It’s hard to believe that I’m going to talk about a Dreamworks movie and NOT use terms like “derivative (did anyone else think Over the Hedge was just Open Season with a new cast?)”, “dull (Bee Movie–eeyipes)” and “gigantic ripoff of (insert Pixar movie title here) (Shark Tale, meet Finding Nemo.  Finding Nemo, meet Gigantic Ripoff)”, but it’s no less true for the incredulity, and thus today I talk about How to Train Your Dragon, just released today from Dreamworks.

Based on a series of children’s books, How To Train Your Dragon follows Hiccup (who apparently in the books is actually named Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, despite the fact that his father’s name is Stoick the Vast, proving that children’s book authors either know jack about naming conventions or simply do not care), a studious, bookish, marginally insane tinkerer in a village of genial psychopaths, or Vikings.

The Viking lands are frequently attacked by dragons, who carry off the Vikings’ food stocks and thus leave them in a very bad position vis-a-vis surviving, so the Vikings in turn make every effort to kill every dragon they see.  But leave it to Hiccup to be the only one in the village who doesn’t want to kill a dragon, especially after he starts discovering that the dragons are rather misunderstood monsters who can be befriended and tamed.  This starts a series of events in which we learn the dragons’ true motivations and aerial battles ensue.

I’m actually rather pleased with how this came out–oh, sure, it telegraphs its punches from a mile away (chances are, about ninety nine people out of a hundred will be able to mostly guess the ending) and isn’t exactly a complex and well-reasoned tale, but it is beautifully rendered, and will pack in plenty of both action and laughs.  It is, for lack of a better term (nor is a much better term very necessary here) a FUN MOVIE.

There’s not much character development here, nor need there be.  There’s no complex tale with lots of twists, again, mostly out of necessity.  This is just a fun and simple bit of fluff to munch popcorn to whilst you watch marginally convincing dragons go whizzing around the screen occasionally spitting fire or lightning or flammable gases at each other.

There may not be much here in any standard narrative sense, but what IS here is pretty.  It’s very pretty.  The visuals are wildly eye-catching even if the plot itself is thinner than dragon wing membranes.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives this happy little Viking movie a seven out of ten for showing up, doing its job passably well, and not botching anything really important.  No one will ever mistake How To Train Your Dragon for Oscar material, but it’s far from the cheesy knockoffs Dreamworks USED to pump out.