How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

Dean DeBlois’s third film opens on an island out of room for its dragons, and on Toothless meeting a female of his own kind. There is a reason the villain is a stranger. DeBlois first planned to bring Drago Bludvist back: washed ashore after the battle that ended the second film, forced to befriend a territorial dragon to escape, and softened by it. Steven Spielberg told him that bringing dimension to the character was an ambitious and noble notion, but that there was not the screen time to do it convincingly, and that the weight sat in Hiccup and Toothless. Drago went, Grimmel arrived. That is why Grimmel has no history with Hiccup. He is an engine, not a reckoning. Light is where the film spends its care. Roger Deakins consulted across all three films, and DeBlois describes him constantly removing lights, pulling back the candy coloured over lighting that animation falls into. Staging the wordless courtship flight at dawn, so the light shifts while it plays, was Deakins’s idea. The release date moved five times, the push into 2018 following restructuring and layoffs. A good fit if you take the wordless courtship flight, built on light instead of dialogue, as the main event. Not for anyone still waiting on Drago, whose account this film never settles.