[7]

This sequel taps into two powerful currents of audience identification: the love between parents and children, and the love between people and animals. You can approach these with cloying calculation, as many family films do, or you can attack them with a level of sincerity that makes you forget they take root in our deepest, mythic past. Both How to Train Your Dragon movies take the later route and are well worth a gander.

In this sequel, adapted and directed by returning writer/director Dean DeBlois, the adolescent viking Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) and his pet dragon, Toothless, discover both a powerful force for good and a powerful force for evil — and they get caught right between the two in a climactic battle that threatens to destroy the peaceful existence shared by humans and dragons. The force for good turns out to be Hiccup’s own mother (voiced by Cate Blanchett). She was presumed dead after a dragon attack when Hiccup was just a baby, but she’s actually been spending all these years rescuing and protecting dragons in a paradise-like sanctuary. The force for evil is a man named Drago (Djimoun Hounsou) who is using a titanic alpha-dragon to mesmerize all other dragons into submission so that Drago can control them and turn them into an army.

I love it when a family film goes dark. In How to Train Your Dragon 2, the titan dragon succeeds in mesmerizing dear beloved Toothless and using him as a weapon against Hiccup and his family (definite shades of The Iron Giant here). The fallout is devastating because it threatens both those forms of love I mentioned earlier, altering one of them forever. But in poetic counterpoint, that devastation is later matched by an equally furious act of love and retaliation against the forces of evil.  I cried both times.

Story and character are the strength of the How to Train Your Dragon movies, but the character animation and action choreography are also remarkable.  John Powell’s epic and emotional score is icing on the cake.

With the voices of Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, America Ferrera, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Kristen Wiig, and Kit Harington (Game of Thrones).

Oscar Nomination: Best Animated Feature Film

A boy and his dragon both come of age.