Sunday, June 29, 2014

How To Train Your Dragon 2

The other night I went to the cinema to see the sequel to one of my favourite animated films of recent years, Dreamworks' How To Train Your Dragon – a film I rate amongst my all-time favourite animated movies, alongside The Incredibles; Monsters, Inc.; Despicable Me and Up1. The combination of great story, excellent animation, humour and a superb cast – Jay Baruchel in particular as Hiccup2 – actually took me by surprise; I was not expecting it to be as good as it was.

While I'm certainly aware of the tendencies of the vast majority of sequels to be disappointing – and no small number to be truly dreadful; check out my blog post on the topic here - I remained optimistic that this would be one of the (rare) good ones.

Sadly, I was wrong. It's not something I can describe without major spoilers – beyond noting that the problems are almost entirely plot-related; everything else about the film is as good as or better than the first – so if you don't want to have key plot twists revealed, stop reading now.