It’s funny to remember how Lilo & Stitch helmers Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois were last-minute replacement directors on the original How to Train Your Dragon. Under those circumstances, they had only 15 months to realize their vision for this fantasy adventure (typically, big-budget American animated movies take four years to produce). Despite entering the production late, Sanders and DeBlois very much imprinted themselves on this silver screen adaptation of Cressida Cowell’s 2003 children’s book of the same name. Hiccup and Toothless certainly echo the unlikely friendship between Lilo and Stitch. Meanwhile, the love Sanders has for the natural world in Stitch and The Wild Robot was vividly apparent in Dragon’s plea for humans to treat their scaly neighbors as humans.
Much like how The Emperor’s New Groove was able to sneak in way more bizarre comedic beats thanks to a compressed production schedule, I have a hunch Dragon’s most creative impulses came from Sanders and DeBlois racing to the finish line. After all, challenging the experienced Oscar-nominated duo would just throw another wrench in the DreamWorks Animation pipeline. Thus, Dragon had stretches of mesmerizing dialogue-free imagery, a tangible sense of danger, and even dared to have Hiccup lose his leg. 2000s animation studio executives craving the next Shrek would surely have balked at these elements under normal conditions.
Now, in 2025, How to Train Your Dragon is back on the screen as a live-action remake. What once radiated specificity to its directors and creative audacity is now a rigid recreation of the past. This new Dragon aims to fulfill audience expectations, not subvert them.
Because of that immense fidelity to the original film, the screenplay by DeBlois (who also returns in the director's chair, this time without Sanders) follows a narrative you know all too well. Hiccup (Mason Thames) is a meek teenage Viking on the island of Berk. He and the other residents of the area constantly contend with dragons. Killing these beasts is a way of life for all Berk residents, especially Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler), Hiccup's powerful father and the island's leader.
When Hiccup knocks down a mythical Night Fury dragon, he prepares to kill the beast...only to release it instead. He can't kill a dragon. Hiccup dubs this critter, whose now unable to fly, Toothless. The pair begin a powerful friendship that lets Hiccup discover more and more about creatures he and fellow teens like Astrid (Nico Parker) have been raised to see as just vicious killing machines.
2025’s How to Train Your Dragon mimics the experience of sitting in your bedroom and hearing somebody else watching the original animated Dragon in the living room. It’s a distant echo of the familiar. The only new additions are a little more screen time for Astrid, a strange subplot between jock Viking Snotlout (Gabriel Howell) and his aloof father Spitelout (Peter Serafinowicz), and ham-fisted exposition. Constantly reminding viewers of a superior animated feature isn’t a recipe for an engrossing theatrical experience. On the contrary, it just exacerbates how much the new Dragon is riding the coattails of the past.
It doesn’t help that certain elements of the original feature don’t translate well to the style of live-action filmmaking DeBlois employs. Adult characters like Stoick and Gobber (Nick Frost) especially look distractingly odd as flesh-and-blood creations. These figures were designed in animation to exemplify heightened visions of classically “masculine” traits with their enormous beards or gargantuan chins. For this remake, DeBlois refuses to embrace more stylized camerawork and production design, yet still insists on rigidly recreating Stoick and Gobber’s more stylized qualities. Suddenly, the cartoonish facets of these two become a problem. The result is that Butler and Frost wander around with costumes and facial hair prosthetics seemingly enveloping their bodies.
Stoick and Gobber exemplify How to Train Your Dragon’s clumsy struggles balancing a “realistic” tone with characters and plot lines best suited for animation. The emotional core of the story also feels hollower, trotted out again for a flatter encore. Rigidly recreating in live-action (right down to their framing and editing) shots of Toothless pressing his face against Hiccup’s palm or Stoick declaring “I’m proud to call you my son” to Hiccup sucks these moments of their energy. Neither the blocking nor the execution of these elements relies on qualities you could only get in live-action filmmaking. They’re just attempts at poignancy, relentlessly reminding you of a movie you’ve already watched.
Constantly echoing 2010’s How to Train Your Dragon doesn’t serve this remake well. In terms of comparisons to other movies, though, at least this new Dragon looks more professionally polished than most live-action Disney remakes. DeBlois and cinematographer Bill Pope realize Berk primarily through gorgeous Ireland backdrops and lovingly detailed sets. Flesh-and-blood Disney updates like Snow White and Aladdin occupy plastic-looking artificial realms, incredibly off-putting to the eye. Lilo & Stitch, meanwhile, turned Hawaii into a series of drab, interchangeable tableaus. At least Dragon doesn’t shy away from the beauty of Irish foliage, while the sets do feel lived-in.
Adhering so closely to the original film also preserves two of the best ingredients of the original Dragon. The first is Toothless, who remains a miracle of character design. An amalgamation of a cat, dog, horse, and bat, this critter looks pretty much the same as he did in 2010 (save for some extra details on his scaly body and gums). This new Dragon at least realizes, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Just regurgitating Toothless antics from the original film beat-for-beat doesn’t show much imagination. However, after suffering through those hideous Seven Dwarfs in Snow White three months ago, it’s a relief this new Toothless inspires cries of “awwww” rather than nightmares.
John Powell’s score also remains a tremendously stirring creation. Tracks like “Test Drive” and “Romantic Flight” re-materialize in slightly newly titled forms (“A Romantic Flight,” for instance) that still preserve their musical ingenuity. The original Dragon’s confident eschewing of dialogue really let Powell’s soaring score take the reins of key sequences, like Toothless and Hiccup’s first flight together. These gloriously grandiose tracks are still as powerful as ever to hear blaring through movie theater speakers. Unfortunately, Powell’s score now competes for people’s eardrums with weird bits of clumsy dialogue over-explaining things to viewers.
What was merely signified through visual storytelling (like the disorientation of Fishlegs and Snotlout’s dragons during the finale) is now hammered home to viewers in poorly written one-liners. Dragon also indulges in an obsession with “explaining” “plot holes” (God, I hate that term) of older animated features that Emily St. James and Lindsay Ellis previously pointed out plagued the new Lion King and Beauty and the Beast re-do’s.
Stoick, for instance, didactically explains to Hiccup how all the Vikings got home after the movie’s finale. Meanwhile, Astrid’s first time soaring through the sky is punctuated with the character expressing her doubt about human/dragon co-existence. “What’re you going to do, take [every Viking] on a magical ride?” Astrid says in a moment echoing the post-modern smarminess of Snow White’s “Princess Problems” song.
Dragon, thankfully, doesn’t go down this path too often. The sincere passion DeBlois has for this world is generally one of this remake’s greater traits. However, these extraneous bits of dialogue directed just at the audience undercut the visual-oriented sensibilities of the original Dragon. Ironically, this 2025 remake’s only fleeting instances of new artistic impulses undercut its core ambition of rigidly recreating its source material.
If your kids are gaga for all things Toothless, the new How to Train Your Dragon will likely hit the spot. Still, watching this feature is akin to simply revisiting the 2010 title again but with the motion-smoothing on your TV turned on. It’s everything you know, but more unpleasant to look at. Powell, gorgeous backdrops, and the enduring cuteness of Toothless keep this from being a Dumbo/Alice in Wonderland/The Lion King boondoggle in modern remakes. Anyone hoping Dean DeBlois could pull out a Pete’s Dragon or 2021’s West Side Story revisiting this seminal DreamWorks Animation feature, though, will need to drag(on) their expectations down considerably. Maybe they should've hired a new filmmaker for this project and given them just 15 months to realize their new, idiosyncratic vision?