LOS ANGELES, June 9 (UPI) -- The 2010 movie How to Train Your Dragon was a landmark for DreamWorks, both in terms of animation and storytelling. The live-action remake with CG-animated dragons, in theaters Friday, proves indistinct and lesser than its contemporaries.
In the Viking village of Berk, Hiccup (Mason Thames) aspires to be a dragonslayer like his father, Chief Stoick (Gerard Butler). When he meets the fallen dragon Toothless, however, he learns humans and dragons can cooperate.
The animated film showed how fluid dragon flight could be. In live-action, it's just another visual effects movie, and one of the lesser ones.
Introducing live-action adds layers of separation compared to the consistency of the fully animated original. The artificiality of each element only exacerbates the separation.
When Hiccup rides Toothless, Thames is sitting on something that is not an actual dragon. Furthermore, he's not actually flying in the air either, so the background removes another level of reality.
