(2010) Borrowing from Astrid: "I admit it. This is pretty cool." My pick for best computer-animated fantasy film of the year - directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DuBlois, who co-wrote the screenplay with Will Davies, adapting Cressida Cowell's book - is a violently funny DreamWorks production with original score by John Powell.

The island of Berk - "It's twelve days north of hopeless and a few degrees south of freezing to death" - where resides young Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel), a scrawny lad with his burly Viking father Stoick the Vast (voiced by Gerard Butler), the village leader, is "located solidly on the meridian of misery."

Apprenticed to Gobber (voiced by Craig Ferguson), the one-legged blacksmith, motherless Hiccup realizes that to have any chance of having fierce, tomboyish Astrid (voiced by America Ferrera) for his girlfriend, he'll have to prove himself worthy to all the beefy villagers wearing horns on their heads: "Killing a dragon is everything around here."

While most dragons are a serious nuisance, one in particular, a Night Fury, a stealth dragon, which no one has ever killed let alone survived to report its description, has caused repeated havoc. With a catapult invention, Hiccup attempts to capture one, resulting in mayhem among his neighbors. "You can't stop him," Gobber says to Stoick about headstrong Hiccup's determination to become a dragon slayer: "You can only prepare him."

Finally acquiescing to his son's ambition - "You'll walk like us, you'll talk like, you'll think like us" - Stoick agrees to Hiccup's participation in training with other youths, including Astrid. But unbeknownst to anyone else, Hiccup after netting his quarry outside of the village (his slingshot device had succeeded after all) discovers he can't bring himself to kill it.

The Night Fury (its big-eyed face has features resembling a cross between a cat and a shark) lies trapped inside a high-walled cove, unable to fly out because of its damaged tail. "A downed dragon is a dead dragon," remarks Gobber, who's in charge of the training school, so Hiccup takes food to the dragon, developing a wary relationship with the reptile, whom he humorously names Toothless, while gaining an understanding of the species' weaknesses and an appreciation of their attributes.

"Everything we know about you guys is wrong," the boy realizes, fashioning a prosthesis for Toothless's caudal appendage. In his training sessions, Hiccup, having become a dragon-whisperer, subdues the various wild things without weapons, amazing Gobber: "He has this way with the beasts."

But suspicious Astrid ("No one gets as good as you do without trying") follows Hiccup to discover his secret. "They've killed hundreds of us!" roars Stoick when he finds out what his son has been doing, to which Hiccup replies: "We've killed thousands of them."

On the way to monstrous mortal combat, as his father leads the tribe in their ships to the dragons' mountain nest, Hiccup, left behind, morosely says to Astrid, "Three hundred years and I'm the first Viking who wouldn't kill a dragon," who offers her consoling amendment: "First to ride one, though."

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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