I watched How To Train Your Dragon because it has two nominations this year (Best Music, Origianl Score, and Best Animated Feature.) Since Toy Story 3 is a lock for Best Animated Feature, I was mainly tuned in to the musical score to see if it had any chance. If you've seen a lot of movies with me, you'll know I place high value on three things above all: the first is a good screenplay, the second is musical score, and the third is cinematography.
Let's talk a bit about DreamWorks Animations before we go on. Throughout their entire history, they've been completely hit or miss. We've seen everything from them...critical and box office disasters (The Road to El Dorado and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas,) watered-down sell-out sequels (Shrek The Third and Shrek: Forever After,) and works which were critically acclaimed (Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Chicken Run.) Needless to say, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to get with How To Train Your Dragon, seeing as how Aardman Animations wasn't around to bail anyone out this time, so I decided to forego a trip to the theatre to see it and waited almost 11 months from its release to rent it.
It would appear I owe DreamWorks an apology.
What a surprise. I was not expecting anything with a sharp script, dazzling aerial scenes that must have been spectacular in 3D, and a soundtrack which gave me goosebumps and raised the film to a whole different level. Some critics have compared the flying scenes to Avatar and have labelled this film as being "Avatar for simpletons." Could they have spent more time on story and character development? Yes, absolutely. The film didn't find it's center for a long time, but when it did, that center was so good that it's easy to see why critics went crazy for it. What's different is that the dragons themselves are given a level of complexity to the extent that I was drawing comparisons between the main character and the dog whisperer (dragon whisperer, in this case.) This is what sets Dragon apart from Avatar, which was visual glitz and glitter, but emotionally shallow. And if you look at the most difficult things to do in animation, this film had them all: humans, hair, fabric, hair and fabric blowing through the air, hair and fabric underwater...
And, if nothing else, they've pre-empted Brave, which appears to follow similar themes. Recall that Antz was released before A Bug's Life, although the latter eventually pulled ahead in box office receipts.
And wouldn't you know it...DreamWorks intends to drive the film into the ground by making not just one, but two sequels and possibly more, to the same extent that the Shrek, Ice Age, and Madagascar franchises lost all their integrity. For shame, Jeff Katzenberg, for shame.
I'll be back with my Oscar picks at the end of the week...there's still some short film homework which needs to be done.
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