Grade: A-

What’s It About?
In a Viking village plagued by deadly dragons, a small boy captures a dragon using intelligence and compassion instead of brute strength.

What’s Its Bechdel Test Score?
1/3. This movie suffers from egregious girl tokenism and pointless love interest-itis.

What About Minorities?
Everybody is a Viking.

So…

I really, really enjoyed this movie. I haven’t really liked anything Dreamworks has done besides Shrek, maybe, so I was very pleasantly surprised.

Hiccup, the protagonist, is freaking adorable. He’s very sympathetic and I liked him immediately, and really sympathized with his problem. Hiccup wants to prove himself to his father and his village, but his strengths – intelligence, compassion, and creativity – aren’t valued by his society. Jay Baruchel (Tropic Thunder, The Trotsky) was the perfect voice for this character, and he did it with a sort of world-weary innocence that I really like in male protagonists.

I don’t usually like celebrity voices in cartoons, even though that is basically all we get in animated movies these days. I would way prefer to have professional voice actors and more of the budget go to the animation and the story. But I liked basically all the performances in this. It takes place on a small island apparently inspired by the Inner Hebrides in Scotland, and all the adults have Scottish accents. The two main adults are played by actual Scotsmen – Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson – and that was really refreshing. There is nothing worse than a fake Scottish accent, Simon Pegg’s Scotty being an exception in my opinion.

The story in this movie is just charming. The village is preyed upon by these dragons constantly, and Hiccup, the chief’s son, brings one down with a slingshot invention of his – but nobody believes him. He finds the dragon out in the woods, injured, and can’t bring himself to kill it. In the course of helping the dragon fly again he comes to understand why the dragons keep attacking their village, and how to take care of the dragon problem without just killing them all.

The dragon! Is about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen on film. One of my cohorts at the movie described the dragon (and the entire film) as “cuteoverload dot com”. Yes, he used a website as an adjective. I agreed.

The structure of the movie is almost too neat – it feels pretty formulaic and at times predictable. And accordingly, some of the dialogue falls flat when it was too obvious or not really necessary. The stuff about the dad’s disappointment in Hiccup was a bit blatant, but I guess that’s how it feels to kids whose parents aren’t super supportive of them? These things did not affect my enjoyment of the film, however, which I generally loved. I could find very little to criticize about it.

EXCEPT!

For the very poorly designed Token Tough Girl. There were enough adult lady Vikings around that it seems that this society was more or less equal, but the story itself didn’t really reflect that. It seems like the lady Vikings were just sort of shoehorned in when they remembered this society needed women.

There are two girls training to be warriors. The entire group of kids in training rejects Hiccup, and he has a crush on one of the girls, Astrid. She is the most poorly designed character I’ve encountered in a while, and it was really disappointing compared to how vibrant Hiccup felt to me.

She is a Strong Woman Character. The kind that is just trying to prove how Strong she is (physically), and doesn’t have any other character traits. She actually hates Hiccup so much it doesn’t even make sense. At first I thought it was at least nice that it was a given that there were lady Vikings in this village, and girls training, and nobody made a big deal out of it, but then it doesn’t make sense that Astrid was so angry and aloof. If she was the first girl Viking warrior then at least she’d have something to prove? As it was, she was just another girl Viking in a village of girl Vikings, but she still didn’t get to be human and flawed like all the boy Vikings, who also had their Viking-ness assumed. I guess she’s smart? But not smarter than Hiccup. He doesn’t really need her, if you know what I mean.

As soon as the plot requires her to, she switches sides and becomes Hiccup’s ally. Her stance of Anti-Dragon to thinking Dragons are Cool is realistically gradual, but her transformation from Hating Hiccup to Trusting Hiccup literally took two seconds. Also, I am not going to lie about totally wanting to make out with Hiccup at certain points in the movie (don’t judge me) but I don’t see why Astrid would? I just didn’t get her, really. This movie kind of failed her on every level, even though America Ferrera (Ugly Betty) was decent-ish at voicing her.

This movie was based on the series of children’s book by Cressida Cowell, which I did not know until I saw it. I’m interested in checking the books out, even though apparently the movie is radically different from them. Among other things changed, there are apparently even fewer female characters in the books. It’s good that there are now some girl characters, I guess, but it looks like Hiccup had a best friend in the book that was sort of replaced by Astrid.

Except Astrid isn’t his best friend. She’s some bitchy girl he inexplicably has a crush on (because she’s one of two girls in the village and the other one is ugly??), who really has no personality besides being a Strong Woman. If he still has a best friend who just happened to be a girl, her personality would probably be a lot more interesting and she would actually have a point. (And little kids know that boys and girls can be friends. I had boy friends as a little kid, and even if one person only had same-sex friends doesn’t mean that’s always the case. Remember Pinky and Rex?!) This is a Boy and His Dog story, the most important relationship is between Hiccup and the dragon – he doesn’t need a love interest. And girls don’t need to be love interests to be important. What Hiccup needed was a Tough, and Astrid could’ve been that, but she was needlessly antagonistic to him (to prove she was independent?), and totally boring. I think the filmmakers were maybe going for a Toph Bei Fong, but by making her a love interest/object of crush, they failed.

Wow I guess I sure had a lot to say about Astrid! If you can ignore the flagrant Smurfette Syndrome, this movie is really awesome. It also had a fantastic “getting his life together” montage that really made me want such a montage in real life!