How to Train Your Dragon (2025): A Beautiful Story Undone by Live-Action Growing Pains

I love fantasy. Whether it’s The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Willow, or anything else, I just eat these films up. The way I see it, this genre feeds into our innate desire for something more than this earthly life, so of course I’ve been interested in the new live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon. Surprisingly though, I’ve never seen the original animated version, and I didn't watch it to prepare for the remake. I wanted to go into this movie with a fresh set of eyes so I could evaluate it on its own merits, and I figured I’d have plenty of time to compare it to the beloved original in the weeks to come.

How to Train Your Dragon was written and directed by Dean DeBlois, and it stars Mason Thames, Gerard Butler, Nico Parker, Nick Frost, Julian Dennison, Gabriel Howell, Bronwyn James, Harry Trevaldwyn, Ruth Codd, Peter Serafinowicz, and Murray McArthur. In the film, Hiccup is a Viking teenager whose tribe deals with a very unique problem: dragons.

These fire-breathing lizards have been their mortal enemies for generations, but that begins to change when Hiccup meets an injured dragon named Toothless. The two quickly become friends, and their unprecedented relationship eventually reveals a hidden truth that transforms Hiccup’s people forever.

On a pure story level, I quite enjoyed How to Train Your Dragon. This movie is a beautiful allegory for the value of forgiveness and reconciliation and the dangers of returning violence for violence, and it also reminds us that our dominion over nature has its limits. Hiccup’s people are obsessed with killing dragons any time they see one, but as the film teaches us, they’re wrong to treat these animals so harshly. Humans are stewards of God’s creation, not its absolute lords and masters, so we can’t simply run roughshod over the natural world.

But as I’ve said before, a good story is only half the battle. A movie also has to tell its story in an engaging way, and on that count, How to Train Your Dragon is a very mixed bag. On the one hand, the dragons in this world are amazing. They’re brought to life with gorgeously photorealistic CGI, so fantasy aficionados are going to love every second of these fanciful creatures’ screen time.

In particular, Toothless is one of the best dragons I’ve ever met in any medium. Not only is this firebreather totally adorable, but he’s also very clearly modeled on my favorite domestic animals–cats. For instance, he has feline facial features, he lies down like a cat, and he even chases reflected light the way cats chase laser pointers. He brought back memories of my cat that passed away a few months ago, so I could’ve watched an entire film of just Toothless going about his daily life in the wild.

On the flip side, several of the human characters in How to Train Your Dragon have the kind of ridiculous, over-the-top personalities you’d typically expect from animation, and if you ask me, they just don’t work here. To take the most tangible example, there’s a Viking named Gobber who trains young dragon hunters, and his approach involves little more than throwing teenagers in with live dragons and hoping they figure it out. I don’t know about you, but I think that sort of absurdly unrealistic behavior just feels preposterous in live action, so any time Gobber practiced his craft on screen, I simply couldn’t take him or his students seriously.

Your mileage may vary, but for me, the animated feel of those characters ruined the entire experience, and that’s a real shame. Like I said before, the story of How to Train Your Dragon is actually quite good, and when the characters’ inanity takes a backseat, that story is allowed to shine. In fact, the big third-act battle closes the film on an unexpectedly high note, so I actually walked out of the theater pretty happy.

But a movie is three acts, not just one, so despite a great ending, the bad in How to Train Your Dragon still ultimately outweighs the good. The best thing I can say about this film is that it made me excited to finally give the original version a watch, and if these characters work as well in animation as I suspect they will, I don’t think I’ll ever want to revisit this live-action remake.