Over the past decade, the
How to Train Your Dragon franchise has gone from strength to strength, succeeding is developing not only a worthy movie series, but also a number of TV series spin offs, delivering a not insignificant eight seasons, six of which were commissioned by Netflix.
The franchise has followed Jay Baruchel's Viking, Hiccup, from fledgeling trainee - disobeying his Viking Chief father (Gerard Butler) and brokering an unlikely union between the Vikings and their most feared enemies, dragons, largely through Hiccup's rescuing of broken-tailed super-powerful Night Fury dragon, Toothless - to proving that the Vikings and dragons could work together. Hiccup found love in America Ferrara's tough fellow Viking, Astrid, lost his father, and found his long-lost mother (Cate Blanchett), also finding himself promoted to Viking Chief of the bustling town of Berk, home now not only to the Vikings but also the diverse dragons that they ride.
After successfully mounting his latest rescue mission against a group of dragon-hunters who had dozens of the beasts in captivity, Hiccup's dragon Toothless gains the attention of F. Murray Abraham's Grimmel, a scheming dragon-hunter who is surprised to learn of the continued existence of another Night Fury, having personally set about wiping out the dragon species. When Grimmel sets a trap - using a female Fury he has in captivity to gain Toothless' attention - a series of events is set in motion that leads to Hiccup having to make some tough decisions about the future of not only his relationship with his beloved dragon, but also of the entire town of Berk.
Although it does not tread the line between adult interest and child enjoyment quite as well as Pixar, it provides a more stable marriage of the two than any other non-Pixar franchise
Franchise helmer, writer/director Dean DeBlois returns to provide this conclusion, assisted in the background by DreamWorks co-founder Spielberg himself, with franchise composer John Powell also once again in the fold, and all of the key cast members intact. They deliver a suitably visually stunning effort, with some utterly spectacular sequences, and plenty of child-friendly threat injected into the action-packed narrative; although it does not tread the line between adult interest and child enjoyment quite as well as Pixar, it provides a more
stable marriage of the two than any other non-Pixar franchise (c.f. Illumination's
Despicable Me films).
The Hidden World may not travel far beyond the realms of relatively safe children's animation formula, but it does enjoy exploring those realms nonetheless, trading in a certain
Thor-like formula to its structure not just as a film, but as a franchise, with a Viking-like rebel forced to prove his worth in order to take his rightful place as the leader of his people, finding love, losing one parent, whilst going searching for another one, and ultimately faced with having to uproot and relocate his entire Kingdom when a new threat arrives to destroy it. The
Dragon series has done its best in staying true to its core coming-of-age focus on the main character of Hiccup, and
The Hidden World may not exactly push the boundaries, but it does follow through with a fitting finale for this long-running character (although if they really wanted to do a
Toy Story 4, they'd likely find a way, and there's plenty of room for prequel Netflix series like before).