Response to How to Train Your Dragon 2

I loved this movie and loathed parts of it. My main problem is the same as in the first movie: Hiccup still isn’t capable of being direct when it matters. I seethed at the scenes where he “attempts” to confront willful individuals with some gobbet of extremely important info. Instead of using his great ability to communicate with others, he falls back on tactics he know won’t work. I understand the place of such confrontations in the first movie, because it underscores Hiccup’s great leadership skills and word-smithing while he is developing them.
In How to Train Your Dragon 2, these moments of inability do not benefit Hiccup’s character development, nor that of the strong-willed people he fails to communicate concisely to. Yes, it is part of his character to employ softer words and turns of phrase to actively defuse situations. Yes, it is necessary for him to do so with prickly characters. It is not necessary for the second installment of dragon-training fun to attempt the same development of Hiccup’s character which was already achieved in the first movie.

Now on to the lovely parts: Flight. It is a delight to watch flying things. The writers and animators for this film did superbly in keeping Toothless as the main flying character. He is all that really cool flight needs to be, fast and so graceful. He also sounds so epic! There are other dragons which make the scenes in the air look so fly^^, and I had that shivering/goosebumpely feeling whenever any of the more graceful dragons so much as turned. Envying a fictional character is not new to me, but it still feels odd. I envy Hiccup and Toothless. I wish to gush more about switching this flightless body of mine out for that of a sleek dragon, but the idea is simply this: When I see a bird, plane, or animated dragon, I want to be it, and yearn to dodge clouds and feel as free as they look.

On to a little more critique, including spoilers, so watch the movie, I guess, before reading more 🙂
Hiccup’s mom was introduced as a feared and badass character, who was respected by a huge colony of dragons and their alpha, an ice-spewing and betusked behemoth. She then meets her son, and is relegated to being a worried mother, unable to do anything of consequence for the rest of the movie. She has to be saved by men twice, which would be okay if she had been introduced as a weak and ineffective combatant. As far as I could tell/count, she successfully freed upwards of 50 dragons from Drago Bloodfist before being introduced, but when we actually see her in combat, she is weaker than Hiccup. If she used smarts to win the unseen battles, why didn’t she continue doing so in the battle we saw? If she used brawn, where did that disappear to? I was bummed about that decision for her character.

Her lines seemed to be for the benefit of Hiccup or Stoick. She could have been so much more! 😦 One big peeve came from a smaller peeve: while she hinted at a great wealth of knowledge about dragons, I only experienced a farthing of her purported treasure trove. That was when she released Toothless’ “spinal flaps”, which even he didn’t know he had? Weird. Anyways, there were so many different types dragons which were described in the first movie, wouldn’t a montage of her showing Hiccup about those dragons’ secrets been a fitting mother-son bonding moment? The “flying together and it makes up for her being gone for 20 years” scene was fun for the flying. That was it. Every scene with her and Hiccup made me feel like she needed to really account for her years of absence, and even if Hiccup was okay with her sudden reappearance, at least a mention of his forgiveness for her gross maternal negligence would have been nice. There never was an explicit forgiveness, just a weird unspoken huggy forgiveness. Okay, that bit was more rant than rationality. Hiccup is obviously not the type to hold a grudge, let alone speak about it in a direct manner. I was projecting myself onto Hiccup in this paragraph.

But the movie made up for some iffy character decisions by having gorgeous animation, beautiful scenes of flight, and some really sweet moments between the dragonriders and their dragons. By sweet I mean emotionally moving^^
The same goes for the deep love and friendship the old homeslice-viking Gobber has/had for Stoick, as well as a natural vibe betwixt Hiccup and the coolest viking in the whole village, Astrid. All in all, wicked good time, despite some character issues.

Would watch again, with gusto
-Will