Chris Sanders

How to Train Your Dragon (2025) tries to breathe fire—and manages only a mild spark.

Few modern animated films have achieved the emotional clarity, visual majesty, and thematic resonance of 2010’s How to Train Your Dragon and its two sequels.

It is hard to dissuade people from seeing this, especially if the 2010 animated film, or How to Train Your Dragon animated franchise has meant anything at all to you.

I bring this up only because the studio’s two 2019 films, March’s How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World and the recent Abominable, both seem to be driven by the same basic artistic impulses and inclinations.

Writer-director Jill Culton’s Abominable is, by and large, a gene splice of How to Train Your Dragon and Ice Age, with its nefarious corporate-military villain drawing comparison to Incredibles 2 and its quirky background animal characters recalling the Madagascar series.

It recycles a key element from DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon series: a nonhuman, nonverbal character who forms a touching bond with the human protagonist.

This isn’t quite Andy Serkis-level motion capture brilliance ala Planet of the Apes , but you often forget that Buck is a CGI creation throughout thanks to the trick-of-the-mind the film manages.

Special mention must also be given to actor Terry Notary who was the motion capture reference for Buck, and much like he’s done in the past playing Kong in Kong: Skull Island and Rocket in all three of the recent Planet of the Apes adventures, he adds a layer of emotional authenticity that’s outstanding.

Terry Notary, the movement coach who taught actors how to mimic simians on the recent “Planet of the Apes” films, played the dog on the set before animation, in what the film bills as a “live action reference performance.”

The Croods evokes the memories of The Flintstones, in which gags transposed the post-war American life of cars, hair-dryers and phonographs onto the Stone Age.

Directors Kirk DeMicco and Chris Sanders seem hell-bent on avoiding "The Flintstones" comparisons, creating an environment that's closer to James Cameron 's "Avatar" world than the Paleolithic era audiences are used to.

Forget The Flintstones — this is more like Ice Age with humans.

It's a joy to behold, a freewheeling exploration of impossible vistas that recalls, and arguably betters, the similar moments in Avatar .

I have no emotional investment in the books, so I was nothing but totally thrilled with what ended up on the screen: a rousing tale beautifully animated to take full advantage of the current technology to create an invented world that is as touchably real as anything James Cameron showed us in Avatar.

We saw the movie in 2-D, but between this and Avatar, 3-D was specifically created to capitalize on our collective desire to fly a dragon/alien creature that’s basically a dragon with flammable breath.

Much like 1995’s Babe , Buck is given humanistic traits (physical reactions, expressions, etc) that often push the boundary of believability (at one point he convinces Harrison Ford’s gruff, isolated traveller John Thornton to give up drinking), but seeing as how some of the situations Michael Green’s script calls for would be near impossible with an actual dog – animal-on-animal violence, human-on-animal violence, the drastic weather conditions of the icy Canadian setting – the CGI decision, distracting as it may be, makes sense; plus, following the backlash A Dog’s Purpose managed when footage of its animals being mistreated went public, The Call of the Wild ‘s decision is all the more sound.

This is strictly a toon tale for the whole family, meaning that anyone on the lookout for a comeback by Fritz the Cat creator Ralph Bakshi (MIA since 1997) will have to keep waiting and hoping.

There is a long and undistinguished tradition of comic-strips and films set in prehistoric times, including Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit in Knockout during the 1940s, The Flintstones on TV in the 1960s, the dire 1981 Hollywood feature film Caveman starring Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach, and now the animated The Croods .

Nevertheless, this is the first big-budget full fantasy animated movie since 1985's tragically ignored The Black Cauldron .

It doesn’t completely succeed in either regard, but Home does give off a curiously dinky vibe, as if DreamWorks—which shunted the film from its original November 2014 release date to make room for the first Penguins Of Madagascar movie—prematurely gave up on the idea that Home could stand alongside the company’s animated franchise-starters like How To Train Your Dragon, the Madagascar series, and even The Croods, which currently has a sequel and TV series in the offing.

Home’s animation isn’t particularly sophisticated and doesn’t come close to the work in DWA hits such as How to Train Your Dragon.

Director Tim Johnson has worked on better films ("How to Train Your Dragon") and worse (he co-directed "Antz"), but he knows how to put one of these things together.