FILM REVIEW How To Train Your Dragon 2

WHAT GREAT BIG TEETH YOU HAVE ?Cate Blanchett is part of the voice cast for ‘How To Train Your Dragon 2’.

Fire, ice and flying dragons


Cinema
Daniel Carey

JOHN Bowman recently devoted part of his Sunday morning radio programme to the Roscommon songwriter and entertainer Percy French, who was born 160 years ago last month. It included French’s parody of the children’s nursery rhyme ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ as Rudyard Kipling might have written it. Here’s a taster:
“Have I wool?” said the Baa Baa Black Sheep. “You may ask me if I have wool? When I yield each year, to the shepherd’s shear, as much as three bags full.”
“Have I wool?” said the Baa Baa Black Sheep. “Go forth to the frozen zone, And my wool they wear, where the polar bear, and the walrus reign alone.”
You get the idea.
A black sheep pops up in a ‘frozen zone’ in the early stages of ‘How To Train Your Dragon 2’, the much-anticipated sequel written and directed by Dean DeBlois. But its fate involves being catapulted into the air as part of a game in which Vikings (riding around on dragons) compete to bag as many sheep as possible. This is a frozen zone where Vikings and dragons have learned to reign together … although the sheep is a long way down the pecking order.
‘How To Train Your Dragon’ was one of the best movies of 2010, and this follow-up has a lot going for it too. Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), who spent the original secretly befriending an injured dragon, has succeeded in integrating the fire-breathers into the island’s way of life, but not everybody in the neighbourhood has such an enlightened view.
Much of the voice cast from the first flick are back on board. Gerard Butler returns as Hiccup’s father (and Viking chief) Stoick the Vast. America Ferrera plays his feisty love interest Astrid. Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Craig Ferguson and Kristen Wiig all play supporting roles, alongside three newcomers – Kit Harington, Cate Blanchett and Dijmon Hounsou (from ‘Blood Diamond’).
After a spectacular start which captures the joy of flight, Hiccup (wrestling with being his father’s heir apparent) and Astrid discover a land of giant green icicles in which they hear tell of a man building a ‘dragon army’. This is a world where failure to fulfil one’s ‘quota’ carries more severe penalties than a reduced grant from the EU.
“I’ll bloody my fist with his face if he tries to take my dragon,” says one Viking, and the scene is set for war with ‘a madman’. Hiccup, playing the Hans Blix role, heads for Baghdad (or its Scandinavian equivalent) to make peace, and meets a woman he’d long assumed was dead. If you’ve seen the trailer, her identity won’t come as a surprise.
The picture is beautifully animated and has some great visuals – swooping dragons, ‘feeding time’, beachside invasions. Drago, the villain, is a cross between Danny DeVito’s Penguin and Bob Marley. We get a Bambi’s mother moment, a Viking funeral, and a modern version dragons who are only following orders.
The storytelling is intelligent, and may well prompt discussion with the kids afterwards – like its predecessor, ‘How To Train Your Dragon 2’ may be a bit much for the really young ones. But a picture that combines excitement with emotional resonance is no bad thing.
That ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ parody finishes with the following lines: “And this is the song of the Black Sheep, and the song of the white sheep too, and they make up this song, as they wander along, and it’s not very hard to do.”
Despite appearances, producing stuff this good – either from Percy French or director DeBlois – is no easy task. Worth checking out.

Rating 8 out of 10