When I discovered cinema, my first dreams were of making my mark on franchises I loved. Then, I grew and learned how to harness my creativity to dream my own dreams. This is the key difference between the passive imaginer, a thing all people are, and an active amateur or professional artist, and it’s why audiences keep showing up to soulless live-action remakes of beloved animated films. The instinct to look at a drawing and imagine what it looks like in real-life is the base human act that drives all dreams: the imaginative realization of abstractions.
Mason Thames (right) as Hiccup with his Night Fury dragon, Toothless in Universal Pictures’ live-action HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, written and directed by Dean DeBlois. Photo Credit: Universal Pictures. © 2025 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
It is something we are all born with, some of us exercise, and most of us abandon when pressured with economic survival or cultural integration. This is why the American child is so welcoming to animation, and why so many adults see all animation as “cartoons for children.” Are all drawings inherently childish? Or do they only become childish when they move at 24 frames a second? When you add color? Or have you just abandoned yourself to a lie of maturity? From the thunderous applause that the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon (2010) received at the combined fan-critic screening this past week, one can only conclude that most of us have done the latter.
“No more of this.”
“You just gestured to all me.”
How to Train Your Dragon (2025) is one of the strangest films to ever be released by a Hollywood studio, and most likely embraced by American audiences. It is a nearly shot-for-shot remake of a beloved animated film, inferior in every single way, but directed by one of the first film’s original directors. It is both an inept studio programming attempt to recapture what was once a profitable strategy (Disney’s animated film re-releases from the 1960s to 2010s) and answer a growing question with the 3D animated films of the last two decades — should they be remastered? The original How to Train Your Dragon was a landmark in 3D animation visually guided by master cinematographer Roger Deakins (1917; Fargo) in the development of lens and light simulation. Yet, the texturing and light rendering of the film cause the sculpting and action to look outdated and at times grotesque. Not as bad as say, Toy Story (1995), a film that should be re-released every summer in theaters, but out of step with modern aesthetic taste all the same. This new film is almost entirely created in 3D animation software as well, inserting human actors into a not-quite photorealistic digital world.
L-R: Snotlout (Gabriel Howell), Tuffnut (Harry Trevaldwyn), Astrid (Nico Parker), Ruffntut (Bronwyn James), Fishlegs (Julian Dennison) and Gobber (Nick Frost) in Universal Pictures’ live-action HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, written and directed by Dean DeBlois. Photo Credit: Universal Pictures. © 2025 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
The director, Dean DeBlois (Lilo & Stitch (2002); How to Train Your Dragon (2010)) has essentially remastered his film with new actors, placing it in dialogue with Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998) and the only other “remaster” of a mostly-animated film, Avatar (2009) 4K edition. This film is also opening against Lilo & Stitch (2025), a live-action remake of one of his other films, which has angered fans everywhere, but not enough to stop it from conquering the box office. This is all to say, the direction of the film is insanely daring and insanely poor as a gaggle of actors young and old are given the task of replicating animated performances so closely that you might as well be watching a cosplayer on TikTok over-act to the dialogue.
L-R: Astrid (Nico Parker), Hiccup (Mason Thames), and Deadly Nadder in Universal Pictures’ live-action HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, written and directed by Dean DeBlois. Photo Credit: Universal Pictures. © 2025 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Animation is often more alive than real life. Ghibli master Hayao Miyazaki (The Boy and the Heron; Spirited Away) famously referred to the living stillness that animators use to evoke life by the Japanese word “ma,” meaning emptiness. More than a moment in a script, the way every animator, hand-drawn or rigged, has their art hold itself in a state of being is unique. So, too, with their accentuated motion, or a voice actor’s rhythm. This is why seeing the modern trend of having actors portray their cartoon counterparts in shared universes, Captain Carter appearing in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) or Cad Bane in The Book of Boba Fett (2021), feel not uncanny, but strange in a different way, like a new personality is driving your friend’s body and they walk wrong. How to Train Your Dragon is a feature-length orgy of this strategy.
“Remember. That thing is their queen. They’re inclined to do whatever it says. We have to help them fight back.
Mason Thames (Incoming), a low-energy actor who turned out a very good performance in The Black Phone (2021) just a few years ago, is forced to try and compete with Jay Baruchel (How to Train Your Dragon (2010); Almost Famous), who gave one of the most dynamic voice performances of the last 20 years in the animated trilogy. Dialogue has rhythm to it, and all of this dialogue was adjusted for Baruchel before Thames was forced to put out this lackluster cover album. It just doesn’t work, nor does the abysmal replacement of Craig Ferguson’s (How to Train Your Dragon (2010); Brave) Gobber with Nick Frost’s (Hot Fuzz; Shaun of the Dead). In fact, the only good performance is by Nico Parker (Dumbo (2019); Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy) as Astrid, the very same actress whose casting racist “fans” “protested.” An absolute loser dork can rise to the occasion to train dragons and solve a multi-generational colonialist-othering conflict, but god forbid a Black girl be there.
L-R: Gerard Butler as Stoick the Vast and Mason Thames as Hiccup in Universal Pictures’ live-action HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, written and directed by Dean DeBlois. Photo Credit: Helen Sloan. © 2025 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Even the novelty of seeing this fantasy world rendered real is strange as some wood is weathered real, and other like the Nerf version of a cartoon prop. The costumes cannot take your breath away as they were originally designed for animated caricatures of our heroes, and now they drape across real bodies. There are but two good shots in the film, one of Hiccup in silhouette, preparing to challenge his village’s tradition of colonial genocide, and one in the still-powerful flight sequence in which a real island is finally allowed to appear onscreen. It is that aforementioned tradition of hunting and killing these intelligent dragons that the film, barely, tries to elevate in the modulation of the editing and poor acting. The message of the film feels more urgently given as Hiccup has a conversation with his father which much of Gen-Z has been having for more than a year now, but not enough to move any measure of the film’s quality.
“They killed hundreds of us!”
“And we killed thousands of them!”
It is easy, perhaps, to consider the music or flight sequence in IMAX worth the price of admission, or that at least the children have something they can watch in theaters, but once-upon-a-time, classic children’s animated films were re-released in theaters so that parents could share their favorite films with their children on the big screen for almost no cost to the studio, allowing them a revenue source that underwrote new films for all audiences, children included. Today, we spend tens of millions of dollars to gain in the gross what was once gained in the net so that shareholders can be tricked into thinking that studio executives work for a living. And this weekend, parents around the world will applaud them for it.
In theaters June 13th, 2025.
For more information, head to the official Universal Pictures How to Train Your Dragon website.
Final Score: 1.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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