One of the disadvantages of advanced age is that the past is increasingly telescoped, and when it came to my attention that DreamWorks had made a semi-live version of its animated hit How to Train Your Dragon, I immediately thought, “Didn’t the original just come out a few years ago?”, only to soon discover it was released in 2010. Not sure if 15 years justifies a new version that is, story-wise and, from what I dimly remember, visually almost exactly the same except that maybe a new generation of kids is ripe for something like this—if they didn’t actually see any of the sequels, the most recent of which came out in 2019. What I also remember is that the original Dragon, dreamt up by the guys who created Lilo & Stitch for Disney, was as close as DreamWorks got at the time to Pixar’s potent mix of character self-actualization and viable humor, but only by a stretch. It’s still closer in feeling to Shrek.

To recap for those who live on a remote island like the characters in the story, a colony of Vikings is constantly terrorized by dragons who swoop out of the sky and kill their cattle and burn their houses, so over the centuries a dragon-hunting culture has evolved. The leader, Stoick (Gerard Butler, who voiced the same character in the original), is a dyed-in-the-wool dragon hater who hopes his adolescent son, Hiccup (Mason Thames), takes up his mantle, but Hiccup is a bit of a wuss, and while bumbling through his dragon-slaying lessons he happens upon a wounded lizard he nurses back to health and names Toothless. Of course, you see where this is going and it ends up exactly where you’d expect it to end up. The director, Dean DeBlois, slightly skews his interpolation of Hiccup’s romantic interest, Astrid (Nico Parker), who is the total opposite of Hiccup—a kickass dragon killer in the making who has to have her mind blown in order to understand why dragons have been harrassing the islanders for centuries and that they shouldn’t be slaughtered. 

The fact that everyone puts their all into this cash grab gives it more heart than it probably deserves, and because CGI has improved by leaps and bounds in the years since the original came out, in a way it’s an improvement. After all, you come for this kind of fantasy to be viscerally impressed, and the dragons are not only ridiculously cute, but pretty lifelike. The same can’t be said for the human characters, who are perhaps even more cartoony than the ones in the original.

Opens Sept. 5 in Japanese subtitled and Japanese dubbed versions in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

How to Train Your Dragon home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Universal Pictures