautifully to make the main chorus of the entire movie and I get goose bumps every time I hear it.

I usually don‘t have this connection with music. Like, I listen to music, but the songs never really stick with me. Except for a couple ones. Every once in a while I hear a song that just makes something inside me swirl and fills me with so much emotion and just genuinely happy. And when I heard that one moment in ‚Test Drive‘ (I think you know wich one I‘m talking about) I was in tears. It was so much at once and I can‘t really explain it, but… It just means so much to me. This music…

I know it's been pointed out so many times but I feel one of the strengths of the film is that Toothless is lot like Stitch: both appearance-wise and demeanor-wise. He has features that perfectly balance cute, badass and even a bit scary. And it works for his role: he's eerie enough to be unsettling when we first see him and he's still hesitant and unfamiliar, he's cute enough for the audience to share Hiccup's closer affection as they bond, and cool enough to look absolutely badass when he and Hiccup finally throw down against the Red Death. He is so many things at once and he can show very different sides of himself at different times: all without any dialogue or even the capacity to talk. Also it's actually kind of charming how the different dragon species aren't conventionally cute: many of them are objectively hideous-looking and rather scary with their spikes and frills and very gnarly teeth. And yet, they manage to be very endearing and expressive once we see the softer side to them.

The flight animation of the dragons is so utterly realistic, and thats the major thing that stands out to me in this movie. The animators supposedly had to study physics with birds and airplanes. The detail in this movie never disappoints.

What I like the most about the story is how Hiccups is the hero, because hes emotional sensitive, insightful and creative and totally breaks with the gender role of the strong male viking (kind of like Wickie). And then he gets his "stubborn" but caring dad to trust him and change while you can really feel the struggle of his dad being inbetween change, admitting he was wrong and his urge to defend and care for Hiccups.

This trilogy is phenomenal. The details here are so absurd, whenever hiccup makes toothless a new equipment, toothless gushes to hiccup's intelligence, and vice versa.

I will never get enough of HTTYD video essays, mostly because there will never be enough words to accurately describe how amazing this film is and what it did for those that grew up with it.

Another detail I didn’t realize until I got older is that Toothless grabbed hiccups leg with his mouth to save him. The movie started with hiccup shooting Toothless’ tail. It’s so beautiful