Review 497: How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World is a visually stunning, emotionally resonant animated film, one that caps off DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon Trilogy in spectacularly poignant fashion.

Now chief and ruler of Berk alongside Astrid (America Ferrera), Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) has created a gloriously chaotic utopia for Dragons and Vikings alike. When the sudden appearance of a female Light Fury coincides with the darkest threat their village has ever faced, Hiccup and Toothless must leave the only home they've known and journey to a hidden world thought only to exist in myth. As their truce destines are revealed, dragon and rider will fight together - to the very ends of the Earth - to protect everything they've grown to treasure.

The plot is fantastic! At its core is simple but important and inspiring message about how just because things have been a certain way it doesn't mean that's how it has to be and just because you aren't like everyone else doesn't mean that you don't have something to offer.
In this film Hiccup and his friends fully grow into adulthood

Returning writer/director Dean DeBlois' direction is excellent, the animation is gorgeous, the scenery is breathtaking, the action scenes are exciting, pulse pounding and packed with terrific moments of humour, the production design is marvellous (the titular "Hidden World" is truly a feast for eyes that's alive with texture and detail), the character design is astonishingly creative, the score by John Powell is beautiful, it's terrifically paced allowing time for some truly fast paced action scenes but also allowing room for some attention grabbing but also quiet character moments and the effect of the closing sequence is just as touching as it is breathtaking.

By part 3, Hiccup is spinning plates, trying to fulfil his role as chief, a potential husband to Astrid, a good owner to Toothless as well as contend with the arrival of a white fury. But of course the Big Elephant in the room is the fact that they've worked so hard to bring Dragons to Berk and live alongside the Vikings and is this actually whats best for them?

Cate Blanchett, once again, provides in the role of Valka, Hiccup's mother and once

F. Murray Abraham is fantastically menacing as the villain, Grimmel, an infamous and treacherous dragon hunter who is responsible for the near-extinction of the Night Furies.

Gerarld Butler also returns as Hiccup's father Stoick the Vast in flashbacks. The influence of Stoick on Hiccup is very much prevalent throughout the film. Hiccup is very much becoming his father in a lot of ways. His own version of his father. He's inherited the mantle of chief and with that comes the fact that sometime he has to make hard and tough decisions regarding the future of Berk. Without Stoick's voice, Hiccup would just crumble.

DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon trilogy will probably go down in film history as one of the all time great animated film trilogies, 5/5.

The Anonymous Critic.