This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Do you hear that snapping sound Pixar? It’s films like How to Train Your Dragon nipping at your heels. The latest animated entry from Dreamworks is a lavish, thrilling, emotionally resonant film that, when combined with last year’s Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Dreamworks’ own Kung Fu Panda, represents what may be the other animated studios finally waking up to the gauntlet Pixar threw down more than 15 years ago.

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III (a perfectly suited Jay Baruchel) is a Viking teenager of no particular repute. Unlike his father, Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler—in this movie, the Vikings speak in a thick, Scottish brogue), and the rest of his tribe’s heroic dragon slayers, Hiccup would rather tinker around in the blacksmith’s shop than pick up a sword. His father, the village chieftain, respects only brute strength and battle-tested bravery, traits his son does not have. Hiccup wants to distinguish himself, but try as he might, he’s just not a killer, or the hero his father expects him to be. All that changes the day Hiccup finds a wounded dragon named Toothless in the forest. The boy sets about winning the dragon’s trust, nursing it back to health and finally becoming its friend. Hiccup soon realizes that everything he was brought up to believe about dragons is wrong. But can he convince his fellow Vikings to see the world from an entirely different point of view before it’s too late for Toothless and the rest of his kind?

Loosely based on the book by Cressida Cowell, How to Train Your Dragon is not just a stupendous children’s film, it is every bit as dramatically engaging as a live-action film for adults. It wonderfully captures a mythological time and place and pours into that creative caldron a towering sense of adventure and an indubitable jubilation so rare in modern cinema. This film is, quite simply, a joy. How to Train Your Dragon is chalk full of blissfully thrilling sequences culminating in a climactic showdown that proves the film’s visuals are more than a match for its incandescent imagination.

The animation is also a wonder to behold. Not interested in navigating the pitfalls of the “uncanny valley” (the industry term for animating photo-realistic human characters), How to Train Your Dragon chooses instead to paint in cartoon caricatures, both for the humans and especially its comically portrayed dragons. But atop these caricatures it overlays some of the most realistic skin tones and hair textures yet seen, and reserves its most pragmatic eye for the forested terrain, frothing sea, and sun-dappled clouds. Unfortunately, I was not able to see How to Train Your Dragon in 3D, a lost opportunity I intend to remedy. Despite the glut of 3D films arriving at a theater near you, I find most are clamoring after the technology gratuitously. Not so here. When Hiccup learns to fly on Toothless’ back, the airborne sequences are at least as good, as if not better, than those captured in Avatar. These scenes not only cry out for 3D projection, I’m sure they would induce waves of euphoria (or nausea) if migrated to an IMAX screen.

Pixar films work on a different level as How to Train Your Dragon. They are largely cerebral (though no less supercharged with gleeful escapism), whereas Dragon is a more primal, more visceral experience. To be precise, Dreamworks and Sony’s more recent animated films, while light years beyond their earlier timid, stillborn entries, still lag behind Pixar’s plumbless depth, nuance and holistic composition. But How to Train Your Dragon marks an exponential step forward in that department. There are real and meaningful social messages here rather than just pandering subtext, not just about the dangers of thoughtless intolerance and the refusal to accept “the other” among us, but also, in a startling and admirable last act development, how debilitating physical handicaps in no way ground the indomitable human spirit.

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by: Chris Sanders, Dean DeBlois
Starring: Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, America Ferrara, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Craig Ferguson, Kristen Wiig, T.J. Miller
Rated PG for sequences of intense action and some scary images, and brief mild language.
Running time: 98 minutes