How To Train Your Dragon Analysis

Directed by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, How to Train Your Dragon (2010) tells the story of Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), a small Viking, who overcomes the prejudices against dragons he was raised with after he wounds a Night Fury. Hiccup initially seems dead set on killing his first dragon in order to garner the attention and love he wants from his friends and most importantly his village’s chief and father, Stoick (Gerard Butler.) However, upon wounding a dragon and being confronted with the choice to kill or not, Hiccup realizes that dragons are just as “human” as he is. Soon after this realization, Hiccup is put in dragon fighting class forcing him to find a balance between learning how to kill dragons and learning how to befriend them. The internal conflict Hiccup faces of making the choice to forgive a multi-generational grudge takes the center point of the film expanding from Hiccup to the rest of the village. The story is told entirely in linear time from a battle in the beginning to the final fight against the dragon nest a few weeks later. The perspective closely follows Hiccup and his adventures but does jump to Stoick’s occasionally throughout the movie. The soundscape of the movie is fairly tame as well, using predominantly …show more content…
In this paper, I compare two scenes from How to Train Your Dragon and argue that they reveal the difficulty yet the importance of foregoing one’s prejudices and accepting others based off their true self’s. The two scenes I chose are Hiccups discovery of the wounded dragon and Hiccup’s first light. I chose these scenes because their soundtracks illuminate the movie’s theme through the reflection of internal conflicts acoustically in orchestral arrangements, cues that highlight each character’s origins, and the humanization of non-human characters by sound