How to Train Your Dragon and live-action remakes.

The question is why. It always is with remakes, especially ones that go from animation to live-action: why are we retelling this story? Has our new technology allowed us to approach these characters from a new angle, a fresh perspective that must be told? Does making the cast real people change how easy it is to connect? Are there changes in the larger culture that mean the original narrative has taken on a different meaning, and so a remake can reassess what it can mean going forward? Is it to introduce a whole new generation to a story they would be unable to comprehend if they watched the older version? The answer is always, in every single case so far, no. And in every case prior to this new How to Train Your Dragon live-action, an animated movie barely fifteen years old, that’s an answer that would’ve irked me, sent me into a tirade about the sorry state of modern Hollywood, about the incuriosity of the modern consumer, and about our childish need to retreat into stories we already know, in the hope that we can escape into them as we used to. Only halfway into this story about a boy and his silly little dragon did I realise something - they’ve got me by the balls.

It was precisely the moment when Hiccup, the quiet, mousey boy from Berk, puts his hand out to touch Toothless, a Nightfury with a defect tail wing, and Dean DeBlois and co. recreate the famous glitch in live action, where Toothless pushes in, holds, then touches Hiccup’s hand, that I realised the answers to those questions earlier didn’t even register. Nor did the fact that this was a childhood classic now in live-action, really. The beauty, if you can call it that, of these live-action remakes is that, at their very infrequent best, they’re never as good as the originals: it’s impossible to be when all they’re doing is swapping one medium for another, but they do capture the broadest feelings of the original movies. Specifics aside, and already noting it's an inferior product and work of art, watching a boy fight against tradition, and his chieftain father, all for his cute dog that drools everywhere, will hit the same rough spot. That’s where this new How to Train Your Dragon succeeds where others have failed. Dean DeBlois skirts the ‘soulless’ allegations by, well, making the same movie again.

Other remakes want to have their cake and eat it too: they want to have those nostalgic moments that take you back, and brand-new stuff to get with the times. And when those two sides merge, something weird begins to happen. Some strange, uncanny valley feeling, where the characters on the screen look, move, and sort of feel like that other movie that you really like, but there’s something different, something off, and that extends to the whole narrative. Beats repeat, motions and lines of dialogue that have been playing in your head for decades, and it’s not the same, and that’s odd, isn’t it? It’s where the claims of ‘soullessness’ flung at every live-action remake come from, because so many of the movies treat their characters like mannequins with a pre-established way to do everything, and so come off so insanely structured and stiff that there’s no humanity anymore. We’re just watching a corporation toy with our nostalgia like a bean bag in front of our eyes.

Thankfully, we’ve got a great example of that very recently – the Lilo and Stitch live-action remake. How different the two films, originally both made by Dean DeBlois, feel when adapted into live action. Lilo feels like it’s wearing the skin of the older movie over itself, like some freak Frankenstein monster, while making a movie that directly goes against the message of the first one. It has all of the cute moments: Elvis Stitch, Nani and Lilo fighting, Pleakley and Jumba, though, as you’d expect, they’re fractions of their former selves, reduced to no more than an idea, a noise and a movement, their characters essentially fully sucked out. There is nothing there.

All this to say: How to Train Your Dragon probably isn’t a good movie, but I liked it. The changes they make, adding an extra half an hour to build out the world, aren’t necessary. The additions with Snotlout, trying to make him an actual character beyond comedic relief (which sadly also doesn’t work, though that’s also an issue with the original), are laughably thin. The dragon designs, changed from massive and cartoony to photorealistic, are in every way a downgrade. The list could continue, on and on and on. Yet, this works because of the strength of this story and DeBlois’s ability to stick to its core tenets and realise what made the original so great.

Should you watch it over the animated version? Fuck no.