The Viking island of Berk is perpetually harried by various dragons who steal the livestock and burn down the dwellings. Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) is the hopeless son of the the chief of the vikings (Gerard Butler) - he's small and no good at fighting. He is however, an excellent engineer and manufactures a sort of slingshot which injures a Deadly Nightshade dragon. Hiccup soon discovers that dragons are in fact poorly misunderstood creatures and he tries to stop his village from killing more of these cuties.
I don't really have much to say about HTTYD. It was an excellently animated, inoffensive kiddie movie about how things aren't always as they seem. Actually, I would like to say that one of the notable things about the movie was the lack of in-jokes for adult viewers. This is not necessarily a bad thing - it concentrates entirely on the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless (the dragon), and how he slowly comes to be accepted by the village.
As is to be expected from animated films nowadays, the visuals are amazing - even though I watched it in 2D, I can imagine watching it in 3D must be awesome. But the real charm in the animation is how it uses it to develop the personalities of the different dragons, particularly Toothless. Whoever decided to use cats eyes as a model to track emotions was a genius! Likewise, the voice acting is well done from all involved. If I had to criticise, I'd say it suffers from a case of the Ratatouilles whereby some characters (the adults) speak with a Scots accent, while other characters (the kids) speak with American accents. Maybe it was a just a ploy at denote different generations but it's weird nonetheless.
Cute and inoffensively enjoyable.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment