How to Train Your Dragon 2

Dean DeBlois agreed to a second film only on condition that it could become a trilogy, and he built this one as the middle act deliberately. The consequence is concrete for a viewer: the villain is never beaten, he slips away beneath the sea unpunished, and the story stops rather than closes. Valka was originally written as the antagonist. DeBlois dropped that plan because young audiences would be left asking why Hiccup was fighting his own mother. What survives is a reunion that forgives twenty years of absence inside a single scene, and it is the weakest hinge in the picture. The technical change is just as specific. DreamWorks rebuilt its animation tools for this production, so animators stopped typing numeric values and began posing characters with a stylus and tablet, which DeBlois compares to handling a stop-motion puppet. Roger Deakins served as visual consultant, and the flying passages are staged in wide, steady shots instead of chopped-up cutting. Two thirds of the way through these 102 minutes a parent dies, and the film never takes it back. For a viewer who wants a sequel that jumps five years and tests its hero at twenty with adult responsibility. Not for a small child who expects the death to be undone and the villain punished before the credits arrive.