How to Train Your Dragon Reviews
Top CriticIt's a Harry Potter-meets-Avatar adventure that should delight most children and adults.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Technically proficient and featuring a witty, intelligent, surprisingly insightful script, How to Train Your Dragon comes close to the level of Pixar's recent output while easily exceeding the juvenilia Dreamworks has released in the last nine years.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The visuals are striking, the script sharp and well paced and it all wraps up with a breathtaking aerial battle sequence.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
This dog can hunt. On the ground. Way-way up in the air. Swimming through clouds breathing fire. Imagine Old Yeller on a hundred pep pills.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
How to Train Your Dragon uses its whiz-bang technology to amplify feelings as well as dimension and scale. The big optical wow is only the half of it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The 3-D throughout How to Train Your Dragon is perhaps the best match with animation yet -- exhilarating when it's supposed to be, yet integrated into the film rather than seemingly pasted on.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
One of the pleasures in this wise, emotionally bold PG ride is there's nary a wink, nudge or nod to popular culture.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Tenderness, beauty and exhilaration are the movie's great strengths.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The film truly starts to soar when Hiccup takes his first ride on Toothless.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
What gives [this] story emotional heft has to do with a different kind of dimension: a depth of feeling surrounding the Black Stallion-style bonding of boy and beast.
Full Review
| Original Score: 8/10
At a time when Hollywood seems to be releasing everything this side of Dead Sea Scrolls documentaries in 3-D, How to Train Your Dragon is a briskly paced computer-animated entertainment that uses the format to maximum effect, the way Avatar does.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The one interesting aspect of the movie, apart from the design, is that it puts so much effort into projecting a moral, such as it is.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
With its messages about acceptance, respect and tolerance, How To Train Your Dragon also brings some lessons of its own, including some valuable tools for doing battle with dragons, should the need arise.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
It all adds up to a pleasant adventure, and one that doesn't insult parents or children. Lucky kids will find someone to take them this weekend. Even luckier adults will find someone to take.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a thrilling action-adventure saga with exhilarating 3-D animation, a clever comedy with witty dialogue, a coming-of-age tale with surprising depth and a sweetly poignant tale of friendship between man and animal.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Though the dragons are cool in their various forms and the battle scenes are epic and exciting, watching two former foes become friends is what really makes the story fly.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
There are times the action lags, and when the dialogue falls back on pop cultural references it feels contrived and forced but, mostly, like the mythical creatures at the heart of this tale, the movie soars.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
[It] The notion of having a pet dragon -- just like a pet whale, or a pet lion -- is a scenario that should appeal to children of all ages.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Baruchel, Ferguson and Butler supply a contagious sense of eccentricity that spreads to the supporting cast, especially the Viking teens played by America Ferrera and Jonah Hill.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Codirectors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders understand more about visualizing the joy of flight than James Cameron ever will.
How to Train Your Dragon doesn't have the depth and resonance of a classic, but the picture's modesty is refreshing,and its artistry is awe-inspiring (the lighting and cinematography are particularly impressive).
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
In steering a course between the rock of rude humor and the hard place of perilous drama, How to Train Your Dragon flies high.
The superb cinematographer Roger Deakins served as a visual consultant, pushing the palette to an unusually burnished and sophisticated level. Kids may not notice the visual texture consciously, but adults will. Or should.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It devotes a great deal of time to aerial battles between tamed dragons and evil ones, and not much to character or story development. But it's bright, good-looking and has high energy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Honestly, it would take several more dimensions to craft something special out of this adequate but unremarkable animated tale.
Directors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, working from a script based on Cressida Cowell's books, should be credited for the way they develop the friendship between Hiccup and Toothless.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
It's more coming-of-age dramedy or "everything about your world view is wrong" message movie than it is a comedy. And that seems like a waste of a funny book, some very funny actors and some darned witty animation.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Embedded among the standard platitudes of parental tolerance and teens finding their own way, is the notion that we should try to understand our 'enemies' instead of engaging them in perpetual, passed-through-generations warfare.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
With How to Train Your Dragon, the filmmakers tone down the glib factor and tell a pretty good action yarn, a boy-and-his-dragon story filled with fiery Viking battles, swordplay and dazzling aerial imagery aboard the flying reptiles.
Kid stuff? Maybe. But How to Train Your Dragon, from the book by Cressida Cowell, works enough miracles of 3-D animation to charm your socks off.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A lively though disjointed 3D cartoon that never quite entices an audience to invest emotionally in its fantasy world.
A thrilling drama interspersed with amusing comedic elements (rather than the other way around).
It has winningly Potteresque teen-dragon-slayer classes, a queen-bee dragon as grand as Godzilla, and a layer of age-of-terror allegory about the ignorance bred by jingoism.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
