How To Train Your Dragon

While Dreamworks’ Shrek franchise continues to earn more money with each inferior addition to its series, the studio’s animation filmmakers are showing signs in other areas that they may yet be able to rival Pixar in the quality stakes. Last year their Monsters vs. Aliens was laugh-out-loud hilarious and made great use of imaginative characters, and How To Train Your Dragon is even better. It’s a really well told story full of heart, action and comedy and it’s refreshingly free of the pop-culture in-jokes that have so often been Dreamworks’ lazy standby.

Based on a novel by Cressida Cowell, the film centres on Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), a clumsy teenage Viking whose tribe lives a perilous existence in the village of Berk, perched on a rocky outcrop in the middle of the sea and continually under attack from vicious dragons. Hiccup excels at inventing but is useless with an axe, and his father Stoic (Gerard Butler), head of the tribe and also Berk’s premier dragon-slayer, is resigned to the fact that his son will never follow him into battle. When Hiccup amazingly succeeds in shooting down a dragon with one of his inventions he determines to secretly kill it and prove his worth as a warrior. But when he finds the trapped dragon he discovers not only that he can’t bring himself to kill it, but that the dragons may actually be much more friendly than the tribe believes.

The story follows the well-worn ‘young innocent secretly befriends the enemy’ formula with all the plot-turns you would expect, but filmmakers Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders tell it without irony, prioritising strong characterisation, and the film is genuinely engaging and moving as a result. Added to this they create some thrilling flying sequences and an intense action finale, representing arguably the best use of new-style 3D in animation yet.
  
The film also features great voice acting, with Gerard Butler in particular giving his most recognisably human performance in years as Stoic. He was clearly born to play warriors, and not much else!

How To Train Your Dragon is out now.

Ponyo

The new animated fairytale from Hayao Miyazaki is just as wonderful and imaginative as one would expect from the man behind Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, and yet somehow Ponyo scales greater heights of joyous fantasy than even Miyazaki’s previous films.

Taking Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid story and adding his own child’s-eye spin, Miyazaki introduces us to Sosuke, a 5-year old boy who finds and rescues what he thinks is a goldfish on the shore. He names it Ponyo, intending to keep her as a pet, but Ponyo turns out to be a magical sea creature of considerable power, who sets her heart on becoming human with Sosuke. But Ponyo’s undersea father Fujimoto isn’t happy, knowing that there are rules that divide the ocean and human worlds, and Ponyo’s magic begins to have drastic consequences for the whole planet.

Ponyo has a dramatic and fantastical storyline, but even its most intense moments are shot through with optimism. The characters who seem bad turn out to have good motives, and the main authority figure – Sosuke’s mother Lisa – doesn’t bat an eyelid even when the mighty sea itself appears to be bearing down on her. Miyazaki fills the whole film with a spirit of childlike hope, and it resonates in each aspect of the movie, from the gloriously alive hand-drawn animation to the vibrant colour palette.

The script is funny and light-hearted, and the American voice cast, including Tina Fey, Liam Neeson and Matt Damon, are great – even if Neeson has a lot of unnecessary exposition to speak aloud to no-one but the fishes. But the film's best moments are when no characters are speaking, and it is left to the images and the classical score to drive the story forward, as in the beautiful and otherworldly opening sequence in which Ponyo first ventures to the surface.

9/10

The Love Game

This new short film from writer/director Andrew Hunt (who I recently interviewed here) is confirmation of his growing talent as a filmmaker. Although the film was produced as part of a current competition run by Young Indies and Bloomingdale’s department store, Hunt has worked within these relatively tight confines to make a short that is funny and very inventive. Playing out half in live-action and half in cartoon animation, the film’s set-up is unique and simple: a guy and a girl are flirting while playing a board game (the ‘Love Game’ of the title), while at the same time their playing pieces – little animated guy and girl figures – are going through a romance of their own. It’s a premise that’s ideal for a short, as it is original enough to be immediately compelling, but short enough that we don’t have time to question the inherent silliness of it all.

It is an ambitious decision to tell two stories in live action and animation over such a short space of time, and the live action story is certainly the weaker of the two. But the real heart of the film is in the animated characters, particularly the by-the-book ‘Guy’ playing piece who, thanks to a great vocal delivery and some excellent animation, becomes the most real and entertaining character in the film. Hunt’s flair for visual wit is displayed in the details of the game and the hilarious expressions he gets from his cast, both human and animated. The Love Game can sit alongside Hunt’s previous, excellent short The Accidental Activist as further evidence that he is a filmmaker to expect great things from.

You can watch The Love Game and vote for it in Bloomingdale’s Young Indie competition here.