How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

Note: This review contains spoilers for How to Train Your Dragon 2 and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.

With the success of How to Train Your Dragon 2, it would be another five years before DreamWorks Animation would release the third, and currently final, installment, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World. Due to real world circumstances, this film would also have a separate distributor from the previous two, this time Universal Pictures as opposed to Paramount Pictures or 20th Century Fox. Since the sequels to the original How to Train Your Dragon were written with a trilogy in mind, it made sense to finish watching the films and see how they concluded the story. Though the ending does deliver emotionally, the flight path has a bit of turbulence.

How to Train Your Dragon 2

Note: This review contains spoilers for How to Train Your Dragon.

Four years after the release of How to Train Your Dragon, DreamWorks Animation released the first sequel, How to Train Your Dragon 2, but distributed this time through 20th Century Fox instead of Paramount Pictures. Interestingly, Dean DeBlois, who co-directed the original film, agreed to direct this film on the condition that he could turn it into a trilogy. Additionally, DreamWorks Animation had overhauled their animation and lighting software during the production, which gave this film the honor as their first to use it. The end result is a sequel that feels different from the original, both in tone and storytelling, but is still great to watch on its own merits.

How to Train Your Dragon

Note: This review contains spoilers for How to Train Your Dragon.

I will admit that when the original How to Train Your Dragon film, based on the 2003 Cressida Cowell book of the same name, first came out, it didn’t really appeal to me at the time for whatever reason, so I didn’t end up watching it, its two sequels or its spinoff Cartoon Network/Netflix series, DreamWorks Dragons. After the third film, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, came out, I had been hearing a lot of positive word-of-mouth about the trilogy, and so decided to check it out due to pandemic boredom, via a 3-in-1 Blu-ray collection of the films. Watching the first film on what happened to be shortly after its 11^th anniversary, I found it to be a lot better than I expected, even going so far as to compare it to Kung Fu Panda in terms of quality.