Growing Up Viking

I’ve recently come to appreciate Vikings a lot more than I used to. I blame the Northlanders graphic novels written by Brian Wood because he’s made Vikings brutal, graphic, and very violent. A few years ago, the Antonio Banderas starred in The 13th Warrior based on Michael Crichton’s book Eaters of the Dead. It was also a great interpretation of Viking life and the way of the cold Norsemen. In other words, most of us got the impression that Vikings were oversized marauders who enjoyed pillaging villages, using giant bludgeoning swords and wore helmets with horns.


Thankfully, How to Train Your Dragon gives us other aspects of day-to-day Viking life. For young Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the pressure to live up to his father’s legacy is tremendous. Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler) rules the island of Berk and deals with some unusual pests. Dragons have been raiding the village, taking away their food and livestock. Hiccup isn’t big or strong enough to join his fellow Vikings and feels like a disappointment to his dad. When he builds a machine that downs the never-before-seen breed of dragon known as the Night Fury, all Hiccup has to do is slay the dragon to prove himself worthy of his fellow Vikings. However, he sees something in the Night Fury’s eyes that make him reconsider everything he knew about dragons in the first place.


My favorite animated Dreamworks film of all time is Kung Fu Panda. It captured all the right elements of good animation, great voiceover work, and a fantastic story at the heart of it all that separated it from what I perceived to be missing in Shrek and its sequels. Luckily, How to Train Your Dragon echoes Kung Fu Panda in that regard. The animation competition between Disney-PIXAR and Dreamworks has been so strong lately that if one slips up, you can bet the other will take advantage. As a result, we as film viewers emerge as winners.


The story of Vikings in itself is already fun, but add to it the insecurity that Hiccup feels when trying to measure up to such a dominant presence as his father and still trying to fit in with other kids his age, and you’ve got a winner. It would have been good to just have Hiccup meet Toothless the dragon and be instant friends, but to have him try to win the dragon’s trust and the dragon needing Hiccup’s assistance to be able to take flight again was another brilliant move. I particularly liked the ending which saw Hiccup not exactly unscathed after the final battle.


Baruchel has been a hot commodity in Hollywood lately, joining his peers Michael Cera, Jonah Hill (starring here as Snoutlout) and Christopher “McLovin” Mintz-Plasse (cast here as Fishlegs) as sort of a new generation of comedians. He brings a great deal of awkwardness and insecurity to Hiccup that made his anguish believable. I’ve also got to give props to Craig Ferguson as Gobber the Belch, trainer of the young Vikings. He gets into the whole spirit of being a taskmaster while also relaying tales of his Viking exploits that have cost him a few limbs. Fellow Scot Butler has his best role since his starmaking turn in 300 here. Butler as Stoick once again portrays “the great leader of men” role, but it’s his vulnerability as father to a son that shows some real voice-acting chops.


I really liked this film because it managed to tell an awkward coming-of-age story while also talking about understanding other species/races and interaction between fathers and sons. The fact that it had Vikings, dragons, and great 3D animation almost seem secondary because the plot at its core is just that good.