Don’t listen to me. Don’t pay attention to my opinions. I have nothing important to say.

My friend Yo Kid K closely followed such advice when we were discussing How To Train Your Dragon 2. When I informed him that I felt it moved too fast and crammed too much stuff in, he told me it was well paced and very little really goes on.

In his mind, exploring the vast outreaches of your world, that leads to finding a new set or fortresses in land no one ever goes to, that leads to discovering a long lost family member and having a reunion, that leads to all out city destroying war with as yet to be introduced villain, that leads to a funeral, it’s not putting in too much for 102 minutes (including the credits).

Red Rover Red Rover send plot stuff right over.

Me: “The dialog gets really schmaltzy, talking down to us.”
K: “It’s a kids movie.”

Me: “It’s really loud and goes really fast.”
K: “It’s a kids movie.”

Me: “I didn’t feel any emotional connection.”
K: “I can’t believe you didn’t see the first one.”

Me: “My favorite kids movie and one of my favorite films is Babe.”
K: “Oh my god. I shut that off, it was boring.”

K: “Do you like any of the super hero movies?” (K is a big fan of Marvel)
M: “One of my favorite super hero movies and it’s just a flat out great film, is Watchmen.”
K: “Oh my god. No, it’s horrible.”
M: “I actually really li…”
K: “It’s horrible.”
M: “No, I think tha….”
K: “Terrible film.”
M: “But when I…”
K: “Bad.”
M: “Did you read the comic?”
K: “Yes.”
M: “I actually liked it better than the com…”
K: “What, it’s horrible. It’s terrible. It’s bad. No.”

I should not have seen How To Train Your Dragon 2. I never saw the first, I never wanted to, and frankly I didn’t want to see this one. But Yo Kid K is my friend, he was excited to see it, and I like my friends. So I do things with them. Maybe it’s because he was in a weird mood, having just come from the doctor over a bad ankle sprain. Maybe it’s because I had to drive 45 minutes to go 12 blocks in downtown Seattle just to pick him up and wasn’t expecting that. Maybe I’m too old. Maybe I’m a jerk at heart. I don’t know.

But I felt what I felt. And what I felt wasn’t much.

That looks like actual leather!

One thing we agreed on was the quality of the animation itself. Opening up with a weird game of tossing hapless sheep into baskets, I was struck by the fur on the sheep themselves. While their faces were clearly block shaped, highly emotive cartoon images, the fur looked real. Some nerds locked themselves away into a room for days to come up with that hair algorithm because it’s pretty astounding how feathery and light it is, how it moves in the wind. There’s a ton, and I mean a TON, of detail in the animation. Leather looks like leather, fur looks like fur, hair looks like hair, metal looks like metal. It’s almost jarring that something so real is placed onto characters who are so decidedly not real. Imagine a stuffed animal with a real pelt.

Having tamed the dragons from the first movie, our hero Hiccup takes his ice-breathing dragon, Toothless, outside the reaches of his city to map the rest of the terrain. They have a special bond where they laugh, play, goof off, and do things like discover a band of outlaws who are capturing dragons for the big army of villain Drago Bludvist to come and destroy all who are in his way. Hiccup’s father, Stoick, battens down the hatches in preparation for war while Hiccup takes a different tactic of showing your enemy friendship to avoid war outright. This is the emotional sub-plot: a son rebelling and thinking he has a better way than his father. Turns out Bludvist had a bad time with dragons in the past and isn’t much for touchy feely conversations.

I know this is hard to accept. But… WAR!

On the way, Hiccup gets sidetracked by an unexpected family reunion with someone missing for 20 years. This is another emotional sub-plot: a son absorbing the fact his family is not what he expects. They take a good 20+ minutes to reconnect (about one minute per year) and whoosh, we are off to war. Big battles of dragons of all sizes involving as much physics as the animators can muster. The scenery goes blurring by and my eyes started to water at every extra explosion. I think I sat too close.

The desire to make peace through conversation gives way to a lesson in how anger trumps all sanity so get ready for a fight. It’s big and broad and I think the kiddies in the audience understood it. Bludvist bad. Non-Bludvist non-bad. And Bludvist has a tool to make all the dragons turn on their friends. Here’s another emotional sub-plot: friendship brings more happiness than evil.

[Warning. The next paragraph has a HUGE spoiler.]

There’s a line when Toothless turns villain and kills a certain someone important. “It’s not his fault.” You know, he’s basically a good dragon, just if you have the right tool, you can make him into a weapon that kills his owners mindlessly. I kind of want to explore this idea of “good” a little more.

[End of spoiler.]

But ultimately everything became focused on the big fight. The fight was the catalyst to drive all the sub-plots home in an epic battle for the end of everything. As an adult, and one who’s seen a lot of movies by this point, I have to say this…

I am over the end of the world plot device. I don’t need things to be huge cataclysms for me to be interested and frankly, I don’t find huge cataclysmic fights that interesting anymore.

Something wicked, this way comes.

K: “It wasn’t the end of the world. It was just a battle for one place.”
Me: “They don’t know anything beyond their city, so if the city ends, their world ends.”

There is death in this movie. Multiple times. Or as Yo Kid K said: “Interesting choice to have genocide in a kids movie.”

Honestly, I think I was in a weird mood. Death and missing family members are full topics for better films. I recognized when Hiccup was being told emboldening, moral lessons about having the heart and lineage of a leader. I knew when I supposed to feel sad at the funeral. And for the war, I recognized the levels of what was at stake. But, How to Train Your Dragon 2 has many more fish to fry. So in the end I didn’t feel the emotional moments earned it. They were distracted from rather than strengthened.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 is non-bad. And they do a whole lot of non-bad in 102 minutes (as much as genocide is non-bad). It’spossibly 360 minutes of movie in 102 minutes. On another day I might enjoy it more, but I don’t know if that’s true. I do know I have no intention of finding out. Eh, don’t listen to me, I like Babe and he can’t even fly.

Is this more exciting Yo Kid K?